This Sunday, June 2, at 10 a.m. ONLY, is our annual Flower Communion. 

Lunch under the tent at 11:15 a.m.

Bring a flower from home if you can!

This Sunday’s worship invitation from Dr. Glen Thomas Rideout includes a story adapted from the telling of Teresa Schwartz and David Schwartz.

He left Bohemia under government threat, accepting a call to serve a Baptist church in New York City as minister…until one day in 1919. That day, he wrote in his diary: “I cannot be a Baptist anymore, even in compromise. The fire of new desires, new worlds, is burning inside me.”

The Rev. Norbert Čapek and his companion, the Rev. Maja Čapek, joined a Unitarian church in New Jersey together in 1921—for the same reason a whole lot of you did: their children liked the religious education program!

After the first World War’s end, Norbert and Maja returned home to Norbert’s birthplace—the newly independent Czechoslovakia. There, they founded the Prague Liberal Religious Fellowship, a Unitarian congregation grown to 3,200 members in just two decades.

This church—like ours—had people who believed different things. Still, Norbert felt a calling to create a ritual they could all share, eventually turning to the beauty of the countryside and its blooms of countless shapes and kinds.

In 1923, Norbert introduced a simple flower ceremony to his people. He asked his congregants to bring a flower to church—from their gardens, the field, or the roadside. He invited each person to place their flower in a vase. There was the church community, no less unique for being united. Following the service, each person could take a flower from the vase—a different one than they had brought.

For his brazen message of inherent worth, dignity, and beauty in difference, the Gestapo arrested Norbert in 1942. Even in starvation and torture, he held a flower ceremony with his fellow prisoners, finding whatever flowers they could among the weeds of the camp. They testified to a beauty larger than themselves, and a love that would outlive them.

The Nazis killed Norbert Čapek. But his spirit, courage, and commitment live on, today. Those qualities have passed, now, to us, to make them real.

His wife Mája brought the flower ceremony to the Unitarian Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1940, beginning the yearly celebration in Unitarian Universalist churches across the nation we continue this Sunday.

And now, we are getting together again, with our whole selves open to the work and potential of community. We bring our time and treasure and thought and wisdom to this shared faith journey. We take solace and strength in each others’ company and the growing connections between us.

Gathered together, an organization of colors and cultures, perspectives and contexts, ages and affections, our common purpose connects us. And together, we all live to be part of a difference that shakes the status quo. Even the differences between—those innumerable, immeasurable, ineffable strands our lives join to weave—even they offer us the opportunity to practice good relationships, to open our hearts and minds, to reject the illusion of separateness, to be stronger by our bonds.

It is the essence of these truths, the reminders that we can each be whole and we can all be one that come with us as we spend a week in the world. They influence where we go, what we do, and how we care. And then, we return to renew and refresh our own lives and each others’—on and on, again and again, building and rebuilding a living example in our common journey, showing what love can do when you bring your whole self, when I bring mine, and—amid a weedy thicket of brokenness and division all about us—there is a we.

The opportunity has come again, as it has for a century (to say the least), for the flowers to remind us of the audacious beauty of collective action; to remind us to love differences that define and distinguish us; to keep our faith in the call of love in common.

Bring a flower from your garden. If you don’t have access to a flower, worry not—we’ll have one for you when you get here. The flowers will teach; you and I can be the difference.

Join us for worship this Sunday, June 2 at 10 a.m. ONLY 

The recording is available for on-demand streaming on our YouTube channel immediately after the service ends.

Offering:

Give via our online giving portal, or CashApp. Make sure to designate that it’s for the “Offering Plate” fund.

Masks are welcome but not required in the sanctuary. Read our COVID policies for gathering. Find information about childcare and Sunday morning options for children and youth here.