31 July 2022 - Rev John Carter's Sunday Reflections

Welcome To The Yorkshire Unitarian Union

Unitarian Sunday Reflections

(Hull and Lincoln Unitarians)

Sunday 31 July 2022

Lincoln Service ~ 11 am

“Spirituality: What Inspires You”

Bring readings and hymns that feed your spirit and inspire you.

Hull Service ~ 4 pm

Celebrating Hull Pride

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Theme

“Spirituality formed and Becoming”

Hymns, Reflections, and Readings

Related to the Gifts of

Sexuality and Gender

We continue to Pray for the Ukraine, Yemen, and all places of war and destruction and all people, creatures and the environment effected by these wars.

May Peace come

“No more war, please”

PRELUDE

WORDS OF WELCOME

Welcome to each and to all:

seekers, journeyers, questing, and content.

May our time of reflection and worship,

fill our desire for wholeness and belonging.

In our time together we are made worthy…..

QUOTE:

“It is against this God who kills that we are fighting and resisting.”

~Alexya Salvador

NOTE ON QUOTE

Organised religion has been one of the harshest critics of homosexuality, citing holy writings as evidence that it goes against God. Alexya Salvador, set to become the first transgender pastor in Brazil, doesn’t necessarily see religion as the enemy of LGBTQ rights. As she states in this quotation, it is a particular version of God, one that is vengeful and judgmental, that must be eradicated. She strives for a different view of God: one that is accepting and loving of everyone, regardless of their identities.

CHALICE LIGHTING

words by John Carter

We light our chalice, this candle,

as a sign of connectedness….

of a beloved faith community,

reaching beyond our boundaries…

seeking equity and justice for all creation….

learning what the human spirit can do and be…

GATHERING PRAYER

We take a moment to reflect on our life and living of this week… as we reflect…. explore and ask of yourself….

For what am I most grateful?

For what am I least grateful?

When did I have the greatest sense of belonging to myself, others, nature, the universe, God?

As we end these reflections, as we move to worship, may we continue to reflect on the things that make life whole and how we may grow ourselves into them.

May the Great Spirit of the Journey walk with us today.

Amen.

1st Hymn

HFL 191

“To Worship Rightly”

words by John Greenleaf Whittier

Now let us sing in loving celebration:

The holier worship, which our God may bless,

Restores the lost, binds up the spirit broken,

And feeds the widowed and the parentless.

Fold to thy heart thy sister and thy brother;

Where pity dwells, the peace of God is there;

To worship rightly is to love each other;

Each smile a hymn, each kindly deed a prayer.

Follow with reverent steps the great example

Of those whose holy work was doing good:

So shall the wide earth seem our daily temple,

Each loving life a psalm of gratitude.

Then shall all shackles fall; the stormy clangour

Of wild war-music o’er the earth shall cease;

Love shall tread out the baleful fire the anger,

And in its ashes plant the tree of peace.

READING

Gifts of Sexuality and Gender: An Introduction

by Valerie Bridgeman

from Allen, Ronald J.. Preaching God’s Transforming Justice (Lectionary Commentary) Presbyterian Publishing Corporation. Kindle Edition.

This new feast, Gifts of Sexuality and Gender, envisioned for late June, assumes that sexuality and gender are gifts of God through which people embody covenantal relationship. While the church has often held that relationships between people of different genders are the norm, many people believe that sexuality can be expressed in other modes, including relationships between people of the same gender, as well as those with multiple sexual identities and those who are asexual and questioning. In connection with this feast, a minister could help the congregation explore ways that it could deepen its understanding of sexual identity and expression.

“God didn’t tell Noah to pick and choose, including some varieties and excluding others. Therefore, the Ark would have harboured full rainbows of gender expression and sexuality, as well as all other dimensions of biological diversity. … In the story of Noah’s ark, the Bible gives a single overarching protection for all biological diversity. The message is comprehensive in its inclusion and without qualification. We should not look to the Bible for affirmation of each new category of diversity that we distinguish. The Ark covers all, now and forever.”

Joan Roughgarden

American ecologist and evolutionary biologist

(Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and People Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 398.)

As we reflect on gifts of human sexuality, we are forced to admit that for many of us our embodied realities do not seem a gift. And the choices we make growing up about how we will express our lives often are subject to ridicule and rejection. For example, a young girl, self-described as a “geek,” decides she loves Star Wars and is taunted on the playground. A young boy loves one of the female characters of Scooby Doo and decides to dress like her for Halloween and is derided by adults. Neither of these examples is expressly sexual, but in North American contexts, they are codes for gender expressions and treated as such. In the summer and fall of 2010, there was a season of suicide among gay teens and gay young adults, or teens and young adults who were considered gay. Many left notes indicating they could no longer bear the burden of living in a society that punished them socially for their sexualities. In this section, I spend time with biblical texts looking at the ways gender and sexuality intersect with depression, suicide, and a loss of self in culture.

