as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, September 20, 2026
Thank you for being here. Today is our first effort at a “Bring a Friend Sunday.” We have a good thing going here at First Unitarian Universalist. We want to share it and we are glad you are here.
For those of you who are visiting, thank you. I know that the prospect of going to a strange congregation on a Sunday morning must be somewhat intimidating. Religion has been rendered semi-toxic in our contemporary world. Christian nationalism is on the rise. Many political reactionaries use it as cover for their agenda. This can inspire a desire to run, not walk, away from the nearest church as fast as possible.
Knowing this, I am grateful for the risk you took today. I do not know what your friend did to convince you to come but I am glad they did. First Unitarian Universalist is committed to widening love’s circle. We want to draw more people into our community because we know we are stronger together. As Sofía Betancourt, the President of our Unitarian Universalist Association puts it, “We hold a love greater than we know between and among us, born from all we hold holy.” That love grows when we share it.
There is an old Unitarian Universalist children’s song along these lines that I learned as a child. It comes from the folksinger Malvina Reynolds, whose family were long time members of one of our congregations in Berkeley. You might know it, “Magic Penny.” The chorus partially runs: “Love is something if you give it away, / You end up having more.”
More love is something our world desperately needs. We are inviting our visitors to join us in the daunting, difficult, project of loving the Hell out of the world. We do so convinced that joining with our collective effort will make your life, and our lives, better.
Our community is strong. The members do an excellent job taking care of each other. The congregation has long made a positive impact on the city of Houston. So much so, in fact, that listing all of First Unitarian Universalist’s civic accomplishments would take the rest of our time together. First historically White congregation to desegregate. First non-explicitly LGBTQ church to have an openly gay minister. Founding congregation in the national sanctuary movement. Organizer of the city’s first center for LGBTQ youth. Mother congregation to not only the other area Unitarian Universalist congregations but the Houston Zen Center and a couple of liberal Christian communities. Fierce advocate for voting rights–we registered close to 1,000 people and had more than 40,000 voter contacts in 2024 and we are set to doing it again–the congregation’s catalog of loving acts runs many pages long.
Visitors, you might already know this. The friend who brought you here might have shared such things when they enticed you to come. They might have said something like, “First is a great place. We put love at the center, uplift theological pluralism, and hold that the purpose of religious community is, in nineteenth century parlance, ‘proposing as our great end a growing likeness to’ God.”
Those words come from William Ellery Channing. Probably best known as being the mentor to the Transcendentalist literary luminaries Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, he is an important Unitarian theologian. Our fellowship hall, next to the sanctuary, is named after him. I hope that you will join us there after the service so that we can get to know you a bit better.
If you identify as an atheist or agnostic, do not let the presence of the word God in Channing’s vocabulary scare you. There is an old joke that observes that Unitarian Universalists believe in, at most, one God. And while the situation is somewhat more complicated, it is certainly true that we welcome atheists, agnostics, and humanists into our ranks.
It is possible that the person who invited you this morning falls into one of those categories. They might belong to the groups of people that, historically, my more theistically oriented friends have labeled “infidel.” Infidels are welcome here. Our congregation is non-creedal and contains a range of theological diversity. Liberal Christians, Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, neo-pagans, practitioners of Ifa, First Unitarian Universalist loves and welcomes them all.
This takes me to my second thank you. It is directed to those of you who were brave enough to bring a friend this Sunday. I recognize that it was an act of courage. You said to your friend, “here is something important enough about my life that I want to share it.” You risked rejection.
It is not always easy to invite friends to church. I have struggled with it over the years. Not only do you have to put yourself out there but you have to pray that when you do the service is going to be inspiring, the preacher, at a minimum, unembarrassing, and everyone friendly. You need to hope that your friend finds someone or something other than you to connect with so that maybe, just maybe, they will come back.
And if they do … a secret here is that having friends who are part of your religious community makes both the congregation and the friendship stronger. You get to share something sacred–a commitment to widening love’s circle–together. That changes the way you experience each other. The great philosophers and theologians have long understood this point.
Aristotle not only held that friendship “is most necessary for our life” but believed that it has its greatest power when it is directed towards a shared aspiration. The Jewish theologian Martin Buber argued that it is through “the common relation to the center”–a collective commitment to the highest good–that we come to both know ourselves and develop the most authentic relationships.
