Cup of Joe, September 6, 2024
This Sunday, I hope to see you at our annual water communion celebration! It is a wonderful ritual that celebrates how we come together from different places with different interests and needs and gifts, and yet we choose to be together as one community, celebrating how we are connected and part of one body.
This ritual has become a traditional way that UU communities mark the beginning of a new liturgical year. I’ve celebrated this ritual with you here at UU Saratoga ten times. This Sunday will be my eleventh. It’s not a new ritual for us.
And yet one of the things that this annual ritual does is ask us to see ourselves, each other, and our combined community anew. We’ve never before been quite who we are now in this moment, and we gather to look forward to new times and new experiences together.
We love new things—I love new things!—and there is nothing like the excitement of opening a gift, the excitement of opening a new door. And it’s also complicated. The new is by definition different, and different can be scary. This year ahead is going to be so full of changes for UU Saratoga and for each of us! There will be anxious moments, but I know you all to be a community of hope and playfulness, and I know we will be reminding each other that we are here to support one another in anxious times with compassion. And we’ll also be reminding one another that being anxious also means being excited!
one of the things that this annual ritual does is ask us to see ourselves, each other, and our combined community anew
This Sunday’s water communion is a ritual we done many times, and it is also new. There are some of us who have never participated in this ritual before. And, profoundly, we as UU Saratoga are also encountering this year’s water communion as the last one we will ever celebrate at 624 N Broadway. Oh! That feels heavy, doesn’t it? And yet it also feels exciting!
We are opening the door on a new year. We are opening the door on a new future for ourselves and for this beloved community. I imagine that with our hand on the door handle, we’re feeling anxious in at least all the ways that a human being can feel anxious.
May we invite the new! There are bound to be surprises ahead. May we greet them together with playfulness, hope, and compassion.
With love for all of you, and anxious to be together again,
Rev Joe
P.S. By the way, one thing that’s new is our website <uusaratoga.org>! Hurray!! We have a lovely and very functional website!
The site is still being tweaked and we’ve only just begun posting news and events to it, but please go take a look and explore it. I would love to hear how the new site feels to you. There is a trove of past sermons already posted there, and we’ll be starting to lean into more and more of the features that our new site offers as we travel on. Events and sermons can be given topic tags which will enrich the searchability and usability of the site.
Please give a big thank you to Dan Forbush, by the way. For the past two months, Dan has shepherded our new website into being, working with the website designer we contracted with, and Dan saw it through to the launching of the new site on August 28th. Thank you, Dan! What a wonderful new gift for us all!