Weekly
Newsletter
High
Country Unitarian Universalist Fellowship (HCUUF)
Weekly
Newsletter: January 14-20, 2019
CONTENTS
• Sunday
Services
• Upcoming
Service & Social Time, January 20, 2019
• Everybody
Can Serve
• HCUUF
Pledge Commitments for 2019
• Touchstones
Corner: Grace
• Teeter
Totter Grace
• Touchstones
Journal for January: Focus on Grace
• HCUUF
Facebook Page
• Other
News Sent under Separate Cover
• HCUUF
Website
• Contact
Information for Newsletter Announcements
• Contact
Information for HCUUF
• Consulting
Minister, Board Members, Committees, Musician, Staff
• Sunday
Services
Our
weekly Sunday Services take place in the Fellowship Hall of the
Lord of the Mountains Church in Dillon, CO at 4:00 pm and are
followed by a Social Hour or Potluck at 5:00 pm. Potlucks
usually occur on the last Sunday of the month.
During
2018 we have had a short sabbatical during the months of May
and October during which no services are held but other
activities takes place from time to time.
• Upcoming
Service & Social Time
January
20, 2019: Service & Social Time
Sermon
Title: The Power of Protest: Learning from Martin
Luther King Jr., and Other Prophetic Voices
Speaker: Lydia
Wittman
I
am here to acknowledge and represent the African American girls
whose stories don’t make the front page of every national
newspaper, whose stories don’t lead on the evening news. I
represent the African American women who are victims of gun
violence, who are simply statistics instead of vibrant,
beautiful girls full of potential. For far too long, these
names, these black girls and women, have just been numbers. I’m
here to say “Never again” for those girls too.
Naomi
Wadler, 11-year-old activist from Virginia: March for our
Lives address 2018
~~~~~****~~~~~****~~~~~~
They
thought that the bullets would silence us, but they failed. And
out of that silence came thousands of voices. The terrorists
thought they would change my aims and stop my ambitions. But
nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and
hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.
Malala
Yousafzai: address to the United Nations, 2013
~~~~~****~~~~~****~~~~~
The
tortuous road which has led from Montgomery, Alabama to Oslo
bears witness to this truth. This is a road over which millions
of Negroes are travelling to find a new sense of dignity. This
same road has opened for all Americans a new era of progress and
hope. It has led to a new Civil Rights Bill, and it will, I am
convinced, be widened and lengthened into a super highway of
justice as Negro and white men in increasing numbers create
alliances to overcome their common problems.
I
accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an
audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept
despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I
refuse to accept the idea that the “isness” of man’s present
nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the
eternal “oughtness” that forever confronts him. I refuse to
accept the idea that man is mere flotsom and jetsom in the river
of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround
him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically
bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright
daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.
I
refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation
must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of
thermonuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and
unconditional love will have the final word in reality.
Martin
Luther King, Jr: Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 1964
• Everybody
Can Serve
Rev. Kirk Loadman-Copeland, Consulting Minister
Martin
Luther King, Jr. said, “Everybody can be great, because
everybody can serve. …You only need a heart full of grace, a
soul generated by love.” His service was in leading the Civil
Rights movement from the mid-1950s until he was assassinated
on April 4, 1968 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.
A few months after the death of the civil rights icon, former
Congressman John Conyers Jr. of Michigan introduced the first
legislation seeking to make King's birthday, January 15, a
federal holiday.
The
Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change
was founded later in 1968. It sponsored the first annual
observance of King's birthday in January 1969, but it would
take almost a decade and a half before it became a federal
holiday. In the interval some states including Illinois,
Massachusetts and Connecticut passed bills celebrating the
occasion.
Three
years after Conyers proposed legislation, the Southern
Leadership Conference that King had led presented a petition
to Congress signed by more than 3 million people who supported
a King Holiday, but nothing came of it until President Jimmy
Carter agreed to support the effort. Renewed lobbying helped,
but the bill failed in the House by five votes in November
1979. Grassroots support finally began to grow and a new
petition with 6 million signatures and the House passed the
bill in 1980 with a vote of 338 to 90.
While
there were difficulties in the Senate led by Republican
Senators John P. East and Jesse Helms, the bill was also
approved there and President Reagan signed it into law in
November 1983. The first official holiday was observed on the
third Monday of January 1986.
At
the time, only 27 states and Washington, D.C., honored the
holiday. Arizona did not vote in favor of recognizing the
holiday until 1992. In 2000, 17 years after the law's official
passage and the same year it pulled the Confederate
flag down from its statehouse dome, South Carolina became the
last state to sign a bill recognizing Martin Luther King Jr.
Day as a paid holiday
The
establishment of the holiday was followed by further
deliberations about how best to honor King’s memory. The King
Holiday Commission encouraged the
practice of community service on King’s birthday holiday. In
1994, Congress passed the King Holiday and Service Act,
designating the Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Holiday as a
national day of service and charged the Corporation for National
and Community Service with leading this effort. It is the only federal
holiday so designated as a national day of service—a “day on,
not a day off.”
On
Monday, January 21st consider some small way of serving of a
way of honoring King, and more importantly, honoring the
Dream.
• HCUUF
Pledge Commitments for 2019
Dear
Members and Friends,
We
have yet to hear from all in response to our plea for pledge
commitments for 2019. Those who have responded have most
generously increased their commitment in order to help us meet
our balanced budget goal.
We're
not there yet, however, so additional responses are hoped for
and greatly appreciated.
If
we do not meet our pledge goal, we will have to look for
additional ways to cut our expenses.
Thank
you for your generosity.
• Touchstones
Corner: Grace
Grace
Happens by Rev. Fredric Muir
…In
our culture, [in addition to] …three [ancient] understandings of
grace—a consciousness of unity, a sense of divine order, a
listening to life there stands …the core of a modern
understanding of grace: it is unexpected—you don’t know when the
blessings will occur; it is undeserved—there’s nothing you can
do to earn grace; and yet it is everywhere, all about you—you
don’t have to be in the right place, timing means nothing.
But,
Frederick Buechner tells us, “There’s only one catch. Like any
other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you reach out
and take it.”
…Grace
happens, if you’ll reach out and take it. Hence the mystery that
makes grace amazing: while on the one hand you can’t do anything
to force grace …if you’re not open to it …then there won’t be
grace.
…As
with Unitarian Universalism, grace is the affirmation that worth
and dignity are inherent to who we are as human beings.
Regardless of the mistakes we make, the tensions we might
create, regardless of what society might tell us, we know we are
valued.
…How
many times do we have the opportunity of grace and we miss it….
Mary Oliver is one of those …poets who remind us to take notice
of the small things.
...[She]
asks: “Do you think there is anywhere, in any language, a word
billowing enough for the pleasure that fills you as the sun
reaches out….” Yes, there is such a word. Grace happens.
Source: Heretics’
Faith: Vocabulary for Religious Liberals by
Fredric Muir (2001)
• Teeter
Totter Grace
