Auckland Unitarians

with David Hines  Worship Leader:- Nina Khouri  Song Leader:- Sally Mabelle  Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 3rd July 2022  For more information see   https://aucklandunitarian.org.nz/christian-karakia-do-you-think-they-are-appropriate-for-state-schools/

with Rev. Clay Nelson Recorded by Auckland Unitarian Church 26th June 2022 Welcome this morning to history. This is the first public celebration of an indigenous peoples’ holiday in the world. Matariki, sometimes referred to as the Maori New Year, has become a celebration for all New Zealanders. It centres on a cluster of stars that in the west were known as The Pleiades or Seven Sisters. They are...

with members of the Auckland UU Climate Team – Brenda Bendall, Shirin Caldwell, Jonathan Mason. Please accept our apologies for the poor sound quality on this episode - recorded directly off zoom. Links to the various resources referred to in this episode can be found on the page for this service on our website:- https://aucklandunitarian.org.nz/climate-change-issues-and-challenges/

with Rev. Clay Nelson Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 12th June 2022 A quick perusal of the internet tells me I should wait for one of the equinoxes, when day and night are equal, to muse on balance and absolutely not when the winter solstice is approaching, but where is the fun in that? When reality is in balance in perfect alignment with my life, where is the challenge? My experience says...

with Rev. Clay Nelson Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 5th June 2022 Forty years ago, this past week, my seminary released me into the world to begin my ordained ministry. In all those years, an Annual General Meeting has never provoked me to preach a musing on one of the discussions held. It was the discussion/debate about approving a remit for the congregation to endorse the Fairer Futures...

with Rev. Clay Nelson  Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 29th May 2022 No one was more surprised than I when moving to New Zealand that I would put my Anglican collar back on after eight years with the American Unitarian Universalists. I did impose one condition on myself before doing so –– I would no longer dance around my progressive religious views in the pulpit. Traditionalists and co...

with Rev. Clay Nelson Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 22nd May 2022 I was never a big fan of magicians because I don’t enjoy feeling conned or suspending my disbelief. Then I encountered Penn and Teller. Who couldn’t love magicians with a TV show called Bullshit ? They are scientific sceptics and atheists who love making mince out of sacred cows. I particularly enjoyed their trick of making...

with Rev. Clay Nelson  Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 15th May 2022  If we go far enough in the future, historians may label the present time as the Age of Anxiety. There is certainly enough anxiety floating about for everyone to build a raft. The possible outcomes in Ukraine weigh on us all. Climate change is occurring faster than projected as sea levels and sea water temperature...

with Rev. Clay Nelson  Recorded by Auckland Unitarian Church 8th May 2022  Some have called “This Land Is Your Land” an alternative national anthem in America. It was written and first sung by Woody Guthrie. Growing up in small-town Oklahoma, Guthrie heard church hymns, outlaw ballads, blues, fiddle tunes and popular music. The Guthries had been fairly prosperous — Woody’s father wa...

with Rev. Clay Nelson  Recorded by Auckland Unitarian Church 1st May 2022  Ralph Waldo Emerson once observed that “It is a happy talent to know how to play.” But I have found it a difficult talent to utilise over the past couple of years. The last time I can remember being immersed in play was doing the chicken dance at Rachel’s and my wedding. It was also the first day someone entered t...

with Rev. Clay Nelson  Recorded by Auckland Unitarian Church 24th April 2022  My Dad was a pretty smart guy. He had a lot of academic degrees after his name and when younger I thought of him as the only Renaissance man I knew. Why? He seemed to know the answer to every question I could throw at him. Later I figured out that he was conning me. When he didn’t know the answer, he still gave...

with Rev. Clay Nelson Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 17th April 2022 Sherlock Holmes, the master of deductive reasoning, tells us in  The Sign of the Four : “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” His approach minutely analyses a clue, making huge claims about the information it must contain. From a stocking found in the...

with Rev. Clay Nelson Recorded 10th April 2022 by Auckland Unitarian Church The Christian world is beginning Holy Week this week. I know that because it always begins the Sunday before Easter with Palm Sunday, the celebration of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. I know today is that day because all this week I’ve been inexplicably humming a song I used to teach the children of my parish on Pa...

