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At the Crossroads

Sunday, November 1 @ 10:30 am - 11:30 am

At the Crossroads

Details

Date:
Sunday, November 1
Time:
10:30 am - 11:30 am
Event Categories:
,

Venue

Online Event

Traditions around the world remind us that the mortal veil separating life from death is delicate, and that at this time of year, we can journey deep within the inner worlds of prayer and dream. We will, individually and collectively, honor and grieve our ancestors and the blessings and truths of who they were; feel into our own power and greatness of being; and set intentions about ourselves, as future ancestors. We will imagine a future world, full of community and depth. Rev. Furrer and Amanda Uluhan will lead this service.

Plan on driving thru East Shore’s parking lot on Saturday October 31, leaving an offering of a sentimental object, a photo, or an artifact of intention for an ancestor altar, which will get highlighted in our November 1st service. 

how to attend

Bulletin

•To virtually attend, please Zoom in using room number 989 3107 9078.

• To phone into the service, call 669-900-6833, Meeting ID: 989 3107 9078.

For those joining, please mute as soon as you enter the room, so everyone can hear. Please note, the services will be recorded, but at this time, there are no plans to share the recording.

More Information

Religious Education for children and youth begins at 9:30 a.m. Learn more here.

If you don’t have a chalice, but want to light one, check out our Making a Chalice at Home page.

Service is followed by Coffee Hour.

Stories for All Ages

Sermon Text

All Saints and All Souls 

For many people the world over this time of the year is recognized as the beginning of the year. Jews and the Chinese both celebrate seed time: when everything goes to seed. For locked up in those seeds is the promise of re-birth and renewal. November 1, today, is halfway between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice. For ancient pagans (and contemporary ones, too) these halfway times—cross quarter days—are of special significance. They called this day Samhain. It was said—and believed—that on Samhain the screen separating the realm of the living from that of the dead became much thinner—a gossamer veil so sheer as to become permeable… if only briefly, allowing the souls of the dead of the previous year to gain access to their next, new world. As their spirits wandered en route, they were guided by bonfires and sustained by special foods, and by their relatives and friends dressing up as spirits to commune and interact with them. 

The word “pagan” comes from the Latin word for “farmer.” Pagans were essentially rural folk who, following the Roman imposition of Christianity, quietly clung to their old ways, remaining faithful to the ancient festivals celebrating their connections to the seasonal rhythms of nature. The Romans didn’t force compliance…much. They maintained all of the old festivals and celebrations, just Christianized them and gave each holiday new meanings. It took a couple of centuries, but eventually the pagans and the peasants all went along. 

Samhain became All Saint’s Day and the night before, All Hallowed Eve. What sainthood entailed, however, was a changing concept. In the early church—the first three hundred years—saints were simply members: people who had been baptized and had committed to following the life and teachings of Jesus. Later, during the times of persecution, “saints” came to refer to martyrs whose very public discipleship-unto-death was stirring and inspirational.  

So it was that the understanding of sainthood narrowed over time from anybody who was baptized to people of genuinely heroic virtue. If we think of the saints in the original way, as the fellowship of the faithful and the mystical body of the risen Christ, then everyone’s included: the known and unknown, the canonized and the also-rans, the deceased and the living.1 But once they started thinking of saints as set apart and altogether exemplary, then All Saint’s Day became rarified and austere—certainly no occasion for celebration and certainly not a good time to go on a bender. And so, sort of naturally there emerged a desire to remember the far greater number of ordinary souls who did not reach the recognized heights of holiness. In the year 998 November 2, All Souls Day, began to be celebrated among the Benedictines in France. It was gradually adopted by other communities throughout the middle ages.  