I have often found this to be true. I was raised a Unitarian Universalist and to this day many of my closest friends are part of our faith tradition. We are, in Betancourt’s words, “connected to a hope-filled belief in human goodness and capacity for love,” that has shaped our lives. Our shared understanding that human beings do not, necessarily, have to do harm or evil but, in fact, can give ourselves to, “the temptation to do good.”
The temptation to do good, that is how A. Powell Davies, a Unitarian luminary from an earlier generation described our shared mission. The phrase came from an interaction Davies had with some diplomat. He lived in Washington and often found himself in conversation with the political class. During one of his visits with a European in the opening years of the Cold War a man reflected to him, “You know, at every level, people are almost good; they are tempted to be good, but they resist the temptation.”
I suspect that you can summon examples from your life when you gave yourself over to the temptation to do good. Maybe it took the form of a small gesture, like the time you offered your jacket to a shivering child. Maybe it was something larger, like the instance where you took a soul to the polls, started a nonprofit, created a beautiful piece of art, or even saved a life. You know your life better than I but, I know, if you are here with us today, or visiting with us online, then you sometimes tremble with the temptation to do good.
The act of inviting someone to visit First Unitarian Universalist, the decision to visit First Unitarian Universalist, both are instances of giving in to the temptation to do good. I promise you that if you keep coming to First Unitarian Universalist, we will keep tempting you, tempting each other, to do good.
Thank you, again, to those of you who offered and those of you who gave into that temptation this morning. If we humans are to survive it will be as much from such humble acts as it will be any grand gestures.
Under the weight of destruction,
we will need the strong shelter
of forgiveness and the deeper wells
that give the sweet water of welcome:
“We have a place for you.”
We have a place for you; Sean Parker Dennison’s words are why we do what we do. We believe that we have a place for you, whomever you are, whomever you love, we have a place for you.
We have a place for you and, if you join with us, I know that there is a chance that we can tempt more people to the good together. That leaves me grateful for the friendships that brought those of you who are visiting us this morning.
My gratitude is a reminder that as Unitarian Universalists one of the spiritual paths available to us is gratitude. Galen Guengerich, a theologian affiliated with our movement, has observed “gratitude … [is] our gateway to meaning.” Being grateful reminds to whom and to what we owe our existence. This in turn empowers us to feel more connected to the beautiful world that surrounds.
My gratitude today helps me recollect that I owe a part of my existence to the members and friends of this congregation. Without them I would not be able to I would not be able to serve and celebrate humanity in the ways I do. Without them, without you, I would not be the person I am. Think for a moment, about who and what, you are grateful.
Perhaps, if you came with a friend, it is for a friend. Perhaps, if you came on your own, it is for this space, this time we have together. There many are things to be grateful for, I believe, in each human life.
In the name of the sun and its mirrors
and the day that embraces it
and the cloud veils drawn over it
and the uttermost night
and the male and the female
and the plants bursting with seed
and the crowning seasons
of the firefly and the apple,
I will honor all life–
wherever and in whatever form
it may dwell—on Earth my home,
and in the mansions of the stars.
That is how the poet Diane Ackerman expresses her gratitude, her connection to the holy, in a poem.
I could offer you further paeans to gratitude. Instead, let me confess that what I have been doing is modeling the Unitarian practice that the purpose of religious community is to help us become our best selves. We do this by cultivating the habits–the warmth of welcome, the commitment to gratitude–that enable us to develop more fully into who we aspire to be. This sometimes has been called “salvation by character,” the understanding that what we do is more important that what we believe.
It is a view that has been part of our tradition for a long time. My invocation of tradition, for those of you who are visiting, might have you asking, “What is Unitarian Universalism, anyway?”
Unitarian Universalists often encounter this query. The evangelists amongst us, the ones who try to get us to share our good news, have encouraged us to develop elevator speeches. The phrase comes from the idea that we should be able to share something about the nature of our faith in the amount of time we might have with a stranger on an elevator.
Bill Sinkford, a former president of our religious association, has one that runs, “The Unitarian side of our family tree tells us that there is only one God, one Spirit of Life, one Power of Love. The Universalist side tells us that God is a loving God, condemning none of us, and valuing the spark of divinity that is in every human being. So Unitarian Universalism stands for one God, no one left behind.”
