as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, May 17, 2026

This sermon is structured a bit different than most of mine. It is split in two parts. In between them we placed a reading, a hymn, and a guided meditation. I’ve put the second reading in today’s post. If you can find the first reading, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Brahma,” here.

First Reflection

A couple of weeks ago, after our service on the Sufi poet Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, someone in the receiving line told me that they enjoyed our service but that 80% of it was over their head. My response was, “Only 80%? You are doing better than me. I think that about 90% of Rūmī is over my head.”

I was not trying to be glib. I was attempting to be honest. Spiritual practice is hard. As I have shared before, I have been greatly affected by translations of work by the seventeenth century Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō. His best known text is “The Narrow Road to the Deep North.” It recounts a pilgrimage that the master took near the end of his life. He traveled from what is now Tokyo to Northern Japan. The journey was both outward and inward. Bashō recounted in great beauty his rambling. He was honest about his struggles with enlightenment. Often a passage stands in as a symbol for both:

I walked all through that day, ever wishing to return after seeing the strange sights of the far north … I wanted to travel light … but there were always certain things I could not throw away for either practical or sentimental reasons.

Spiritual masters like Bashō and Rūmī are rare. The path they trod… well, as Bashō said, the road to the deep north is narrow. I suspect that this is a key distinction between religious traditions that point us towards what I might call enlightenment and those that direct us towards what I might label salvation.

Enlightenment is that experience of gaining special religious knowledge or insight that is not immediately available to all. As I have shared in the past, one way to describe religion is as that which binds us together. In this sense, enlightenment can be thought of as a deep awareness of how each is connected to all.

I sometimes use the phrase the resurrection of the living to describe the enlightenment experience. It is often cast as the waking up to the world as it is: a place suffused with beauty and complexity, joy and sorrow, hope and desperation. It is sometimes understood as recognition of our human condition. We live on, are part of, a planet where life’s dynamics are bound up in transience, where all shall pass with time, and freshness forever haunts the horizon.

I anticipate that you have had an experience of enlightenment in your life. I suspect that there was some moment in which you had a glimpse into the interconnected nature of being. What was it like? Was there some time in which you felt like the veil had dropped, the cloud that sometimes sits over daily life had been blown aside, and suddenly you were intimately aware of the raw realness of reality?

The ordinary has cracked for me. There have been instances–dancing caught under the sun by the front left speaker, hands submerged in the dirt of the garden or guiding a bean vine as it makes its way to the sky, conversations so excited that it is hard to know where one person’s words end and another’s begin–there have been instances where I felt like I was inextricably connected to and understanding of the all of being. What about you?

Can I get a Hallelujah for whatever experiences of enlightenment you might have had in your life? Hallelujah!

Hallelujah, I have shared with you in the past is a mash up of two Hebrew words. It combines “hallel”–to praise–and “jah”–signifying God. We might interpret it as a way of saying “praise being” or “praise life” or “thanks for the enlightenment.”

Enlightenment is always something we encounter as individuals. Try as I might, I cannot ever really share whatever flashes of enlightenment, glimpses of being, I have with you. You know that the same is true in reverse. It is told that the Buddha instructed his followers on this point when he said, “teaching is merely a vehicle to describe the truth. Don’t mistake it for the truth itself. A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.”

A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon, if enlightenment is the acquisition of special knowledge about the nature of being then salvation is the experience of being held by the universe. Enlightenment is by nature individual. Salvation, well different traditions offer different perspectives. Most forms of Trinitarian Christianity suggest that it is something we gain for ourselves and do not share directly with others. Our Universalist ancestors believed that it was something that we either all encounter together or we do not encounter at all. The abolitionist, Unitarian, and seminal African American writer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper held a universalist theology. She put the matter this way, “We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul.”

We are all bound up together, can I get an Amen?

There are debates as to whether salvation is celestial or terrestrial. Proponents of the celestial position hold that it is something we experience after we are dead. Advocates of the terrestrial perspective proclaim that it is found in this world. Do you have an insight into when or where we are held by the fullness of the universe?

Most contemporary Unitarian Universalists probably lean toward the terrestrial. If, like me, you are outraged by the decisions of what some are starting to call the John Crow Roberts court, if you want to restore the Voting Rights Act and honor the marchers in Selma, if you want to live in a multiracial democracy, if you want everyone to have access to reproductive health care, if you want medical bankruptcies to be a thing of the past, if you want to live in harmony with the Earth and share the good things in life amongst all who need them, if you are committed to biodiversity, clean water, and clean air, then you are probably an advocate for terrestrial salvation.

Can I get a Hallelujah for terrestrial salvation?

Our Universalist ancestors fought for terrestrial salvation because they believed in celestial salvation for all. They understood that if divine love was all encompassing, then they were challenged to be all loving as well. There is a famous story from the nineteenth century Universalist minister Hosea Ballou on this point. For a time in his life he was what used to be called a circuit rider. He traveled from church to church spreading the gospel of universal love. One evening he stopped for the night at a farmhouse. The farmer was distraught. He shared with Ballou that his son was an alcoholic who had done many bad things in his life. He was terrified that his child would be condemned to hell.

