I’m looking forward to a full December.  Naomi, Francisco and I are creating a series of special worship services that I hope you will find joyful and meaningful.  Plan on celebrating the season with your Unitarian Universalist Community.

On Sunday, December 16, our worship service (both at 9am and 11am) will feature a “Holiday Cabaret” on the theme “Gifts of the Season.”  As with past years’ RE Pageants, our worship will feature our children and teens but also include contributions from our adult members.  Instead of a single story spread across the whole hour, our idea this year is to feature several individual “acts” expressing a single theme.  Our theme is gifts and gift-giving.  We have several songs planned, a mini-play, a “reverse offering” and other surprises.  The focus for this service is on the secular aspects of the holiday season as well as including other, non-Christmas holidays from this time of year.

Our Christmas Eve services, Monday December 24, will be more exclusively Christmas-focused, but still with a Unitarian Universalist lens.  Both services include candlelight and carols.

The 5pm service is designed for families and children.  We create a “living creche” on the chancel.  As we tell the story and sing carols we will slowly populate the scene in the Bethlehem stable, illustrating the theme that everyone has a place in this religious story.

Our 7pm Christmas Eve service will be a traditional “lessons and carols” service.  This is an old form of worship including readings from the Bible alternating with sacred music. Together, the readings and the carols tell the Biblical Nativity story.  The mood will be more meditative and serious.  My sermon, “Do Not Be Afraid” comes from two places in the Bible text where angels tell Joseph and then the Shepherds not to be afraid, reminding us that spiritual transformation can feel threatening as one way of living exchanges for another.  But aren’t we all, perhaps, this time of year, ready to make a change?

However you celebrate the December holidays, whichever holidays you celebrate, I hope that you’ll enjoy what your church has to offer.  Celebrate with us.  Be with us.  Worship with us.

I look forward to seeing you at church.