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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 4, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org
As we begin to look for a new Director of Faith Development, how do we describe their job? What do we want our program to look like?
Call to Worship
Stephen Sondheim, Into the Woods
How do you say to your child in the night?
Nothing’s all black, but then nothing’s all white
How do you say it will all be all right
When you know that it might not be true?
What do you do?
Careful the things you say
Children will listen
Careful the things you do
Children will see and learn
Children may not obey,
but children will listen
Children will look to you for which way to turn
Reading
by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
In a house which becomes a home,
one hands down and another takes up
the heritage of mind and heart,
laughter and tears, musings and deeds.
Love, like a carefully loaded ship,
crosses the gulf between the generations.
Therefore, we do not neglect
the ceremonies of our passage:
when we wed, when we die,
and when we are blessed with a child;
When we depart and when we return;
When we plant and when we harvest.
Let us bring up our children.
It is not the place of some official
to hand to them their heritage.
If others impart to our children our knowledge and ideals,
they will lose all of us that is wordless and full of wonder.
Let us build memories in our children,
lest they drag out joyless lives,
lest they allow treasures to be lost
because they have not been given the keys.
We live, not by things,
but by the meanings of things.
It is needful to transmit the passwords
from generation to generation.
Sermon Exerpt
-Robert Cole, “The Child as Pilgram”
So it is we connect with one another, move in and out of one another’s lives, teach and heal and affirm one another, across space and time — all of us wanderers, explorers, adventurers, stragglers and ramblers, sometimes tramps or vagabonds, even fugitives, but now and then pilgrims: as children, as parents, as old ones about to take that final step, to enter that territory whose character none of us here ever knows. Yet how young we are when we start wondering about it all, the nature of the journey and of the final destination. These are things about which children want to speak, about things they want to think.
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