Ballou told the farmer that he had a solution to all his problems. “Alright,” he said, “let us lie in wait for your son when he comes stumbling home drunk. We will build a big fire. When we see him, we will catch him and throw him into it. That will teach him never to sin again!”

The farmer was aghast. “That is my son and I love him!” Ballou replied, “If you, a human parent, love your son so much that you would not cast him into the flames, then how can you believe that the divine parent would do so?” God loves everyone, Ballou taught, so we are challenged to do the same. This congregation’s first preacher, Quillen Shinn, put the charge succinctly when he asked, “What are we to live for but to make this world a Paradise, a pleasant, happy place for all to live in?”

To make this world a paradise, can I get another Hallelujah?

Now, you may have noticed that throughout my reflection I have been drawing a wide variety of spiritual masters. We have had Rūmī the Sufi, Bashō the Buddhist, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper the Unitarian, and Hosea Ballou the Universalist. Such theological pluralism is a hallmark of contemporary Unitarian Universalism. It is why in this congregation we encourage the pursuit of both enlightenment and salvation. This willingness to embrace both enlightenment and salvation is connected to one of our great teachings. It has a deep history.

The teaching, I am going to share a bit about it now. The history, we will get to that in in a moment. The teaching is simple. It is summarized in a passage from the ancient Indian text the Rig Veda, “Truth is one, the wise call it by many names.”

Truth is one, the wise call it by many names. Unitarian Universalism offers no single prescription on how to find religious truth. Instead of assigning the preacher the responsibility of uncovering the truth for you, we commit to all being on a religious journey together. This means that it is your task to find the kind spiritual practice that works best for you. Different things will help each of us in our own way. There is no single spirituality or religious practice that will work for everyone.

As a preacher I know this well. People have lots of kinds of responses to my sermons. Some love them and find them spiritually opening. Others cast them as too intellectual. Still others have a mixture of responses. No one preacher is going to work for everyone. You are charged to figure out the spiritual path that helps you find your own narrow way. My job is to point to the moon as best I can.

This perspective, the honoring of multiple kinds of gestures towards and experiences of, enlightenment and salvation is one of the things that makes Unitarian Universalism a dissenting religious tradition. We dissent from the idea of singular religious authority–even, or maybe especially, when it comes in the form of our own ministers–and instead hold that every religious tradition has something to offer us.

Our movement has not always been this way. Our own opening came through our encounters with other religious traditions. In Europe, as I have shared recently, much of that shift was prompted by an engagement with Islam. In the United States it came from ancient Indian texts connected to the traditions we now call Hinduism.

Taking the responsibility to search for enlightenment and salvation onto themselves nineteenth century Unitarians like Ralph Waldo Emerson turned to the first translations of these texts available in English. Discovering works like Rig Veda and the Bhagavad Gita he constructed a view that universal truths lay behind all religious traditions. Some of these truths were better expressed in the language of European theology. Others were best found in the religions he thought present in India. His poem “Brahma” was one attempt to render the enlightened insight he uncovered in ancient Indian works.

If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.

The difficult passage suggests Emerson’s own understanding of enlightenment, that we are all bound up together, “part or particle of God,” as he put it.

In honor of the ways in which there are many spiritual paths available, Nina will now lead us in a candle gazing practice connected to religious teachings from India.

Second Reading: from The Bhagavad Gita, trans. Eknath Easwaran

The Bhagavad Gita is a sacred text from India. Part of the epic poem Mahabharata, it is more than two thousand years old and takes the form of a dialogue. In this passage we observe a conversation between Arjuna, a mortal hero, Krishna, Arjuna’s charioteer and an incarnation of the supreme being Vishnu, and Sanjaya, the Gita’s primary narrator. Their dialogue occurs on the eve of a great battle in which Arjuna will be pitted in lethal combat against many of his friends and family members.

Arjuna [speaks:]

… Surely it would be better to spend my
life begging than to kill these great and worthy souls!
If I killed them, every pleasure I found would be
tainted. I don’t even know which would be better,
for us to conquer them or for them to conquer us…
My will is paralyzed, and I am utterly confused.
Tell me which is the better path for me. Let me be
your disciple. I have fallen at your feet; give me
instruction. What can overcome a sorrow that
saps all my vitality? Even power over men and
gods or the wealth of an empire seem empty.

Sanjaya [narrates:]

This is how Arjuna, the great warrior, spoke
to Sri Krishna. With the words, “O Krishna,
I will not fight,” he fell silent. As they stood
between the two armies, Sri Krishna smiled and
replied to Arjuna, who had sunk in despair.

Krishna [replies:]

You speak sincerely, but your sorrow has no
cause. The wise grieve neither for the living no
for the dead. There has never been a time when
you and I and the kings gathered here have not
existed, nor will there be a time when we will
cease to exist. As the same person inhabits the
body through childhood, youth, and old age, so
too at the time of death he attains another body.
The wise are not deluded by these changes.

