The First Easter Reverend Janet Parsons Today, probably more than any other day, our new way of daily life just feels wrong. We have been asked to make many sacrifices during the past few weeks. And the timing of that is appropriate, in its way, as we have just...

Dreams in the Desert Reverend Janet Parsons Gloucester UU Church April 5, 2020   This week the two religious traditions that give us our roots are celebrating important holidays. It’s Holy Week in the Christian tradition: beginning today with Palm Sunday and...

Sunday, March 22 2020 Call to Worship As Susan Taormina plays our opening hymn — wordlessly on piano— see if you can recollect singing the version in our hymnal, in which we sing in praise of the blue skies of our homeland, but then acknowledge that other people love...

Singing Our Way to Hope Reverend Janet Parsons Gloucester UU Church March 15, 2020   A period of time spent wandering in the wilderness is one of the oldest and most common themes in storytelling. It is the idea of a quest: a journey into uncharted territory,...

Today we are drawing on some wisdom that was written over 700 years ago. Imagine your writings surviving for over 700 years. Not merely surviving, but becoming known more and more around the world, translated into new languages, spread by technologies that the author...

Hagia Sophia: The Feminine Face of God Reverend Janet Parsons Gloucester UU Church March 1, 2020 In the sixth century of the Common Era, a church was built in Constantinople by the order of the Roman Emperor Justinian and the Empress Theodosia. The church was the...

To Rise, To Reach a Little Deeper Reverend Janet Parsons Gloucester UU Church February 16, 2020 “It is that time and place to remember those who came through the long night to witness another sunrise.” (Qiyamah Rahman, in Voices from the Margins, p. 14-16.) This is...

Sermon: 32407 + 34902 by Rev. Julie Lombard Flashing back to a solidarity march for immigration that happened in August for families being separated at our borders and caged children, at a time when some parents were dropping off a kid at college where they will live...

More Cautious Than Courageous Reverend Janet Parsons Gloucester UU Church January 19, 2020 “I felt we would be supported by the white church,” lamented Martin Luther King Jr. in his 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail. He thought white clergy would rise up in support...

The Land That Never Has Been Yet Reverend Janet Parsons Gloucester UU Church January 12, 2020   “Let America be America again, the land that never has been yet.” (Langston Hughes, Let America be America Again) Truly, it feels as though this is an extraordinarily...

Forgotten Wholeness Reverend Janet Parsons Gloucester UU Church January 5, 2020 “Wholeness is never lost, it is only forgotten.” (Rachel Naomi Remen, in Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal, New York, Riverhead Books, 1996: p. 108.) Maybe it’s impossible to...

Joy, Anyway Reverend Janet Parsons Gloucester UU Church December 24, 2019   “Joy to the World!” The song, and its generous, lavish, wish for joy for all people, is 300 years old this year. It has come to us across times of famine and plenty, of war and peace,...