as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, April 5, 2026
I am not sure about you, but I am anxious. I do not think of myself as an obsessive worrier by nature but, at some point, throughout the day, I find myself concerned about my kids, the church, my parents, the state of the economy and the rising price of, well, just everything, my cholesterol, when the next storm is coming, the future of electronic dance music, the intellectual situation, the awful, unnecessary war of choice in Iran, the climate crisis, and, well, even my cats.
I worry about Biscuit when he bolts outside before I can get the door shut. Will he do something stupid and try to cross a busy street? Overestimate his abilities and get into a fight with one of the neighborhood strays? Remember how to find his way back home?
I worry about Bagel when he gets up on the neighbor’s roof and engages in death defying acrobatic feats. Preserve him from coming crashing down under the full weight of gravity when he jumps across a gap that’s how wide? I do not think I can look.
I am anxious. I worry. No more, I suspect, than most of you. We live in an unsettled time. On Saturday, Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize winning economist, said in a post reflecting on our situation, quite simply, “I’m scared.”
I am scared. In my ministerial role, I find myself accompanying you as you confront the world’s difficulties, often with extraordinary bravery. Almost every week, there are members who share that they are struggling: with unemployment, with medical conditions, with relationships, with geopolitics, and with family dynamics.
If you are here with us today, there is a good chance that you have joined us seeking reassurance. In my experience, people enter our sanctuary looking for stability, refuge, from the battering winds of the world. In my conversations with you, it is not unusual to hear some variation of the sentiments that the poet Audre Lorde put so lyrically:
... when the sun rises we are afraid it might not remain when the sun sets we are afraid it might not rise in the morning when our stomachs are full we are afraid of indigestion when are stomachs are empty we are afraid we may never eat again when we are loved we are afraid love will vanish
We are afraid love will vanish. There is a desire–in the midst of all the anxiety and worry–to find a place where we can hear some variation of the famous words by the fourteenth century mystic Julian of Norwich. She wrote that despite “all of this pain … all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner [of] thing shall be well.”
All shall be well, we are processing a sudden staff departure. It has left us without the ability to give proper goodbyes or have a sense of closure. I imagine that it has left you feeling a number of different ways: sad, confused, concerned, unsettled, maybe even angry or afraid. I have certainly felt a variety of emotions in the last week and a half. The stability that I crave in this community was, at the least, temporarily disrupted.
I anticipate that it might be harder for those of you with children. I know, that with the governor and the school superintendent actively dismantling the Houston Independent School District, many kids are experiencing the difficulty of rapid teacher turnover. To have a sudden change in the congregation’s religious exploration program on top of that can be upsetting.
All shall be well, amid the confusion of the world there are some traditions that will promise you just that. I cannot. My lack of confidence in a theological statement like “all shall be well” is one of the reasons why I have never been a Trinitarian Christian. It has something to do with why, year after year, I struggle to find the right Easter message.
I am unable to offer you the typical one. I am sure you recall its outline. Jesus is crucified on Friday. He lies silent in the tomb on Saturday. He rises, resurrected, on Sunday.
Those who celebrate the canonical texts in the Christian New Testament have never quite agreed upon the significance or nature of that resurrection. There is the account in the Gospel of Matthew. It concludes with Jesus telling his followers, “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” And there is the one in the Gospel of Luke. It terminates with the words, “he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.”
I think that the end of the Gospel of Mark is more honest. It is the earlier text, which makes it less likely to have been embellished. In it, after encountering “a young man, dressed in a white robe” in the tomb, rather than Jesus’s body, the text tells us that his friends, “went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
They were afraid. Two things here. First, on Easter there is not enough discussion about the lives of Jesus and his followers. The emphasis is on the resurrection, not the life that came before the crucifixion. Second, there is rarely sufficient conversation about where the resurrection narrative came from and how it did something to calm the fears of those who encountered it.
Jesus and his followers were revolutionaries. I admit that I am conceding a rather dubious point. I am casting Jesus as a historical figure rather than as a composite character compiled from the wandering, radical, holy men who ranged across the ancient Mediterranean offering an early version of “Free Palestine.”
Jesus, assuming he existed, was not the sort of person who would have approved of Pete Hegseth’s crusader Christianity, Christian Zionism, or Christian nationalist Good Friday prayer meetings. He was opposed to the billionaires of his day. He overturned the tables of the money changers in the Temple. He believed that the worship of wealth corrupts the soul.
He spoke out against the warmongers. Living under the oppressive regime of the Roman Empire, he preached a message that might resonate with many contemporary anarchists. At the “No Kings” march last week I spotted our local Black Block with a banner reading, “No Kings, No Masters.”
I suspect that Jesus would have approved. He is supposed to have said, “pay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God.” He went about proclaiming the advent of Kingdom of God. In God’s kingdom what could have possibly belonged to Caesar?
If you doubt Jesus’s radicalism, I invite you to consider two of the most famous texts attributed to him. We call them the Sermon on the Mount and the Lord’s Prayer.
The Sermon on the Mount is not a text for the comfortable. It blesses “the poor in spirit,” “the sorrowful,” the hungry, and the “persecuted.” The version in the Gospel of Luke contains maledictions, words of scorn, for the powerful. “But alas for you who are rich; / you have had your time of happiness,” Jesus is supposed to have said. It is a sentiment that many a modern anticapitalist would find inspiring.
As for the Lord’s Prayer, the biblical scholar Obery Hendricks recently described it as the “Prayer that Got Jesus Crucified.” Hendricks points out that in the Christian New Testament when Jesus’s disciples–those people who were afraid at the tomb–asked him how to pray they were not asking him about the mechanism of prayer.
