Past Sermons
Did you miss a recent sermon? Or want to share one with a friend? Would you like to get a flavor of the kind of messages you might hear at First Parish? Click one of the sermons below, or browse our video archive on YouTube.
Please join us at 4 pm on Christmas Eve for our annual Candlelight Service of Lessons and Carols. The First Parish Choir is preparing some beautiful music for this service, and I will offer a Christmas homily. Invite your friends and family to join us for this special celebration! Our earlier start time allows you to return home in time for Christmas Eve meals and celebrations.
On the winter solstice, on the shortest and darkest day of the year, it is easy to dwell on all the things that make us fearful and and uncomfortable in the dark; so instead, let us respond with joy. Come join us for an intergenerational service to ring in the new solar year with smiles on our faces and music in our hearts. Valentin Frank preaches
Christmas Play December 14
Follow Mary, Joseph, and the donkey on their journey to the place where they welcome new life and light! We warmly invite you to join us for our annual Christmas Play at First Parish, produced by the RE Team and enacted by our children and teens. This year we will offer three magical advent stories, along with musical accompaniment directed by Kenneth Griffith and narration by Rob Hardies. There will be baby lambs, wise shepherds, angels, a stubborn ox, and Christmas Mice!
Too often peace feels elusive and fragile, outside of our control, beyond our understanding. It is tempting to look for a peace we can truly know so that we can cultivate it in our lives. So what do we do when the only peace we find is one we cannot know?
At the holidays, some of us will dust off recipes handed down from our families: instructions for making holiday meals, cookies and other treats. Our families also pass down recipes of faith, instructions and models for what it means to be a person of faith. How do we relate to and reckon with the religion we inherited from our families in ways that allow us to develop a life-giving spirituality of our own? Rev. Rob Hardies preaches
"Come with whatever seed of faith you can muster, and listen…” -Enfleshed Liturgies
Join us for a celebration of faith and doubt through story and song. Matt Meyer will reflect on a high stakes wager, a secret doubt, and what it takes to stand up to bullies in heaven and earth.
Matt is an itinerant troubadour and worship leader who has led hundreds of services for UU congregations across the country. He has a degree in hand drumming and serves as Director of Community Life for Sanctuary Boston.
One consistent element in our worship service is the hymn Spirit of Life. More than a song, it is a prayer - a plea, even - for Spirit to draw near: Spirit of Life, come unto me. For the hymn’s creator, Carolyn McDade, this hymn and this plea emerged from a difficult political moment, not unlike the one we face today. What wisdom can McDade’s hymn offer us now? And what does Spirit of Life reveal about our shared understanding of the sacred? Rev. Rob Hardies preaches.
17th century Japanese pot Matsuo Basho writes:
Deep into autumn
and this caterpillar
still not a butterfly.
As we find ourselves deep into autumn - deep into this long, tender transition of our lives and our world - let us come together amid the uncertainty of what comes next, holding one another in possibility. Sophia Doescher preaches.
