UUMKE Sunday Service Podcast

Did Jesus choose the theme of his first miracle to show everyone how much value he placed on having a good party? Maybe it was deeper than that. Maybe not. Let’s have some fun talking about it!

Where do you find beauty? What do you feel like when you encounter beauty? How do humans decide if something or someone is beautiful? Beauty can be inspiring, healing and life-giving, but beauty can also be dangerous, leading people to chase an impossible ideal of appearance, resulting in eating disorders and other illness. Seeking and noticing beauty can be a healthy spiritual practice that conne...

Door County singer-songwriter Katie Dahl has made a name for herself nationwide as a songwriter whose work delves deep into the life of the heart as well as the life of the country. Here, she considers the question of what music’s role can and should be at a time of political turmoil. Is the role of a song is (in the words of humorist Finley Peter Dunne) “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the c...

Join us on Pridefest weekend to honor the blessing of diverse gender and sexual identities. In a world with so much shame, misunderstanding and judgment, the blessing of acceptance feels like a balm. Rachel Naomi Remen wrote, “By making a place for wholeness within our relationships, we offer others the opportunity to be whole without shame and become a place of refuge from everything in them and...

Join us for the annual First Church Flower Communion service, where we will consider the blessings we give and receive in community. Remember to bring a flower to share your unique blessing in our ritual of giving and receiving flowers. Flowers will also be available if you forget. This year we will include a ritual of gratitude for Lu Krug’s enormous financial gift to First Church, and a ritual o...

Religious Education Sunday Multigenerational Service. “RE Sunday” is filled with ritual. The little ones come forward – eager or timid – to receive giant erasers which represent the community’s acceptance of their mistakes. Eighth-grade students are recognized for the commitment to exploring their lives as values-consistent, whole human beings in relationship with others. Our high school seniors s...

Join us for the annual First Church Flower Communion service, where we will consider the blessings we give and receive in community. Remember to bring a flower to share your unique blessing in our ritual of giving and receiving flowers. Flowers will also be available if you forget. This year we will include a ritual of gratitude for Lu Krug’s enormous financial gift to First Church, and a ritual o...

How do we survive in this changing world? What gives us the strength to keep going, no matter the struggle? We will honor those who have served in the military during this service on Memorial Day weekend.

The process of coming alive is ongoing. We are physically born, and then we are reborn again and again in the process of creativity as we are inspired by and shape each other throughout our lives. There are no creators without companions – whether known or unknown. Parenting is a process of creation ongoing. When was the last time you created (or helped create) something that you hope will outlive...

Coloring outside the lines means that there are lines within which we can stay or go beyond. In worship and community life, those lines are tradition. Today we’ll explore the creative tension between tradition and innovation as it influences our practice of creativity.

There is a relationship between who you are now, and who you are becoming. In the process of visioning our future as a community, we are calling ourselves into our hoped-for becoming, even as we live together today. How can knowing who we are helping us become who we long to be? What must we know about ourselves in order to unfold towards our hope?

Michaelis and Kaleka, who came together over their deep need to understand the power of compassion over hatred. These two joined together, co-authored a book on compassion and formed “Serve2Unite”, an organization that works to create inclusive compassionate nonviolent climates in schools and communities. The lecture: “Hurt People Hurt People: The Responsibility of Compassion” is followed with a w...

The climate crisis we are in now has been emerging for a long time. The urgency of now was created by decades of ignoring warnings, but even more, by centuries of centering individual experience and profit while ignoring the broader context of life. What would it be like to expand our understanding to include the wideness of the whole earth and broader humanity? What emerges from the fullness of b...

Parker Palmer says the soul is a shy thing and requires time and space to emerge. Allowing may be as much a part of the soul’s emergence as pushing. How might you let go and let your soul come forth in its own time? What space will it take in your own life for your soul to unfold?

A sudden realization may seem surprising and special, but it emerges from what is already there. Epiphanies can be scientific breakthroughs, philosophical discoveries, or a realization in which we understand something more deeply or from an enlightening perspective. It’s the sudden emergence of clarity from something we’ve been thinking about for a long time. The “aha!” moment that can never be ta...

On this Easter Sunday, we will explore the wildness of emerging from oppression, control, stagnation, and loss. We will mine the traditional Easter story for modern-day meaning, wondering how a story of deep oppression and loss turned into one of wildness, freedom, and hope. How does chaos become a community? How can empowerment emerge from oppression? How can loss fertilize new life?

Do you remember the jingle “Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down” used to advertise the annoyingly predictable egg-shaped children’s toys that wobble when touched, but always come back upright? Could it be that human beings are just as predictable – that being out of balance is part of being in balance? We used to say that First Church is a place to find and keep your balance. I believe that m...

When we come together in community and in the larger society, we can make choices about how to be together. Do we want to compete for status, value, and resources? Is living in the community and in the world necessarily a zero-sum game, where some people win and others lose? Or is there a third way, beyond binary choices and into synthesis, interconnection, and win-win-win? Please join us as we ex...

The Rev. Don Foerster wrote that our lives swing like pendulums between and among polarities; that we swing between the desire “to serve the cosmos that commands us to become more” and the longing to “be our genuine selves, content with what we are.” How does the balance between outer pull and inner need show up in your life? Are you saving the world or savoring it? What kind of practice would hel...

This year’s annual youth service will include songs, testimonials, and readings from our youth to follow our theme of Change: Practice What You Preach. The youth group is challenging you to take action for standing up for what you believe in! In this New Year, the youth have resolved to start fighting back while raising awareness on three subjects they feel passionate about diversity: the environm...

What happens when we don't know what's coming next? Which is pretty much true all the time, though we pretend it's not. How do we step up to our fear of the unknown and trust the unfolding future? Perhaps faith can help us do that and thereby open us to more imagination and creativity in our family life, community life, and justice work.

Faith is not only an individual orientation, it is also a collaborative creation and a collective experience. Faith moves in the space between us; it is something we create in a relationship. Join us for this service that includes a covenant with our Pledge Drive Team and explores how loving relationships of trust and truth allow individuals and communities to flourish.

Here’s the idea: Oftentimes people look at Unitarian Universalist churches and think of us as places of little faith. I would argue that we have as much as any other religion, but it may be faith in different things than people are used to hearing.

Intention lies somewhere on the road between hope and commitment. How do intentions function in our lives? How do they function in our community? Join us for this service that will investigate the stretching prayer of intentions.

2018/01/14 • The Rev. Jennifer Nordstrom • The Healing is not Done by First Unitarian Society of Milwaukee