Like a deer crying for water,
my soul cries for You, O God;
my soul thirsts for God, the living God;
O when will I come to appear before God!
My tears have been my food day and night;
I am ever taunted with, “Where is your God?”
Today, I want to talk with you about a difficult subject: death. Today, I want to talk with you about a glorious subject: life. In short, I want to talk with you about religion. The Unitarian Universalist theologian Forrest Church claimed, “religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die.” These days of pandemic make death an almost unavoidable subject. Which...
Kamala Harris’s selection as the Democratic Party’s Vice Presidential candidate is historic. She is the first woman of color to be nominated for the position. In today’s New York Times, the columnist Frank Bruni captured much of the excitement about Harris claiming, “She represents an America that’s evolving, fitfully, toward equal opportunity and equal justice.” In the same column, Bruni also...
This week, I must confess, I have been feeling more than a little tearful. It has been 154 days since I last preached a sermon to you in person. And I have been missing you. And I have been missing my life from the before times. And my family--other than my son this has been the longest I have gone without seeing any of them. And I have found myself struggling to live in the here and now.
Since the start of the pandemic, the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston has been posting a weekly ministers’ forum online. In this week’s episode I talk with Dan McKanan, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer at Harvard Divinity School, about the parallel histories of Harvard Divinity School and the Unitarian Universalist Association.
This past Friday the Washington Post journalist Robert Samuels put out a simple eleven-word tweet. Over an image of the Post, he wrote, “Have mercy. Every story in this front page made m[e] gasp.” The articles offered a litany of woes: “Trump suggests delaying election;” “U.S. economy contracts at record rate;” “Mail backlog raises fears of delays in ballot delivery;” “DHS gathers ‘intelligence’...
Welcome back to my site! I am excited to have it back up! It is still a bit under construction and I have a lot of content (specifically sermons) to add that I have created (or more accurately preached?) since the site was being worked on. This new site is a work in progress and I am still figuring out how to add audio, video, and images to go along with the text. One feature I am particularly...
as preached for the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston’s online worship service, April 26, 2020 The theme of today’s service is renewal and regeneration. And in this sermon I invite us to consider the most pressing question immediately before us: What comes next? The Governor of Texas has begun the process of re-opening the state. He has appointed a task force to get non...
The question is one that a lot of religious people and leaders are asking themselves right now. The global health pandemic means that responsible congregations throughout the world have shuttered their doors to physical services for the foreseeable future. Some are continuing to use their sanctuaries to film online services, others are producing online services directly from the homes of clergy...
as preached online for the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, April 12, 2020 You might remember that our theme for worship for April is renewal. This is our Easter service. I am scheduled to be talking with you about renewal and rebirth. And in this sermon, we are going to be focusing on something that might be called the resurrection of the living. The inspiration for it comes from...