In this swing-time season between biting cold and emerging change and growth, we pause to let go, to take on, to concentrate, to drift, to be aware, to be passive. We affirm that we are surrounded by life and love and we now add our own positive intentions and cares to each other and this community. In these moments, as with all moments, may we celebrate the connectedness we have with all things, living and non-living; may we affirm unity without uniformity, diversity without divisiveness, certainties without conformity.

We think now of the global human family with all its history, struggle, beauty and complexity. We would celebrate almost 14 billion years of evolution, emergence, progression and that, while we stand in this brief conscious stream of existence aware of our incredible abilities and uniqueness in all the created order, we are but one common breath in the grand scheme of it all.

This morning we consider again how the world moves and changes and our place of being active catalysts and difference-makers. We first lament and apologize with humility and embarrassment for the systems that have caused and continue to cause alienation, inequality and oppression. Patriarchy, male domination and male bias have had their day. We value the woman, the man, the person, the human in all its richness, depth, frailties and abilities. We profile with pride the place of women who manage to transform this world through strength and creativity – through non-violence and care, through the vastness, mystery and uniqueness of the feminine. And, we stand in awe of the feminine in anyone, anywhere. Would we this day stand in solidarity with what is right, what is just and fair, what is feminine and masculine, what is emerging in us all that gentles and strengthens our communities, indeed this planet and village we all share.

As we face the disparities in this world, we wonder how broken and inspired we have been – or may become….

….when considering the prisoner, chained or bound, with lack of skills and wearing only the lead shoes of despair.

….when seeing the woman, with half a home, as half a wife, living less than half a life, poor, single…holding in her lap a condemned child….condemned to never know what it may be like to fall in love, never knowing what it may be like to be cool.

….when glancing at the homeless, those in doorways called homes. Those living in fear of freezing to death or being beaten by some half-crazed alley hunter. Will we look upon these refugees in the exodus of economics, hungry ones, cousins of Jesus with no place to lay their heads?

….when reading of the jobless; those who have lost their compass point, those dis-identified, disrobed of dignity, celebrating the holidays of idleness. Countless ones struggling against being Styrofoam slaves of the keepers of the Dow Jones…thrown out like used coffee cups. Ones no longer needed as a cog in the machine, known as statistics.

….when remembering the hungry; those swarming like locusts, camp to camp, shelter to shelter searching for food. Those rationing food, prolonging the play of death. We in our special diets, selecting whole grain foods, watching weight. How do we consider the nightly feast in our garbage cans or disposals and those who would dine on our leftover scraps? And what would we do if those with skinny bones and sunken eyes came to our doors?

Ah, the dissonance, the disparities, the opportunities in this world we share. Political prisoners, the medically deprived, the aliens and immigrants. So many unspoken for. May we this day choose to be agents of life, demonstrators of peace and equality…for the rich and the poor, for the man…and for the woman next to us…and those in distant reaches of this beautiful and crazed world in need and in wait of our joyful and just, our human and humane responses. Let it be….

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