As someone who was raised Unitaran Universalist but has both Jewish and Protestant ancestors I have always been interested in the intersections between Unitarianism (and now Unitarian Universalism) and various variants of Judaism. While researching something else entirely today I stumbled across a reference to The First American Congress of Liberal Religious Societies. The Congress met at Sinai Temple in Chicago and represented Unitarian, Universalist, Reform Jewish and Ethical Culture congregations. The proceedings of the meeting are available on-line and maybe sometime I’ll get around to reading them. This is also not the first time I’ve stumbled across interchanges between Reform Jews and Unitarians. While researching the curriculum I am writing as part of Tapestry of Faith last year I discovered a whole series of speeches by Rabbis given at the May Meetings of the AUA in the 1900s and 1910s. There’s a great essay waiting to be written by someone on the interchange between Unitarianism and Judaism out there…

Preached at the Unitarian Universalist Society of Cleveland, October 25, 2009

Over the next decades Greater Cleveland will survive and thrive or struggle and decline as a single entity. Cleveland Heights, Beachwood, Shaker Heights, Lakewood, Lorain, the city of Cleveland itself or any other community in the region will rise or fall with the region as a whole. Our future is, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., caught up in "an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny." This point was brought home to me this past summer when my family and I were in Paris. 

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Four recent and not so recent sermons are now on-line:

Standing on the Side of Love (October 4, 2009)
The Bounty of the Earth (March 22, 2009)
In Search of Redemption (March 8, 2009)
Generation to Generation (March 1, 2009)

My project of reading the Bible is going a little slower than I hoped. At this point I had planned to be through Judges but today I just finished Leviticus. Outlining the books, even when I am just working writing my first impression outline rather than creating a refined one, seems to take quite a bit longer than I had anticipated. I suspect that this means I might not finish the project of reading the whole Bible by June. If that happens it will be no great tragedy. I will just continue to plug away until I complete both scriptures. With that said, my rough outline follows below.

Leviticus Outline

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This week I put five of my sermons on-line. Over the next few months I should complete put up the backlog of sermons I acquired while our web-site was in transition. Read the new sermons on-line by clicking on the links below:

Here is my rough outline of Exodus. Once I am done with reading the whole of the Bible I might come back and revise these rough outlines. As I read along I learn that somethings that appear as stand alone episodes are really part of larger narratives.

Exodus Outline

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The last two weeks as I was reading Genesis I was struck by the fact that God, or at least people’s experience of God, shifts through the book. I realize that this is in part almost certainly due to the various sources that were redacted to form the final text. But also seems to me that it is part about humanity’s changing relationship with God.

At the beginning of Genesis God appears as the creator (1:1-26). God speaks but God does not speak to humans. Then God creates humanity and addresses human beings directly. In Garden of Eden God is depicted as "moving about in the garden" (3:8) and having conversations with Adam and Eve.

After God drives humanity out of the Garden God continues to speak directly to humanity. It is unclear to me whether or not God appears physically to figures like Cain and Abel but God is described as having "walked with" Noah (6:9). Near the same passage the presence of "divine beings" is also noted as taking wives from the "daughters of men" (6:2).

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I will be posting outlines of the books of the Bible as I complete them. My outlines are interspersed with some very cursory notes. I am using the Jewish Study Bible for my text as I make my way through the Hebrew Bible.

Genesis Outline

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