…

The impermanent has not reality; reality lies in the
eternal. Those who have seen the boundary between
these two have attained the end of all knowledge.
Realize that which pervades the universe and is
indestructible; no power can affect this unchanging,
imperishable reality. The body is mortal, but
that which dwells in the body is immortal and
immeasurable. Therefore, Arjuna, fight in this battle.
One believes he is the slayer, another believes he
is the slain. Both are ignorant; there is neither slayer
nor slain. You were never born; you will never
die. You have never changed; you can never change.
Unborn, eternal, immutable, immemorial, you do
not die when the body dies. Realizing that which
is indestructible, eternal, unborn, and unchanging,
how can you stay or cause another stay?

Second Reflection

I am neither perpetually enlightened nor consistently saved. Recognizing that I can only point towards the moon, in each service we try to offer you a variety of spiritual practices to help you open yourself more fully to the possibility of enlightenment within and the experience of salvation without. Today, we have had song. It is a collective practice that unites our very beings in breath. We have had silence, the invitation to gaze inside our inner recesses. Nina just shared a candle practice. We have read sacred texts, infused with their deep teachings. You are now hearing my words. Each effort the opportunity for you to consider what helps you the most on your own journey towards enlightenment and salvation.

Your journey, it is ultimately your responsibility to name and uncover the spiritual for yourself. This has been a teaching placed within many of the world’s religious traditions for millennia. It has long been proclaimed from this pulpit, Rev. Scott in particular likes to emphasize it. It is found in the portion of the Bhagavad Gita from which we just read.

In that section of the text, we find the hero of the Gita, Arjuna, in conversation with Krishna, a version of the supreme being Vishnu. Arjuna is undergoing a moral crisis. He is caught up in a civil war between two groups of cousins. Each side is questing for control of an ancient kingdom. Arjuna does not want to participate. He would rather abdicate his responsibilities and lead a quiet life than engage in bloodshed. He says to Krishna, “Surely it would be better to spend my life begging than to kill these great and worthy souls!”

The text, like all ancient scriptures, is complicated. It comes to us in something other than its original language, refracted through all of the experiences of colonialism and imperialism that brought it to us. When reading it we are confronted with the same question we are confronted with in the pursuit of any spiritual practice or religious truth. How much of the practice or truth resides within us and how much comes from the source we seek to connect with?

The text itself appears to gesture towards this dynamic when Krishna says, “One believes he is the slayer, another believes he is the slain. Both are ignorant; there is neither slayer nor slain.” All, he appears to teach, are bound up together. Each singular individual is but a reflection of the infinite whole. “Unborn, eternal, immutable, immemorial, you do / not die when the body dies,” Krishna continues.

If you hear an echo of Emerson in what I just said it is because he reworked the passage, I just read into “Brahma.” The point of both Emerson and the Gita seems to be to gesture to a kind of enlightenment in which we uncover the knowledge that we are each but fleeting expressions of the larger whole. I exist between womb and tomb. Then I do not. But the matter and energy that comprise my body and contain my consciousness, these originated long before me and will continue on until being itself ceases.

Until being itself ceases, in the Gita, in our Unitarian Universalist tradition, amongst the spiritual masters, we often encounter movements towards the reconciliation or interweavings of all the religious teachings. In the Gita it appears that we meet a blending of enlightenment and salvation–both the terrestrial and celestial kinds. Krishna pushes Arjuna to recognize that he is but like a wave cresting on the ocean–a particular expression of the larger whole that comes and then goes. That is enlightenment. But there is also salvation. This enlightened recognition leads to the experience of being held by all. With it comes the need to do one’s duty.

In the Gita that duty is to fight in a war. The struggle is both celestial and terrestrial. In the text the combat is as much metaphorical as it is real. The two sides might be interpreted as different parts of the self. The overall gesture, however, is that the work we do in this world cannot be separated from whatever goal we hope to achieve in the next.

In contemporary parlance, I might say that when we are leading full religious lives there is no distinction between our justice and spiritual work. We oppose the John Crow Roberts court, we seek to restore the Voting Rights Act, because we catch glimpses of enlightenment and hear whispers of salvation. The one cannot be sought without the other. And if you disagree with me or dislike my interpretation of the Gita, Emerson, or our tradition? Well, you are the one responsible for your spiritual journey, not me.

Can I get an Amen to responsibility?

Responsibility, today I have been sharing an interpretation of teachings from spiritual masters and sacred texts. There is a way in which they are always beyond whatever words I might offer or whatever understandings I might share. I can only provide a glimpse of the larger whole. Much of the time, well, I think that 90% of Rumi is over my head. But I keep questing, seeking, searching for my own gleanings, hoping that as I do I might find some better ways to point to the moon. “Truth is one, the wise call it by many names,” may today, tomorrow, and all the days of our lives, we find some of it. As we find it let us share it and in doing so bring a litte more love, justice, and beauty into the world. That it might be so, I invite the congregation to say, Amen.