with Rev. Clay Nelson. Recorded by Auckland Unitarian Church 3rd April 2022 Kat Liu’s reflection on beating up on herself brought back a happier memory. It was a game my mother played with me when I was little older than a toddler. She would take my arms and force me to hit myself, not so it hurt but until I gleefully giggled when being scolded to stop hitting her baby. She meant no harm. How coul...

with Rev. Clay Nelson. Recorded by Auckland Unitarian Church 27th March 2022 When I was a child I liked playing on the teeter-totter at the playground. Apparently, you call it a see-saw here. What I found challenging was finding the balance point with my partner at the other end. I was not a philosophy prodigy at the age of seven, so I had not the words to describe what I knew intuitively: balance...

with Rev. Clay Nelson. Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 20th March 2022 The world is stuck. There is lots of evidence. This premise is supported by recent events in Aotearoa New Zealand. The once admired Prime Minister has been stripped of her beatification, not by anything she has done or failed to do, but by our anxiety displayed on Parliament’s lawn. The pandemic is still taking a toll, ne...

with Rachel Mackintosh. Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 13th March 2022 What do you see when I show you this image? (Image of orange human figure used in advertising by the New Zealand Electoral Commission). Who do you see? Do you project yourself on to this person? Yes? I don’t. I see a neutral person, not me. Could it be a woman? Hard to imagine. I see a man. Could he be Māori? Doesn’t eve...

with Rev. Clay Nelson. Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 6th March 2022 Ukraine national anthem - https://youtu.be/HJBdn_O1gwo I find myself in a conundrum. One of the chief reasons amongst many that drew me to live in Aotearoa New Zealand was its long history of nonviolence, beginning with the Moriori of the Chatham Islands. They once were warriors but chose to become warriors for peace. They...

with Rev. Clay Nelson. Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 27th February 2022 I have been musing this week on a quote by Heraclitus that has long intrigued me: “It is impossible to step in the same river twice.” It has brought to mind an attractive, fresh-faced, twenty-something woman with a huge smile who visited me at St Matthew-in-the-city. At the time a list MP, Jacinda was laying the ground...

with Rev. Clay Nelson. Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 20th February 2022 Like the vast majority of Kiwis I have been unimpressed by the behaviour of the anti-maskers, anti-vaccinators, anti-mandators, Trump wannabes, neo-Nazis, Jacinda haters, and miscellaneous malcontents creating chaos in Wellington for nearly two weeks. Protesting is a justifiable activity in a democracy. Sometimes that...

with Rev. Clay Nelson. Recorded at Auckland Unitarian Church 13th February 2022 The future has a history. My guess is that humans have always been obsessed with predicting the future. It doesn’t matter if they were using tea leaves, animal entrails, numerology, bumps on the head, palmistry, tarot cards, or dreams interpreted by oracles, shamans, prophets, priests or spiritualists, they c...

with Rev. Clay Nelson. Recorded by Auckland Unitarian Church 6th February 2022 I find water to be not only a miraculous source of life, but also a rich metaphor for who we are. I recently bought a new scale because the mirror says my health would benefit by losing a few kilograms. OK, maybe more than a few. The scale I bought is high-tech. You know me. What other kind would I buy. It reminds me of...

With John DiLeo. Recorded by Auckland Unitarian Church 30th January 2022. John DiLeo © 30 January 2022. For much of my life, my conscious perspective on ‘freedom’ was always in terms of “freedom to.” As a child enjoying nearly every privilege one could – an able-bodied White, Christian, cis, hetero male of European descent, born to a reasonably stable two-parent household, and living in a quiet, s...

With Rev. Sally Mabelle, Nina Khouri. Recorded by Auckland Unitarian Church 23rd January 2022. Sally Mabelle © 23 January 2022. When I was preparing today, I googled ‘Unitarian Mysticism’ and to my surprise and delight, up came an inspiring 10-week Adult Religious Education course on the Unitarian Universalist Association website (uua.org) called ‘Spirit in Practice’ by Rev. Erik Wikstrom Walker ....

With David Hines. Recorded by Auckland Unitarian Church 16th January 2022. David Hines © 16 January 2022. My sermon today says Let’s stop making apologies for God. She’s a total nuisance. In the Christian circles I grew up in, people were constantly saying how good God was. They blindly ignored all the grief and harm in the world, and if anybody drew attention to it, they’d come up with excuses. L...