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Getting Better at Love
“Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”[1]—Pete Seeger’s famous question. Actually, if I have the story right, he got the flower question, and the questions about the girls picking them, and the men going...
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Agape Church = Ally Church
Denmark’s King Christian X defied the Nazis and helped save the Danish Jews during World War II In his review of Bo Lidegaard’s Countrymen, a recent history of how the Danish people helped the Danish...
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Surrender: In Search of the Present Moment
“Winds be still. Storm clouds pass and silence come.”[1] This is not the first time I’ve started a sermon with a quote from this particular hymn. It’s not one of those hymns I learned as a child; but...
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Beloved (Multigenerational) Community
A UU Child Dedication In her December 2013 blog post, “The Power of Our Child Dedication Some Years Later,” Kim Paquette[1] says: “The beloved members of our [congregation] had been there for my...
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Sometimes We Fight (“Drug Free” in America)
Rebecca Parker urges us to “bless the world.”[1] In her 2006 book, Blessing the World: What Can Save Us Now, She tells the story of a time when she and a friend were walking with one of her mentors,...
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For What the Soul Hungers
“Reconciliation” by Josefina de Vasconcellos “Break not the circle of enabling love, where people grow forgiven and forgiving; break not the circle, make it wider still, till it includes, embraces...
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Beyond the Last Ridge: Reflections on Devotion
“I always thought I’d have little girls / and be a good mom, be the mother / I never had, teach them how to make pies / and how to get past wanting to quit, show them / the place in our minds beyond...
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Fatherhood in Flux
The Rev. Kathleen McTigue is right: the realities of parenting do not mesh well with the features of the classic spiritual journey—“the solitary pilgrimage, the focused weeks of prayer or meditation,...
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It’s All Poetry
In May I heard a report on the news of a suicide bombing somewhere, maybe Iraq, an enormous number of bystanders killed and wounded, a witness explaining to a reporter through a translator that the...
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Taking Your Faith to Work
I’m calling this sermon “Taking Your Faith to Work,” though it’s a misleading title because there are so many different understandings of what it means to have faith and what it might mean to take it...
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A Prayer for Welcoming Families of All Kinds
We are a gentle, angry people. Angry that still so many are left out, left behind, shoved aside, ignored, isolated, alienated, made invisible, exploited, oppressed, incarcerated, forgotten. And we are...
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A Dream in the Heart
People “cannot continue long to live if the dream in the heart has perished. It is then that they stop hoping, stop looking, and the last embers of their anticipations fade away”[1]—a potent...
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#BlackLivesMatter — a 2015 MLK Sermon
Tomorrow the nation pauses for its annual observation of the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. It will also be day 368 in Houston, TX, day 355 in Southfield, MI, day 337 in Bastrop, TX, day...
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#BlackLivesMatter
[This sermon was delivered at the Unitarian Society of New Haven in Hamden, CT on March 15, 2015. It is a revision of my January 18th, 2015 sermon of the same title.] On the Edmund Pettus Bridge, March...
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On Being/Becoming Generous People
Our ministry theme for March is generosity. We choose this theme for this time of year quite intentionally. March is the month and today is the day we officially launch our annual appeal during which...
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From Radical Transcendence to Radical Immanence
Because I’m in the middle of teaching our Building Your Own Theology class and inviting the participants to look deeply into themselves and their experiences in an effort to name what they believe; and...
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Call to Worship (for the installation of the Revs. Cathy and Heather Rion Starr)
Because the spirit says do, let us worship together! Because the spirit says sing, let us worship together! Because the spirit says dance, laugh, shout, let us worship together! Because the spirit says...
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More Dispatches from the Culture War, 2015
I’m wrestling this morning with two conflicting impulses in me. They arise in response to the American culture war, in response to deep divisions in the country over sexual orientation, gender...
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Comments at the May 14, 2015 Press Conference for SB 1044
These are my comments from the May 14, 2015 faith leaders’ press conference in support of SB 1044, “An Act Concerning the Recoupment of State Costs Attributable to Low Wage Employers.” Photo by...
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On Ancestors, Slavery, and Religious Dissent
“Heroes of faith in every age, far seeing, self-denying, wrought an increasing heritage, monarch and creed defying. Faith of the free!”[1]—words from 20th-century Unitarian minister Vincent Silliman. I...
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