You might remember the scene. In the Gospel of Luke one of Jesus’s followers requests, “teach us to pray.” Jesus responds with the words:
Father, may your name be hallowed; your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins, for we too forgive all who have done us wrong. And do not put us to the test.
Note that his response is not to offer anything about the procedures of prayer. Jesus’s disciples are typically portrayed as a observant Jews. They would have known the regular practices of religious life. Instead, Jesus provides his followers with instructions on what to pray for.
Hendricks claims that the instructions were revolutionary. He writes, Jesus’s “instruction to petition the God of Israel to pray that God would ‘hallow (or sanctify) God’s own name, when it was a known transgression of Roman civil law to venerate any name above the emperor’s” was tantamount to treason. The bit that comes next, “your kingdom come,” was even more radical. It expressed the hope that God, not Caesar, would be sovereign over land, sea, and sky. Hendricks reads the line this way, it expressed the belief “that Caesar’s kingdom must go and with it, Caesar’s laws and dictates. … the very definition of insurrection.” Render unto Caesar those things that are Caesar’s indeed.
The Lord’s Prayer did not successfully bring the coming of the kingdom. It did not do so two thousand years in Roman occupied Palestine, in the ruins of what had once been the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. It is not going to do so today. It left Jesus crucified. And his followers, the would-be revolutionaries who traveled in his shadow as he said, “No Kings, No Masters,” well, it left them afraid.
The winning theological answer to their fear has come to us by way of Paul of Tarsus. He was a man who never met the living Jesus. He had a response to the overwhelming fear felt by opponents of the Roman Empire. Jesus’s followers had seen their leader, and many like him, executed. The Roman roads were literally lined with the crucified. Paul promised them not victory today but “the resurrection of the dead” in the future. He replaced the hope that God would soon create a kingdom of love and justice with a claim that all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well at some point after death.
There is great theological debate as to whom was included in Paul’s vision of the resurrection of the dead. Our Universalist ancestors insisted that it is a universal statement of God’s overwhelming love. They imagined, as Mark Morrison-Reed as vividly put it, that included the “image … of the last unrepentant sinner being dragged screaming and kicking into heaven, unable … to resist the power and love of the Almighty.”
There is reassurance in such messages. They promise the conquest of fear, an end to anxiety and worry. These this will ultimately be defeated. They might not be obliterated now. I anticipate that we will always be concerned with empire, how our children are doing, unanticipated transitions, and, in my case, the fate of cats. But messages like Paul’s or Julian of Norwich’s suggest that such upset is unnecessary for, in the end, there will be the resurrection of the dead and a cosmic cessation of imperial power.
I lack the theological confidence to make such predictions. My theological comfort is found in a different understanding of the resurrection. It is one that is discovered in Jesus’s words when he said, “God is not God of the dead but of the living.” It is expressed in many of texts from early Christian communities that were not collected in the library of scriptures Christians call the Bible.
One of my favorite of these is called “The Treatise on Resurrection.” It contains words about the nature of the resurrection that suggest at entire way of life. That way of life, also spoken of in Audre Lorde’s poem “A Litany for Survival,” does not promise the abolition of fear or anxiety. It suggests how we might live with them.
In the treatise Jesus is recorded as saying:
The resurrection has nothing of this character. It is truth standing firm. It is revelation of what is, and the transformation of things, and a transition into freshness.
Lorde concludes her poem:
... it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.
In the past I have called the teaching such words points to the resurrection of the living. I have observed that it is a wisdom found in many of the world’s religious traditions. It is especially present among those who we might label as religious dissenters, who believe that genuine religious practice can never be put in the service of empire.
The resurrection of the living is about waking up to the world as it. I find it expressed in the words attributed to the Buddha when he answered the question, “Are you a god?” with the statement, “I am awake.” It is also revealed in teachings by Sufi poet Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī. He wrote:
The same wind that uproots trees makes the grasses shine
And:
All day and night, music, a quiet, bright reedsong. If it fades, we fade.
If it fades, we fade. When someone like Paul Krugman says, “I’m scared,” when the weight of all that anxiety and worry comes crashing down–like I fear Bagel will do he when is dancing on a roof forty feet in the air–I detect two lessons for us in the resurrection of the living.
The first is to embrace the difficult reality that fear and anxiety often stem from concerns about loss. I worry–and you might to–because I experience the beauty of the world: the marvels of children, the blessing of community, the space between notes that makes a song, the way that light crashes through a window to illuminate, the leaping of cats, the joys of friendship, and feeling of belly well fed. I can often calm myself by opening up to what is in front of me, awakening to the moment that I am and understanding that it is the experience I have now been given.
The second is found in the version of the Lord’s Prayer attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew and uncovered in so many texts–secular and sacred–elsewhere. The words read:
Forgive us the wrong we have done, as we have forgiven those who have wronged us.
In the language of our Unitarian Universalist vernacular, I might call it a commitment to put love at the center. It involves the dedication that we will move beyond the challenging aspects of our relationships with the people before us and embrace the whole of the human. The statement is a call to recognize, as the President of our religious association Sofía Betancourt has written, that we “hold a love greater than we know between and among us.” Here at First Unitarian Universalist, we say that we respond to that greater love with a call to widen love’s circle.
The simplest way to do is just to keep showing up. When there is fear or anxiety, when we worry, it is to say to each other, I am here, with my hand on your back. It is a belief that we are not resurrected from death but resurrected in life when we wake up to the love and beauty that is already amid and among us.
That might be so, I invite the congregation to say Amen.
