Edwin Friedman was a rabbi, family therapist, and leadership consultant who is best-known for his work with religious communities. His book called Friedman’s Fables is a collection of stories he wrote to help explain family systems. I’m going to tell you one of those stories. It’s called “The Power of Belief” and it begins with a man who came home one day and announced that he was dead.
This morning’s sermon, like the rest of the service, was written by Rev. Caitlin Cotter Coillberg, who is home sick today. It’s my pleasure to preach it in her stead:
“It is hard to be objective about Pirates.” That’s the opening sentence of activist, anthropologist, and anarchist David Graeber’s book Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia.
This week we had a No-Rehearsal Palm Sunday Pageant with music and fun costumes involved! Use the YouTube link attached to get the full experience!
Like a lot of families, mine celebrated our cultural and ethnic heritage in different ways. My mother lovingly made the traditional Hungarian and Slovakian foods her mother had cooked. No Christmas was complete for us without poppy seed stollen and cabbage rolls with sour cream, no family birthday conceivable without Chicken Paprikash and homemade galushkis.…
During my study leave a few weeks ago I went, once again, to the Museum of African American History and Culture. I went again in part to see the wonderful exhibit on Afro-futurism, eager to experience it without the distraction of two active curious toddlers. If you missed our field trip to see that last year, it’s not too late! We need to find ways to celebrate imagination.
Fourteen years ago this July, I went to the DC Marriage Bureau to get a license so that Christian and I could get married. The District of Columbia had passed marriage equality months before in March of 2010, but it wasn’t until July that the Court of Appeals upheld the decision, and the joy among the couples who finally trusted their marriages wouldn’t be invalidated was infectious. I’m pretty sure I was the only woman in line that day planning to marry a man, and I have never experienced such happiness and elation in any government building again since.
Think for a moment about the purpose of working with others in the community. Changing policies, changing laws, changing the budget may come to mind. But in 1956, after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down bus segregation, here’s what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said was his end-goal for the Civil Rights Movement:
This pandemic showed us many things: that we are all vulnerable, that we depend on each other for safety, and that we can change and adapt. And being restricted in where we could go, where was safe to go, reminded us of something important, that we need places, physical and virtual, to gather together, to…
When I was 9 months old I was adopted by parents who had experienced great heartache and waited many years to have a child. I have always known I was adopted, and my parents always spoke of my biological parents with respect, with gratitude. And while they didn’t attach any particular religious or spiritual significance to my adoption, the rest of the world certainly did.
So, I’ve been thinking a lot this week, like I do, about the opening line from Shakespeare’s Richard III- Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this Son of York. I’ve always loved how Shakespeare captures the sense that there are seasons and chapters to our lives, both as individuals and…