Endless Emergence
Things don’t often just emerge out of nothing. There are usually (and in most cases) a whole host of circumstances and unknowable intersecting things that conspire so that something can emerge – and it usually emerges as a response to a need. How can we begin to curate emergence as a need-based, love-infused response to the inherited world around us? How do we recognize what it means to create a loving response in our individual lives and collective world? Just as our needs are, our lives can be beautifully and continually emerging. This emergence can be curated, it need not be just something that is enacted upon us. We are both capable of and called to create responses to these continuously arising needs and we always have a choice in lacing our response with love, or shrouding it with fear and shame. Will we be rigid, inflexible and out of touch? Or will we be warm, responsive, nimble and yet persistent? This Sunday, we’ll explore emergence as curated response to a need.
Join us for worship at 10 a.m.
Order of Service: June 10 Order of Service
Listen to the Sermon and Call to Worship
Offering Recipient: Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism (give here)
Summer Worship Theme: Emergence
We humans look at a flock of birds flying overhead, sketching awe-inspiring designs in the sky, and think the birds must be following a leader. But leadership alone has never been the full measure of history nor the full inspiration of the beauty and patterns that emerge from a community of birds in flight. In fact, the patterns we see in the sky are made by each individual bird bringing to the group its own creativity and reacting to the movement of two or three of its neighbors. It is a dance between freedom and obedience. Our work in community, our efforts in justice making, and patterns of right relationship emerge in the same dance between freedom (our own creativity) and obedience (our commitment to our neighbors, community). Together we create patterns of love and justice. This summer we ask: what makes something emerge? How and when do we lead? How and when do we follow? Where and how should we be placing our attention? What is emerging?
