as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, June 7, 2026
We have arrived at our annual flower communion. It is my favorite service. It contains within it a simple, dual point, lesson: beauty sustains community; community sustains us.
I considered this yesterday. Wednesday, I returned from England. While I was gone, blessed by the Houston rains, my garden burst with greenery. Saturday before more water came, and then in the gaps in the deluge, I strove to return it to a semblance of disorderly order. Sunflowers had gone to seed. They were cut. Daikons, carrots, basil, all threatened to flower. They were harvested. Bean poles bent. I straightened them.
Through it all a rose-breasted grosbeak–black head, scarlet chest, white body–sang, perched on sturdy stalks and gleefully assaulted any meal containing flower. Bees busied tomato blossoms, the bright yellows of sunflowers just now blooming, and the beginnings of cucumbers,
The beauty of the Earth, a minor manifestation of the community of all being, brought together by the gardener’s small efforts. When my heart is heavy … When my heart is heavy, this communion of bee, bird, and blossom, of green leaf and good thing to eat, is a balm. It is an unspeaking community brought together by sustaining vegetative life, a metaphor for the congregational life we share.
We are drawn together by beauty. The music–exquisite piano work, sweet voices– provides our worship adhesive. Courtyard, Zen garden, enriched now by indigenous water plants and darting fish, a testament to our endurance across time. Our front placed pocket prairie a living proclamation of our Unitarian Universalist values. Interdependence, equity, transformation, pluralism, generosity, and justice with love at the center, they are all represented there in the land reclaiming itself. It invites native pollinators, sinks carbon, heals something of body and soul.
We are drawn together by beauty. The flower communion testifies to this point. The sanctuary is bursting flora. We exchange petaled gifts. They are representative reminders that in congregational life we sustain our communion by sharing the best, the most beautiful, parts of our selves. Like the flowers we trade, we say to each other, I have a gift to give, myself. In sharing such gifts we offer sustenance, comfort, strength to see each other through.
Though she speaks not of congregational life, Susan Glassmeyer’s poem “I Tell You” puts forth testimony:
In class today, a Dutch woman split
in two by a stroke–one branch
of her body a petrified silence,
walked leaning on her husband
to the treatment table while we,
the unimpaired, looked on with envy.
How he dignified her wobble,
beheld her deformation, untied her
shoe, removed the brace that stakes
her weaknesses. How he cradled
her down in his arms to the table
smoothing her hair as if they were
alone in their bed. I tell you –
his smile would have made you weep.
A person, a flower, beautiful, beautiful, community, sustenance, enabling us to continue even in the hard times.
Soon we will exchange flowers. Soon we will say to each other, through silence, in this community I give you the beautiful gift of myself. In this community, I receive the beauty that you share. The beauty that we offer one to the other sustains us.
The beauty that we offer sustains. We need that beauty for these are hard times. Dehumanization, Christian nationalism, white supremacist populism, the presidential agenda is crushing.
Just this week, offering what one commentator named a “middle finger to the United States Constitution’s separation of church and state,” the Pentagon has removed Unitarian Universalism from its list of recognized religions. Also gone are humanism, Native American traditions, and atheism.
Religious dissent, political dissent, is being targeted. The administration has named anti-fascists and the “radically pro-transgender” as terrorists. I guess that means… Friday, several scientists were removed from a medical conference for sharing copies of an editorial which detailed the impact of the President’s cuts to science funding on health outcomes. I.C.E. continues to mimic the gestapo. Last year there were 32 deaths in its detention facilities, most of them preventable. The list of indignities goes on and on. It is enough break the strongest spirit.
But beauty, says the flower communion, pervades. But beauty, we tell each other, sustains, maintains, persists. There is a story about beauty in hard times that I have shared before. It is one of those bits of living scripture that I return to again and again as I seek to understand the power of beauty to endure. It comes from the Holocaust survivor Gerta Weissman Klein. Writing of her time in Auschwitz, Klein recollects, “Ilse, a childhood friend of mine, once found a raspberry in the camp and carried it in her pocket all day to present to me that night on a leaf.
Imagine a world in which your entire possession is one raspberry and you give it to your friend.”
Imagine a world, Weissman Klein, the flower communion, my garden, the lesson we share this Sunday is that it is almost always possible to bring more beauty into the world. In these times creating beauty is an act of dissent. It is the refusal of the crushing weight, the celebration of life itself, the proclamation of the power of our Unitarian Universalist values: interdependence, equity, transformation, pluralism, generosity, and justice with love at the center.
So, I leave you with this challenge: do something beautiful this week. Celebrate the rainbowed glory of Pride. Plant a summer flower. Share a smile. Paint a picture, write a poem, make a delicious dish, give the world a little of the gift that is yourself. Bit by bit, small gesture by small gesture, planting by planting, we can build a more beautiful world. The flower communion tells us so. Ask yourself, what beauty will I create?
Celebrating the beauty inside, sharing the beauty without, I invite the congregation to say, Amen.