I wonder whether we who name God’s name may hold ourselves accountable to build a society where all are safe, where no one is treated as less than human. Gender and sexualities are gifts among all peoples, whether they are bisexual, gay, lesbian, heterosexual, transgender, or questioning/queer. Yet circumstances may arise around the way we live our lives that leave us feeling hopeless and alone. It becomes the communal work of the church and society to make the world safe, an expression of God’s love for all. The Bible reminds us of the pathos of suffering as well as the passion for justice we all seek.

Comment:

Our service today celebrates and reflects on the experiences of LGBTQIA folx. In hymn and reading we will explore these themes. Our hymns include songs of freedom and justice, our readings are from various LGBTQIA poets, reflecting on experience as well on faith, spirituality, and theology.

Many of our hymns reflect this as well, out next three hymns are connected to the human struggle for justice and equity. Beginning with Bread and Roses, based on a poem reflecting on how woman too are involve in the battle for labour rights and equality….Not only is our battle for economic empowerment, but it is also for the enlightenment of humanity and the beauty of life, creation, and not just surviving but thriving, fully living…. We march for bread, and we march for roses too.

2nd Hymn

HFL 216

“Bread and Roses”

words by James Oppenheim

As we come marching, marching,

In the beauty of the day,

A million darkened kitchens,

A thousand workshops grey,

Are touched with all the radiance

That a sudden sun discloses:

For the people hear us singing,

“Bread and roses, bread and roses!”

As we come marching, marching,

We battle too for men,

For they are women’s children,

And we mother them again.

Our lives shall not be sweated

From birth until life closes:

Hearts starve as well as bodies —

Give us bread, but give us roses!

As we come marching, marching,

Unnumbered women dead

Go crying, through our singing,

Their ancient song of bread!

Small art and love and beauty

Their drudging spirits knew:

Yes, it is bread we fight for,

But we fight for roses too!

As we come marching, marching,

We bring the greater days:

The rising of the women

Means the rising of the race.

No more the drudge and idler,

Ten that toil where one reposes,

But a sharing of life’s glories —

Bread and roses, bread and roses!

READING

Our next two readings explore the divine feminine, and reflect in our theology our experiences of our own bodies and self awareness…

Beauty…Divine Feminine

by Connie Schroeder

Sanctified : An Anthology of Poetry by LGBT Christian Createspace. Kindle Edition.

My desire is to walk her paths

bathe in her oceans

rest on her strong comforting breasts

as I wander the mountains

feel the touch of her embrace

on a warm breezy day

taste her sweet honeycomb,

plump, juicy apples and golden corn.

Let me smell her hot blackberries in the sun,

freshly baked bread

my favourite soup simmering on the stove

or the delicate scent of lavender.

I want to see her many shapes, sizes and colors…

in the old woman crone whose face crumples

into a million wrinkles as she smiles;

in the child who sings a made up rhyme,

and dances through the garden,

in the mother who holds a newborn baby,

feeding the child from her own warm,

soft mother body, sleepily at 3:00 am.

I want to be aware of the life force,

moving

in every stone or tree

child, brother, sister,

poet, singer, weaver, dancer,

giant redwood tree, spawning salmon

dancing ash tree, spider and web; silent moment;

leaf and blade of grass

First love of my soul

May I learn of faithfulness from you…

offering yourself for your beloved

giving your body to a million lovers longing

for your kiss,

nurturing our souls with tenderness

with grace, with wisdom.

***

What Gretel Knows

by Emily Hasler from 100 Queer Poems. Random House. Kindle Edition.

Gretel knows what to say to the boy who

thinks we’re saved.

Gretel knows, put a girl in water and she’ll

drown; boil it,

she’ll cook. Gretel knows there’s no salvation;

only storage,

refrigeration, freezing. A fairytale of Tupper-

ware, stained

and scratched, sudded beside the sink. Even

old crones

have to eat. We be fat. We be lean. Gretel

knows it’s just

a change of state, conduction of heat. Gretel

knows

how we swell and settle like dough with

weight of air, time.

The child hacked from the wolf’s stomach,

pulled from the womb,

taken from the oven or the pot. But Gretel

knows it is too late.

The ingredients in us activate. A raising. Our

edges puff and blur,

give and take of the world about us. It doesn’t

matter, Gretel told him,

she knows that the house is cake for fuck’s

sake. The earth

is seasoning. Our sweet flesh is so tender it

flakes between

our fingers. Gretel knows. That the wicked

stepmother,

the old crone, Baba Yaga, me—Gretel—we are

all the same.

Archetypal and obsessed with our stomachs.

Gretel says:

This is the bread that broke the body. This is

my body: take it. Eat.

This is the tongue that licked the bowl of the

cement mixer clean.

3rd Hymn

Our next hymn was written in anger and in grief. If grew to be an anthem of the LGBTQ folx of the 1980s, as they battle hatred, and government indifference to the ways that HIV & AIDS were destroying their lives and their friends, as well as our siblings in other impacted communities….so out of the brutal premeditated murders of Mayor George Moscone and San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk came an anthem of anger and hope and solidarity….

SYF 182

We are a gentle angry people

words & music by Holly Near

We are a gentle, angry people,