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Rev. Bill Hamilton-Holway

When you were a child, who was the oldest person you knew?

How old was she or he?

So, they would have been born in approximately what year?

I knew my mother’s parents. They were born about 1865, almost 150 years ago.

They were prairie people who moved from Kansas into Oklahoma in the early 1900s.

Some of you remember people who were born even earlier.

Now, think about one of the youngest children in this congregation, perhaps someone born in the last year. There’s a good chance they will live to be 90 years old. That puts them into the 22nd Century.

Last fall, the Religious Education and Family Ministry Discernment Task Force recommended this congregation embrace the idea of life-long learning, cradle-to-grave faith development.  Consistent with an ever-changing universe, we recognize human life is always in transition. The world in which my great grandparents lived is very different from the world of this congregation’s children, and their children to come.

Grounded in this understanding, we long for education, worship, and celebration that embrace the future.

Horse and buggy becomes Model T Ford becomes hybrid and electric cars, and public transportation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson marvels at the moon.  Human footprints now are there.

That’s last century’s news.

Hubbell Telescope pictures take us further out in space, further back in time.

The future calls.

We, in this sanctuary, represent a span of human time in which transformation has occurred as never before.

From multiplication tables to super computers.

From months to ship information around the world to seconds.

The global community is becoming a reality.

My great grandparents knew the culture of the Midwest.

Our children live in an increasingly intercultural world.

We long for education, worship, and celebration nurtured by this understanding.

Life unfolding.  No matter our age, let ours be a religion welcoming

life-long religious exploration.

Joyful is the ministry embracing generations,

seeing the wisdom in each, and

knowing wholeness is in the connections.

Different generations live in different cultures.

Here the cultures intersect a whole-hearted church.

Those who study creative intercultural connections know change is not easy for us humans.

We know what we have experienced.

Often we don’t know the limitations of what we have experienced.

It’s easy for us to generalize and to project our knowing onto others.

Their perspective offers different gifts,

If only we can let it in.

We have the opportunity to create an intentional, intercultural, intergenerational community, teaching and learning the skills for living in an always and more rapidly changing world.

We are resources for one another.

We can learn to exercise our curiosity.

Ask questions of the elder.

As questions of the younger.

Seek always to deepen our faith in this tree of life, in these hearts beating within us.

Family Minister Laura Bogle

There is a heart beating here, in this Tree of Life.  Do you hear it? 

The heart is a place of exchange.  In a heart beat, life-giving oxygen moving from cell to cell to nourish all the parts of the body. 

The heart of our congregation is also about exchange, feeding one another.  Worship, meals, gatherings to celebrate to mourn to sing to raise money to learn to serve to play.  When together, we are fed by each other’s wisdom and knowledge.  We learn from our differences. 

Each one of us at times is a giver, each one a receiver.  The more of us participate, the stronger the heartbeat becomes. 

One member of our toddler teaching team says: “I’ve never taught before and [the toddlers] are definitely teaching me. even just by listening.” 

Another teacher says,” How insightful and thought provoking our children are, even when they don't seem to be paying attention, all the sudden wisdom pours forth!!” 

When we gather across all ages, the wisdom and love flows in many directions. 

One teacher shares a story about doing an activity with 2-3 graders learning about prayer.  They all created simple strands with 4 beads.  

1: I am grateful for… 

2: I am sorry for… 

3: I hope for myself… 

4: I hope for the world… 

This classroom activity for our children has become a spiritual practice for this teacher.  Every night, using the 4 beads to guide reflection and prayer. 

When we gather across all ages, the wisdom and love flows in many directions.  

You could even say it flows across time. 

Peacemakers Elise Boulding and John Paul Lederach talk about the concept of the “200-year Present.”  Lederach uses this concept in peace and reconciliation work, helping communities to see and take advantage of turning points, opportunities to create a new and more peaceful future. 

The “200-year present” incorporates the life span of the oldest and youngest people we know.  The “present” we are living in here at UUCB includes the very beginning of the life story of the oldest person in our congregation.  That past is present here with us. 

And it includes the furthest reaches of the life of the youngest person here. That future is present is here with us too. 

Living in the present means living creatively with all of this knowledge and possibility, memory and potentiality.  

John Paul Lederach would call it having an “imagination of the past that lies before us.” 

Another of our religious education teachers shared this with me: 

I am learning to listen more carefully to what is said by the children in my class (4th – 6th grade).  Most of these “kids” [are already educated and] have an acute sense of reality that sometimes outstrips my foggy sense of "what is." 

[he says…] 

The continuity of life and the eternal “presence” of time for human consciousness becomes apparent to me especially in our church functions that include members of all ages.  I begin to see the youth as sources of wisdom just as I would naturally expect the aged to be "fountains" of wisdom. 

