October 14, 2018
What can we learn from the behavior of the lost?
September 30, 2018
In the Sweet Honey in the Rock song, Ysaye M. Barnwell asks, “Would you harbor me? Would I harbor you?” In this sermon, I talk about what it is to offer safe harbor and sanctuary, particularly to our immigrant and refugee siblings.
September 23, 2018
Just a few weeks into this new settlement, I tried to encourage parishioners to get past fears and to start thinking about changes ahead, even dreams, for First Church Unitarian.
September 9, 2018
Like many Unitarian Universalist congregations, First Church Unitarian in Littleton has a Water Ceremony (sometimes called Water Communion) for its ingathering, homecoming Sunday. This was the all-ages reflection that I delivered that day, my first Sunday leading worship as the settled minister of FCU, September 9, 2018.
September 1, 2018
I haven’t preached this at First Church Unitarian in Littleton… But this is the sermon your search team heard me preach back when I was a pre-candidate! Follen Community Church in Lexington recorded it when I was there on February 18, 2018, so here it is for the rest of you to watch if you like. And seeing as it’s your big chance to learn the meaning of life, you probably want to watch, right?
May 6, 2018
Help, Thanks, Wow—The Three Essential Prayers
April 1, 2018
The Easter story is being told in countless thousands of Christian congregations today. As varied the content of the Sunday services may be from one Christian congregation to the next over the course of a year, they are all on the same page today.
March 25, 2018
Culturally and politically speaking, what is generally referred to as “The Sixties” ran from, I’d say, late 1963 with the Martin Luther King March on Washington and the Kennedy assassination, and ended in the mid-70s with the end of the Vietnam War and the whole Watergate episode. However you frame it, it was a very tumultuous time in our nation’s history; and its legacy and meaning continue to be debated.
March 18, 2018
The spiritual journey is about seeking—and occasionally finding—a sacred or holy or divine dimension to life that resides within this natural world we inhabit.
March 4, 2018
What I want to do this morning is to share with you some of the discussions I’ve been having with prospective ministers for FCU, and tie those discussions to the Stewardship Campaign that is now underway for your 2018-19 church year.
February 25, 2018
My opening story has to do with how a major episode of self-doubt on my part proved to be a pivotal moment in my life.
February 4, 2018
Sometimes when the bottom falls out of life we are set free. We attain enlightenment, or an enlightenment of sorts, so perspective, some clarity, some sense of reality, some sense of dealing with things as they are.
January 28, 2018
One of our great national paradoxes is that practically every movement in this country to achieve greater levels of social justice, equity, and equality have been, to one degree or another, religiously inspired and driven. And at the same time practically every effort to oppose, subvert, or undermine these movements has also been religiously inspired and driven.
January 21, 2018
I think the message […] is that beyond ritual, beyond the practices or the contents of any one faith—meaningful as these things are to so many people—it is ultimately our stories that save us.
January 14, 2018
It will be 50 years ago come this April, but the memory is vivid as ever. I was a 22 year old seminarian in Rochester, New York and was doing my field education at a large, liberally oriented American Baptist church in a Rochester suburb. Just as I was going into a meeting there on the evening of April 4, 1968 someone said they’d heard on the news that Martin Luther King had been shot.
January 7, 2018
A few weeks ago, I attended a Memorial Service for a woman named Nori. She was about 10 years my junior and had died from pancreatic cancer. Nori discovered Unitarian Universalism by way of the Nashua UU Church in the early years of my ministry there, and very quickly became involved in the life of the congregation. I felt honored to be her minister.
December 24, 2017
As for the Bible’s stories, like every story their truth depends upon their listeners.
December 10, 2017
While we do not know who Jesus really was, this does not mean he was made up out of thin air. He is not a complete invention or fabrication. What the New Testament gospels and letters give us is an interpretation of a man who will always remain hidden behind a veil of history, never to be fully revealed.
December 3, 2017
What I want to share with you this morning is the conversation I like to have with anyone who for any number of reasons is trying to make some sense out of any idea of God; as, I will admit, I’ve been doing for much of my life with greater and lesser degrees of success.
November 26, 2017
When one looks at the many and varied stories on how the many and varied religions of the world came into existence, more often than not there’s a martyr in there somewhere. And yes, we Unitarians do have our own martyr in the person of a one Michael Servetus.
November 19, 2017
Annie Dillard’s book “A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” is an account of time she spent living in a rural area outside of Roanoke, Virginia in the early 1970s. Here’s how she describes her home of that time: “I live by a creek, Tinker Creek, in a valley in Virginia’s Blue Ridge. I think of (my) house clamped to the side of Tinker Creek as an anchor-hold. It holds me at anchor to the rock bottom of the creek itself and keeps me steadied in the current…It’s a good place to live; there’s a lot to think about.”
November 5, 2017
Mr. Alan Weisman came out with his book “The World Without Us” some ten years ago. In it Mr. Weisman uses a very fanciful premise to play out some very factual, and scientifically based, scenarios.
October 29, 2017
The memento I brought for the service today is an old high school yearbook, published in 1927. Among the senior class pictures is one of an attractive young woman known as “Lottie.” I never even knew she had that name until I discovered the book after she’d died, and I was helping clean out the house in which she’d lived for much of her life.
October 15, 2017
Today I want to bring this matter of class closer to home. Home in this case being our Unitarian Universalist movement, and this congregation as a part of that movement—our UU Association. I’ll be drawing in part on a report that came out last summer, just prior to our UU General Assembly, by our Association’s Commission of Appraisal titled Class Action: The Struggle with Class in Unitarian Universalism. And I’ll be throwing in some of my own stuff as well.
