The sermon was multi-themed Part I of a discussion of baptism and the nature of sacraments. He promises to tie everything together in Part II next week. I dunno. It could be a whole series.
In the United Methodist church we have two sacraments, baptism and communion. Other Christian churches have more. Pastor Steve talked about seeing the sacred in life, such as the birth of a child, a death, the splendor of creation, and seeing life moment by moment as sacred. He didn't mention sex as a sacrament, which is standard throughout main line Christianity, even though sex is so intimate and fundamental to humans. It's rarely been discussed in my lifetime of going to church; I can't remember sexual intimacy being mentioned ever from the pulpit.
In Sacred Pleasure by Riane Eisler (1995), the author considers the shift of religion in the transition from what she calls partnership cultures to domination cultures, particularly marked in the attitude toward sex and the status of women. Partnership cultures tended to worship the Great Mother and sacramentalize sex, while domination cultures suppressed women in the shift to patriarchy and gods made in men's image.
Pastor Steve, as I said, did not get into this. He described the Jewish tradition as worshiping a transcendent God, the Creator beyond human understanding, as distinct from other cultures which he said worshiped the creation, in the form of the moon, the sun, the earth, fire. I'm not sure that's a right understanding of those other religions--surely there was a sense that the creations were representations of the transcendent. I remember being told as a child that Catholics worship idols, evidenced by the statues in Catholic churches. That seems to me a similar misinterpretation.
When I was in seminary in 1975 we discussed God the Mother and God the Father, which saw the movement to more inclusive language in protestant churches. One of my professors was Rosemary Radford Reuther. We studied Mary Daly's approach to reclaiming the feminine for Christians. Feminist theologians still struggle to make sense of the patriarchal worldview and misogyny present in the Judeo-Christian tradition. (Misogyny is a high-falutin' and academic term for hatred of women which glosses over the down and dirty daily abuse of women.) Some think it is an unfair label for a religion based on the teachings of love and forgiveness of Jesus, but you have to take the cultural application into account and be responsible for it, if you follow the Christ, the transcendent become human.