We live in the present fully, when we grow and learn together; when we ALL come to the heart, places of exchange, where we can grow and learn from one another, where we carefully remember the past and we recklessly remain open to the new. 

When we do this, we nurture this Tree of Life, and make it strong for the generations to come. 

Rev. Barbara Hamilton-Holway

“Where was I before I was in inside my mother?”

“Where do you I go when I die?”

These questions come up when you are in a community of all ages.

We bless the arrival of babies, commemorate and celebrate the lives of those who die.

The mystery of birth and death is always before us ~ the miracle of breathing, of hearts beating.

In a whole church of all ages, you’ve got this great chance to know and love people from each decade of life.

You learn that when someone dies, memory, influence, love continue.

You understand you are part of something larger than yourself, on-going, never-ending.

In a whole-hearted church we honor births and deaths and embrace this time in between.

We ask what do we do with this gift of life?

Births and deaths are lessons in living.

They teach tenderness and compassion toward all.

We all have this same beginning, the same end.

They teach what is most dear in life.

The love we give and receive is what matters.

Within a whole-hearted church, gratitude, generosity, and love grow.

What a miracle that we are here together!

What coincidences, near misses bring each of us into the world

and let alone into this room together today.

This miracle should bring us into closer kinship, make us humble and full of awe.

In a community of all ages, you embrace the fullness of life.

When I’m with a child, I remember my childhood.

When I’m with a 90 year old, I imagine myself aging.

Here you can learn from someone, much older than you, much younger than you.

Wisdom and wonder comes down the generations and up the generations.

Two Sundays ago, the youngest reached out their hands offering flowers

as the oldest among us reached out to receive.

Tunes of hymns drifted over all and held us.

We sang “From you I receive and to you I give.

Together we share and from this we live.”

Sunday worship begins with children leading our call to worship.

On Easter we worshiped together, children and adults.

Each one seemed to hear something to hold on to,

and our bodies joined as we could in movement, our voices in song.

We looked at one another with love.

At the Seder celebration of freedom those gathered shared a ritual meal.

Candles were lit, babies sat on a blanket gumming their first matzo,

the older children asked questions, found the hidden Afikoman, the broken matzo,

and playfully bargained for rewards.

In the celebration of the evening, everyone seemed at ease

and happy with one another.

At the Family Retreat families created their own Tree of Life – roots of what sustains us,

what we branch out to do, the new leafy growth we nurture, the good fruit we bear.

The Tree of Life needs your love and will always give it back.

At a workshop people called out words that express our deepest longings:

peace, gratitude, belonging, love, appreciation, wholeness, openness, flow, giving,

receiving.

When someone asked what are these words a list of?

Someone called out, “Sunday morning.”

Another way to say it is “Whole-hearted Church.”

May our beautiful whole-hearted church, full of gratitude, love, appreciation,

and wholeness, thrive and grow.

Centering in Meditation and Prayer

Let there be a quiet time among us.

Feel the breath of life move through your body.

Feel your heart beating.

Here we are.

All of us breathing, all of our hearts beating,

a song of gladness, a prayer of gratitude.

Feel your pulse beating in the quiet, in the quiet.

In Oslo where as you know a person is on trial for killing 77 people, tens of thousands of people gathered outside in the rain and sang.  They sang a Norwegian version of a Pete Seeger song, “Children of the Rainbow;” children of the rainbow, beautiful variety of colors and cultures and religions, living in harmony.

They sang ~

A sky full of stars,

Blue sea as far as you can see

An earth where flowers grow,

Can you wish for more?

Together shall we live, young children of the rainbow.

We sing for this rainbow world for our children.

We sing to the den mother who, it was reported this week,

was ousted by the Boy Scouts of America because she is a lesbian mother.

We sing for the world we dream of, rainbow land.

We sing for….(memory book).

We sing O We Give Thanks for this gift of life,

For the life of our dear Joan Swift, church pillar, leader, friend, who died on Wednesday.

Joan, here every Sunday for years and years and years.  Here forever more.

We give thanks for the life of twinkling Ken McPherson, member of our choir, good-spirited, good-humored, dear friend, who died on Thursday.

Ken’s spirit here forever.

Love, hold Joan and Ken and their families.

Where were we before we were born?

What happens to us when we die?

Energy never ends; energy cannot be destroyed.

Where were we?  Where are we going?

We come from and go to something greater than ourselves of which we are a part.

This precedes us, bring us to life, and finally enfolds us back into its heart.

It’s beyond our words, beyond our reason, beyond our imagination.

Some call it mystery, spirit, life force, god, goddess, love…

We give thanks for the mystery and miracle of life and death and life on-going.

The love we give and receive is what matters.

Love is stronger than death.

Love is.

Love.

Amen.

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