The Protestant reformers further elevated the idea of sainthood. Among the stern, unyielding Calvinists it was said that only one in a hundred was among “the elect.” Everybody else was destined for hell, pure and simple. It was not a hopeful nor cheery theology. And so, naturally, more generous ways of understanding ourselves and our proper, wholesome place in the world emerged. In early America, a more liberal and optimistic vision of life began to be proclaimed by our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors. They didn’t believe in hell, though each group came to that conclusion in their own way. (In the mid-19th century Thomas Gold Appleton, brother-in-law of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, defined the difference between them. His witty statement accurately captured that one group relied of the goodness of the divine and the other on human ability when he said that the small-town Universalists “believed that God was too good to damn them,” while the self-confident more urban Unitarians believed that people like themselves “were too good to be damned.”) 

In any case, both denominations believed in a deity that embraced everyone, leading by the 20th century to our UU belief that lasting truth is found in all religions and that human worth and dignity are innate to everyone, regardless of their race, sex, class, gender, or orientation.2 Hell became the psychological condition people put themselves through in life by (a) trying to live up to inhuman demands of perfectibility; or (b) abandoning all concern for perfectibility and drifting into a life of dissipation. The human condition UUs believed—then as now—was blessed… and all of creation with it. This is what we, as Unitarian Universalists, celebrate on All Soul’s Day: that Reality, antecedent to all categories, Reality is One; that we come out of unity into multiplicity when we’re born, and that on the final day of judgement we, along with everything else and all souls from all times will be reintegrated into the eternal godhead. Out of unity into multiplicity…and back into unity.  

We Unitarian Universalists celebrate a God that loves every person as dignified and worthy. Is it any wonder that our UU forebears named more than twenty of our congregations All Souls Church? These congregations are from coast to coast: 

  • Kansas City, Indianapolis, and Belleville, Oh. in the Mid-west; 
  • New London,Ct., Watertown, N.Y., and Braintree, Ma.; 
  • Colorado Springs, Souix Falls, Brownsville, Tx.  
  • And Lacey, down near Olympia right here in Washington. 

All Souls, Tulsa has over 1800 members, is multiracial, and (to quote their website) “unafraid to speak out in the community about reproductive rights, the rights of those who have suffered past wrongs and to comfort the afflicted.” Truly a church of the free spirit. 

All Souls in Greenfield, Ma. was organized in 1825, led by a man whose baby son had recently died. When he heard the local Calvinist minister declare that unbaptized children all went to hell, he walked out and vowed to start a church espousing universal salvation. He did just that. 

All Souls Washington, D.C., is one of the most progressive pulpits in our nation’s capital, and has been for nearly 200 years, expressing faith through acts of justice and compassion. My suffragist Great Aunt Louise was a member of that church back in the 19-teens and ‘20s. She once told me that their church bells rang more optimistically than any of the others in town, loudly peeling “No Hell! No Hell! 

All Souls in Brattleboro, Vt. dates to the early 1790s when the legendary Universalist Hosea Ballou preached to a small gathering nearby. By the 1830s both Universalists and the Unitarians had built up their congregations and built attractive churches, but decided they’d benefit from joining. They did in 1922, forty years before their respective denominations followed suit.  

All Souls: that’s what we celebrate here and across Unitarian Universalism. Everybody. And today—indeed, every day—we hold up those siblings in spirit who have died over the past year from Covid-19. As of this morning that includes over 235,000 Americans. We are all anguished by this terrible loss and pray that these fellow citizens are at rest and free from suffering of any kind and that those they left behind are comforted by their neighbors and family. That this pandemic has been allowed to metastasize as it has is a public health disaster laid at the feet of the current administration. An administration that does not believe in the inherent worth and dignity of all people. They have made it abundantly clear that they don’t worship at the church of all souls.  

But we do. Hallelujah! And amen.  

Sermon Audio

At the Crossroads

by Rev. Dr. Stephen H. Furrer

East Shore Unitarian Sermons (Bellevue, WA)
East Shore Unitarian Sermons (Bellevue, WA)
At the Crossroads
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Details

Date:
Sunday, November 1
Time:
10:30 am - 11:30 am
Event Categories:
,

Venue

Online Event