FIRST CHURCH IN BELMONT, UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST
August 9, 2015 — 9:30 am
*Opening Hymn — Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee
Call to Worship — I’ve Known Rivers - Langston Hughes
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
Chalice Lighting (Unison)
Life is a gift, for which we are grateful.
We gather in community to celebration
the glories & the mysteries of this great gift.
- Rev. Marjorie Sams Montgomery
*Hymn — Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child
Reading — Funny Strange - Jennifer Michael Hecht
We are tender and our lives are sweet
and they are already over and we are
visiting them in some kind of endless
reprieve from oblivion, we are walking
around in them and after we shatter
with love for everything we settle in.
Thou tiger on television chowing,
thou very fact of dreams, thou majestical
roof fretted with golden fire. Thou wisdom
of the inner parts. Thou tintinnabulation.
Is it not sweet to hand over the ocean's
harvest in a single wave of fish? To bounce
a vineyard of grapes from one's apron
and into the mouth of the crowd? To scoop up
bread and offer up one's armful to the throng?
Let us live as if we were still among
the living, let our days be patterned after
theirs. Is it not marvelous to be forgetful?
Offertory
*Doxology
From all that dwell below the skies
Let words of love and peace arise;
Let joyful songs of praise be sung
Through every land by every tongue. Amen.
*Responsive Reading — The Limits of Tyrants (579)
Those who profess to favor freedom
and yet deprecate agitation are men
who want crops without plowing up the ground;
they want rain without thunder and lightning.
They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one,
and it may be both moral and physical,
but it must be a struggle.
Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never did and it never will.
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to
and you have found out the exact measure of injustice
and wrong which will be imposed upon them,
and these will continue till they are resisted with
either words or blows, or with both.
The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance
of those whom they oppress.
Candles of Concern and Celebration
Sermon — A Room To Swear In -Jen Deaderick
*Closing Hymn — Down to the River to Pray
*Benediction