Sermon Archive

For the last 16 years, Brandi Tuck has been the Executive Director of Path Home, whose mission is to empower homeless families with children to get back into housing - and stay there. Brandi will talk about the history, causes, and solutions to homelessness. She will also highlight the innovative programs that Path Home offers and talk about how working at Path Home for so long has changed her view on homelessness. 

Brandi Tuck graduated from the University of Florida in 2005 with degrees in Political Science & Philosophy and a minor in Organizational Leadership for Nonprofits. She was also awarded a certificate in Nonprofit Administration from Boston College in 2019. Brandi moved to Portland in 2005 after college and began working at the Oregon Hunger Relief Task Force conducting in anti-hunger public policy and outreach for federal nutrition programs. In 2007, Brandi founded Portland Homeless Family Solutions and has worked as the Executive Director ever since, increasing the organizational budget from $78,000 to over $5million annually. Brandi currently serves on the board of the American Leadership Forum of Oregon and the Multnomah County Continuum of Care Board. In the past, Brandi has served on the boards of the Nonprofit Association Oregon (NAO), the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network (YNPN), and the Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble. Brandi is a Fellow in the the Oregon Chapter of the American Leadership Forum (ALF) and is passionate about anti-oppression, systems change, and resilience. In her spare time, Brandi enjoys hiking with her dog Sylvie Bear, reading books with her book club, doing yoga and pilates, and exploring the outdoors. 

Special Collection: Backyard Habitat Certification Program https://backyardhabitats.org/

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We continue to explore the values approved for congregational study and consideration as part of the UUA Article II revision process. November's value is GENEROSITY explained as "We cultivate a spirit of gratitude and hope. We covenant to freely and compassionately share our faith, presence, and resources. Our generosity connects us to one another in relationships of interdependence and mutuality. "

In this service, Leslie will explore how to cultivate gratitude and hope in such complex, chaotic and challenging times. In a global society that is ever more polarized, how do we connect to our interdependence and mutuality?

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Readings & Sources used in the November 12th, 2023 Sermon

You can stumble across the small pieces of beauty, wisdom and truth that surround us all the time, but to find them in earnest takes some learning and intentionality. Knowing what to look for can be helped along by the generous sharing of others who are also in the community of seekers.

The Rev. David Pyle is the Regional Lead and a Congregational Life Consultant with the MidAmerica Regional Staff. Rev. Pyle holds a Masters of Divinity from the Meadville Lombard Theological School and a Bachelors of Arts in History and Political Science from East Tennessee State University. He completed his Clinical Pastoral Education Residency at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, Illinois. He has served as a minister for congregations in California, Michigan, and Illinois, and as an Administrator for a congregation in Texas. He also serves as the Deputy Command Chaplain for the Army Reserve Sustainment Command. He lives in Oak Grove, Kentucky.

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Join us for our 2nd Annual SOLV Fall Cleanup in the Hollywood Neighborhood. Each church year there are 4 months that have a 5th Sunday. As part of our lay-led ministry, we will be using these Sundays to offer an alternative to traditional worship. In lieu of holding a service, either in-person or on Zoom, we will be organizing a group service project we can do together instead.

We will gather at 10:30 outside the Center for Positive Aging and finish by Noon – Rain or Shine! Members Larry Burt & Diane Ingle have again coordinated with SOLV to provide supplies. Our goals are to help make the area a safer, cleaner, more pleasant area to visit and to help build community spirit among our members. Volunteers will pick up litter in the Hollywood neighborhood business area surrounding our meeting place. 

There will be no regular service (either in-person or online) this Sunday.

Rev. Kelly Dignan will help us begin to investigate our family stories and our ancestors’ connection with Earth. Our UUA President, Rev. Dr. Sofia Betancourt says this: “It is to inherited environmental practices themselves that ecowomanism* [and we] must turn for rehumanizing ways of knowing in relation to Earth.” 

Rev. Kelly Dignan is the Co-director of UU Ministry for Earth. She focuses on programs and loves helping UUs deepen their practices of Earth care, justice and flourishing of life. She also offers spiritual direction to individuals and teaches UU History at Iliff School of Theology, her alma mater.  Kelly lives in Denver, Colorado with her husband and near her four children. 

