MONDAYS WITH MAX
The Bicentennial Planning Team is pleased to announce Mondays with Max, a time to sit back and listen to Max reading from his book, Leaning Against the Wind. During the upcoming year we will be posting recorded sermons starting on Monday, January 27. Look for another new sermon every three weeks. For those of us who knew Max, hearing his voice will trigger many great memories. For those who are new to the church but have heard many Max stories, this is a great opportunity to hear the uncanny eye and ear of an artist and the wise heart of a lifelong pilgrim. With lyrical prose, impudent puns, and startingly original perspectives, Max demonstrated his skill in communicating from the pulpit.
Of Love and Hands and Death and Love
From Fossils to a Faith
An Inclination to Fall
Ragged Dick and Little Orphant Annie Never Picked Blackberries
A Revelation of Plucked Chickens
My Theology in Crisis
Mary’s Gone Away
ABOUT MAX COOTS
Max Coots, minister of this church for 34 years, was born in Canisteo, New York, in l927. He grew up in Waverly, spent summers on his grandparents’ farm (a formative experience he referred to often), and studied art at Waverly High School. After a stint in the Navy, he attended art school before going to Elmira College and Bucknell University, from which he graduated in 1950. He received a master’s degree in religious education from Columbia University and a Master of Divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary.
During his years at seminary, Max served as the Assistant Minister at the Universalist Church of the Divine Paternity in New York City where he was ordained a universalist minister in 1953. After four years as minister of the First Universalist Church in Cortland, in l958 he became minister of the Canton Universalist Church (which became the Unitarian Universalist Church at the time of the denominational merger in 1961). He served until his retirement in 1992. He was a poetic preacher, wise counselor, inveterate punster, and general church handyman. A visitor to the church once mistook him for the church custodian and was surprised to find him in the pulpit when she attended services the next Sunday
Max adopted Canton and the North Country as his own. He was a community activist, helping spark the creation of the St. Lawrence County Chapter of NYSARC, the Church and Community Program, and North Country Freedom Homes. He aided those concerned with nuclear warfare, penal reform, civil rights, alcoholism, family planning, and Vietnam and Iraq war resistance.
In retirement, Max returned to his early love of the arts and took up sculpting. His sculptures were full of whimsy, puns, and fanciful creatures, and always brought smiles to viewers’ faces. Max enjoyed woodworking and had a workshop in his barn on State Street. He also loved gardening and for more than 50 years raised vegetables in plots near his home. He also wrote three books: Seasons of the Self in 1971, View from a Tree in 1989, and Leaning Against the Wind: A Selection of Sermons in 1992. All are available in the Coots Library.
ABOUT LEANING AGAINST THE WIND
From the forward by Alfred Romer – Here is a collection of the sermons which Mac Coots preached in the Unitarian Universalist Church of Canton, New York, during his thirty-four years that he occupied the pulpit. It would be more respectful of course to refer to him as the Reverend Dr. Max Alden Coots, but no one ever does. We are too fond of him for that. He has been Max Coots to the world, Max to his congregation, and we have printed these sermons out of our affection for him. What we offer is only a sample, of course. Sundays come around once a week and there are a great many weeks in thirty-four years. Enjoy these sermons for their excellence, then. Hear them, say them even, and if occasionally one seems to lack polish, reflect on the tyranny of the clock and the calendar and keep on reading.