Podcasts of Sermons from Foothills Unitarian Church. Rev. Gretchen Haley, Senior Minister & Rev. Sean Neil-Barron, Assistant Minister
Rev. Gretchen preaches about how Tough Love Saves Us All as we work for liberation and to dismantle racism. She explains Beloved Community and guides us in exploring how courageous love requires us to act with a systemic and collective lens.
Rev. Sean discusses boundaries as how we live in the messy middle between dependence and independence. He explores how boundaries are a practice to give structure to how we relate to one another and how boundaries are an act of compassion.
Rev. Gretchen explores staying put with those you love during the hard parts of life. She teaches that in promising to love someone in "good times and bad" we are not merely engaging with a distant and theoretical idea. We are promising to stay put through pain. A love that doesn't turn away when times get painful requires a soft and supple heart.
Rev. Gretchen draws on the story of Job to illustrate how bearing witness to another without fixing or minimizing is an act of courageous love.
Rev. Gretchen explores what we really mean when we say "love." She invites us to engage with the concept of love more deeply because "when we understand love not just as a word, but as an experience and a commitment, as a way of orienting our lives and the source of our hope, as a vision for the world as it could be, it will make all the difference. We will make all the difference in all the smallest corners of our lives, and across the whole of life itself."
Rev. Sean grounds us in the core tenant of our Unitarian Universalist faith that “we are not isolated individuals but rather an interdependent ecosystem of beings.” He discusses the role of ‘the crowd’ in the context of the Capitol Hill riots last week and within the framework of social psychology research.