*Ecowomanism, which Melanie L. Harris defines, is an approach to environmental justice that centers the perspectives of women of African descent and reflects upon these women's activist methods, religious practices, and theories on how to engage earth justice. As a part of the womanist tradition, methodologically ecowomanism features race, class, gender intersectional analysis to examine environmental injustice around the planet. Thus, it builds upon an environmental justice paradigm that also links social justice to environmental justice. Our UUA President, Rev. Dr. Sofia Betancourt is an ecowomanist ethicist. So we will be including some of her work, too! 

Family Worship at 9:30 AM

Join Our Virtual Service Sunday at 10:30 AM

This service will be offered ONLY as a virtual service.

Click here to join the virtual service on Zoom

Meeting ID:  275 194 110

Phone In:  (669) 900-6833

Special Collection: UU Ministry for Earth

For the first service this year about our social justice focus on the climate crisis, Barbara Bernstein, a long-time Portland media person, will be speaking to us today about a film she made regarding the local superfund site on the Willamette, and showing us a bit of the film. Barbara is also planning to stay afterward so that people can engage with her.

"Once a Braided River, a new documentary by Barbara Bernstein, tells the story of how the North Reach of the Willamette River was transformed from a braided river, rich in biodiversity and home to many bands of indigenous people, into an industrial sacrifice zone with a ten mile long superfund site running from downtown Portland to the river’s confluence with the Columbia River. The documentary focuses a lens on the part of Portland that most Portlanders don't know about or ignore. It braids together the strands of many issues that face us - climate chaos, rivers contaminated with toxic pollutants, fish and wildlife brought to the brink of extinction by these perilous practices, and the dire hazards of storing immense amounts of explosive fossil fuels upon liquefaction zones underlain by major fault lines along the shorelines of our rivers. The documentary features community groups and activists working to replace the current industrial sacrifice zone with a green working waterfront defined by good jobs, clean energy, and healthy ecosystems."

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Love is one of the load-bearing pillars of our faith and lives at the center of the seven values articulated in the revised Article II proposal. Rev. Dobbins will share some of her congregation's reactions to the proposal and explore what bell hooks called our "search for clarity around the nature of love." Is love a feeling or an action? If we are to learn to love in action, what are the skills of love? How can we know when we are acting from a place of genuine love ... or even what that is?

Rev. Monica Dobbins is in her 3rd year of professional ministry, serving as the Assistant Minister at First Unitarian Church of Salt Lake City where she focuses on preaching, religious education for adults, serving as a resource for older youth, and pastoral care. The social justice issues closest to her heart are health care reform and immigration justice. 

A native of Birmingham, Alabama, Monica lives in downtown Salt Lake with her spouse and daughter; enjoys hiking and knitting; and misses sweet tea desperately.

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Unitarian Universalists place Love at the center of the values that define and unite us. This is not sentimental soft-hearted love, but the courageous creative love that encompasses all of life. We affirm each person’s inherent worthiness and dignity and honor the interdependent web of life, and respond to all with love. Join us to explore the power of this all encompassing love.

This is the first in a series of monthly sermons that our minister, Rev. Leslie Becknell Marx, will lead exploring the 6 values with love at the center which are the proposed evolution of how Unitarian Universalists define and align themselves. For the UU nerds among us, this is part of the process of adopting a revision to Article II of the Bylaws of the UU Association of Congregations. Full report from the Study Commission and action taken at 2023 General Assembly. 

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The 2023 UUA General Assembly took place at the end of June and Wy’east sent two delegates, Linda Macpherson & Rev. Leslie Becknell Marx.  This General Assembly featured some significant decisions that will impact our broader Unitarian Universalist faith for years to come. Join us to learn more about the proposed new Article II and the selection of a new President for the association. 

Family Worship 9:30 AM

Join Our Virtual Service Sunday at 10:30 AM

This service will be offered ONLY as a virtual service.

Click here to join the virtual service on Zoom

Meeting ID:  275 194 110

Phone In:  (669) 900-6833

A covenant is a set of promises that we make to one another, in a Unitarian Universalist religious community, in light of something larger than ourselves. A covenant is a commitment to the relationships we have with one another and to making, maintaining and strengthening those relationships, a religious practice, even when and especially when times are difficult. As we make that commitment to relationship, because together we can achieve something important that we could not achieve by ourselves. Because these religious communities we form matter not only in our own lives, but in the lives of people we have never met and may not ever know.

Multi-Platform Worship Sunday at 10:30 AM

This service will be offered as BOTH a virtual and an in-person service.

Click here to join the virtual service on Zoom

Meeting ID:  275 194 110

Phone In:  (669) 900-6833