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| Sunday sermons and copyright notice
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Here you will find sermons delivered at the Unitarian Church of Vancouver. Unless otherwise noted the sermons are from our parish minister, Rev. Dr. Steven Epperson.
Sermons are available in PDF and MP3.
Sermons in PDF are listed chronologically (most recent at the top) in Printer friendly sermons in the right column. You can download these files to your computer to read on your monitor or to print.
To listen to a sermon, left click an MP3 file name in Listen to sermons & special services below.
To save a local copy for future use, right click on the name and choose “Save Target As” or the equivalent in your preferred web browser.
All content is copyright Unitarian Church of Vancouver. Reproduction is permitted provided that both the author and UCV are acknowledged
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| Recent sermon
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Come, Come Whoever You Are
Last July, when Diana and I were in Berlin, we went to a photo exhibit in an old urban villa that had been transformed into a contemporary art gallery. Join with me in your mind’s eye in tour of the exhibit. Enormous black and white photographs of Sufi dancers, or whirling dervishes, by the Turkish artist Mehmet Gunyeli filled the galleries. Two examples of these photos are on the cover of the order of service. What’s missing, or course, is the sheer scale and lustrous quality, the beauty of Gunyeli’s gallery mounted photographs. You’ll have to use your imagination.
Before we proceed further into the gallery, a few words about Sufis. A Sufi is a generic term for a Muslim mystic; a person dedicated to a disciplined path of intense devotion, meditation, and study of the Qur’an and the sayings of the prophet Muhammad. The Sufi believes that behind the apparent separateness of things in the world, there is only one transcendent divine reality. “Whichever way you turn, there is the face of Allah,” it says in the Qur’an. (Sura 2:115) As well, the Sufi believes there is an outward or literal meaning of scripture and Tradition, and inward spiritual meaning and depths; again as it says in the Qur’an: “He is the First and the Last, here is the Outward and the Inward [way]. (57:3) While observing the precepts of the faith, the Sufi seeks out these depths through study, discipleship and spiritual practice.
One of those devotional practices pioneered by a Turkish Sufi tradition called the Mevlevis is a whirling ritual (sama) full of mystic symbolism that can, at times, induce ecstatic states as the whirler pivots on the left foot, while concentrating on the divine. The photos I saw in the exhibit in Berlin were of men performing this dance.
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| Downloading sermons
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To save a local copy for future use, right click on the name and choose “Save Target As” or the equivalent in your preferred web browser. Once you have the file on your computer you can load it onto your MP3 player, or burn a CD if you want to take the sermon with you.
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