October 1, 2017
“Where is our Holy Church? Where race and class unite.” When these lines appear in our hymnal there’s a question mark after the words “Holy Church.” “Where race and class unite…” is offered as a response to the question. Perhaps that question mark is misplaced. Or maybe those words should be offered as a vision or goal we’ve not yet reached but still aspire to—be it in our UU congregations or in society at large. It’s not an easy topic, but one we can ill afford to ignore on either level.
September 17, 2017
When I offered my “Kick Off the Year” sermon from this pulpit one year ago this Sunday I assumed I was leading into my final year with you. I’d say there’s an object lesson there on not relying too heavily on one’s assumptions. Sometimes they can fool you.
June 11, 2017
“I have learned that the read church can be defined as our most intimate relationships: How we smile and trust each other; How we talk and touch each other; How we share and protect each other; How we welcome new friends and forgive old enemies; How we love each other—in all the myriad ways that love can be expressed. That is the church.” — Rev David Rankin
June 4, 2017
“This is the highest activity of your mind and heart, this Oneness…to see all the relations and the connections between all objects, forces, peoples, and creatures…This is why all great religions preach the central idea of Oneness.” — Woodie Guthrie
May 28, 2017
“…the true measure of our lives is about how we touch and guide and nurture the lives of others as we are given opportunity to do so. “
May 14, 2017
What these two women [Julie Ward Howe and Anna Jarvis]—from widely differing stations in life—had in common, then, was a vision and a desire for a reconciled human family. This is the vision we should all be striving towards in whatever great or small ways we can, using whatever means and resources are available to us.
April 16, 2017
…when it comes to the rhythms of our lives, in all their great glory and in all their deep tragedy, we are the ones who must be agents of resurrection. We are the ones who still have to reawaken when our bars of the spirit are lifted. We are the ones who have to do the shaping in order that we may fulfill the promises of our own lives.
April 9, 2017
I do believe in resurrection, of a sort. I believe as do most Christians and non-Christians alike in keeping alive the Jewish Galilean prophet’s subversive wisdom. While I no longer adhere to the doctrines that have come to make up the religion about Jesus–doctrines he never promulgated himself–I find much that is worthy in the religion of Jesus. And I’m grateful for the role that our Unitarian and Universalist forebears played in making that distinction.
April 2, 2017
I will say now that we—individually, as part of citizen action groups, as members of this congregation—seek and act in ways to be a part of the positive and uplifting piece of our immigration narrative.
March 26, 2017
A covenant, within the context of ministry, is a promise the minister and the congregation make to one another for as long as they each and all wish to maintain it. Without getting chapter and verse about it here, I’ll say it is a covenant in which the minister and the congregation pledge to one another to bring together their resources, their time, skills, energy, knowledge, love, compassion, and care in order that real ministry can happen. It is more than a contractual agreement, that is to say. It is a pledge to walk together towards the ongoing fulfillment of a commonly shared mission and vision.
March 12, 2017
… we are then called to renewal and to recommitment to be persons of faith in the best sense of the term; the faith that we can be agents of healing and reconciliation and transformation in the broken places of life.
March 5, 2017
[Vonnegut] did not usually make his God references in a dismissive or cynical way, although cynicism is part of his literary stock in trade. He made them instead in the more […] paradoxical way of someone who is honestly searching for something that he thinks isn’t there but who believes the search is worth the effort anyway.
February 19, 2017
I think this is what ultimately keeps evil—for all the horror it can inflict—from having the final word. It is not about some cosmic battle between supernatural forces and their human agents; rather it is about people, often plain and simple people, who do the right thing at the right time; people who can still see the essential humanity in the eyes, faces, and hearts of their fellow human beings whose humanity is being denied or diminished, and respond accordingly.
February 12, 2017
The question we religious liberals need to be exploring is what kind of a vision to we have to offer those in that culture in crisis? They may well not be ready to hear or respond to anything from us now, just as my father was not ready to hear the world view I was coming to, but that doesn’t remove the question from us.
February 5, 2017
Spiritude. It’s a trusting attitude towards a life guided by the spirit, or spirits, one calls on. Call that spirit what you will: The human spirit, the life spirit, the spirit of the universe, the spirit of God–whatever feels the most authentic to you.
January 29, 2017
… for those of us who seek to stand on the side of love, for those of us who seek to be agent of that moral arc of the universe bending towards justice, the road ahead is anything but a simple highway. It will be a terribly difficult road at times, as has been well demonstrated in just this past week. The way in which we travel in the days ahead will determine whether were as a society are headed for yet another dawn in the life of our nation, or for the dark of night. I came away from last weekend hopeful that we will choose to work towards yet another dawn rather than surrender to the forces of the dark of night.
January 15, 2017
The content of your faith, or my faith, need not be the same as was Dr. King’s. But bear in mind that as we meet the challenges, and respond to the calls to action, that surely will lie before us, that whatever our skills, abilities, and energies may be, there will be times when we will experience our human vulnerabilities and human limitations and perhaps our own times of self-doubt and wondering.
January 8, 2017
Control of one’s life is a hope we want to see realized up to a point, but only up to a point; because it is a willingness to let go and be vulnerable to such things as hurt and fear and sadness and loss which, ironically enough, makes genuine human relationships possible.