One God, no one left behind. Jonalu Johnstone, another of my colleagues, says, “we gather in community to support our individual spiritual journeys. We trust that openness to one another’s experiences will enhance our understanding of our own links with the divine, with our history, and with one another.”
My guess is that you brought a friend this morning you made a similar statement. And if you a friend that has been brought, well you probably heard one. I am terrible at making elevator speeches. I am too loquacious to pack everything I want to say within the 30 seconds of an elevator drop. Ever the preacher, I have the bad habit, as one of my Baptist friends says, of taking ten minutes just to clear my throat.
But if I did have a elevator speech it would revolve around the temptation to do good and widening love’s circle. It would also invoke the reality, as Sinkford does, that Unitarian Universalism is not a new-fangled religious tradition but a rather ancient one. First Unitarian Universalist has been in Houston for more than a century. In New England we have congregations that are over four hundred years old. In Europe there are some that are approaching five hundred. But that, well, that moves us towards the ten minutes of throat clearing.
Hemming and hawing is not where I want to land. So far, I have been sharing largely from the core of Unitarian heritage and its understanding that what we do shapes who we are. But Unitarian Universalism, as our really long name implies, has another heritage to lean into as well. It comes from the claim that God loves everyone without exception. God loves you, and you, and you, and me, and the crankiness of our friends, the most difficult of our family members, the cat when he’s bad and steals a piece of tuna from the counter, and the dog when she soils the rug, God loves us unconditionally, the Universalists believed.
As a parent, I have always found this perspective helpful. It has, of course, helped me to stifle my urge to throttle children when they have acted out, disappointed me, or just proven that they are their own people. If the Universalist God is supposed to love everyone despite their flaws, then I should do my best, at the very least, to love the kids even when they have gotten on my very last nerve. But it has also given me a useful tool in helping them navigate the world.
If you have been around Texas for a while then you have probably encountered the kind of Christians who strongly believe in Hell. You might have even experienced them trying to share their belief in fire and brimstone with you in their own efforts to bring a friend to church.
I certainly have. And so have my kids. When my stepdaughter Emma was little, she was into ice skating. One day, when we moved to a new town, she met a new friend at the rink. Immediately like two peas in a pod, Emma’s new friend soon invited her over to play.
Things went well at first. They had a grand time—hide-and-go seek, tag. Then Emma’s new friend decided she needed to convert her. She said something to her like, “I wish you would get baptized and become a Christian. If you did then we could play in Heaven forever. But if you are not a Christian when you die you will go to Hell. Then there will be nothing but you and bugs forever. The bugs will eat you.” I think that the girls were about nine at the time. Bugs were about the scariest thing they could imagine.
The parental response was to share that God did not send people to Hell. There was nothing to be afraid, she was told. God is love. No need to be terrified of bugs.
It seemed to work. Steadied with the knowledge that our Universalist ancestors conceived of the divine as an eternal loving force, it was possible to share that everyone, when they die, will be reunited with the divine.
The Universalists made biblical arguments for universal salvation. They cited texts like 1 John 4:16 that partially reads, “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”
God is love. More can be said. There is a statement to be made about how the insight that our religious ancestors’ biblically rooted insight that there is no Hell–the Inferno does not appear in the scripture–inspired them to embrace theological pluralism. All religions, they came to believe, have something to offer us and the world in the quest of character development. It is an important insight to affirm at a time when members of one political party in Texas are targeting religious minorities as unamerican and claiming that they represent a threat to the country.
There is also an invitation to be issued to sign the Gaza Children’s Shroud after the second service. It will eventually contain the names of 20,000 Palestinian children who have been killed since October 7, 2023. Its presence with us today an opportunity to testify to the universal love of the divine, or if you prefer the inherent worth of all human beings, in an act of commemoration.
But, mostly, I want to close by thanking those of you who extended to a friend a loving invitation to join with our community this morning. I also want to thank those of you who accepted the invitation. Your presence among us has helped us to widen love’s circle. The gift that is you is a reminder that the world will be saved, if it will be saved, from the devastations that haunt us all by small gestures. One at a time, person after person, we can encourage each other to give into the temptation to do good.
That it might be so, I invite the congregation to say Amen.
