as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, March 15, 2026
Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
The hymn signals something true about most of us. We humans are narrative creatures. Our lives have beginnings, middles, and ends. In between, almost from when we first talk, the majority of us work to place ourselves within greater stories that will outlive us.
“Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die,” Forrest Church wrote. Aware of our ends we seek to place ourselves within greater stories that will outlive us: family, country, ethnic group, political tradition, metaphysical narrative, or religious community.
Mostly, we arrive after a tale has started and before it terminates. “All the world is a stage, / And all the men and women merely players; / They have their exits and entrances,” is how William Shakespeare famously put it. In a dimly lit bar, my brother summarized the matter somewhat more cheekily, “a lot of stuff happened before I was born,” he said.
A lot of stuff happened before I was born. Evolutionary biologists, historians, family systems theorists, they all tell us that our answers to the question, “Where do we come from?” partially determine the answers to the other questions, “What are we? Where are we going?”
I anticipate that you have your own answers, or are seeking your own answers, to these queries. Joining a religious community means, in part, that not only you agree to seek the answers to your questions alongside others but that their answers partially become your answers. Your story, my story, our story, the rhythm of congregational life. All of us entered the sanctuary doors after the story that is the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston started. I pray that all our stories will end before the larger story that is the story of our congregation ceases.
This morning, we pivot as we continue further with our ongoing sermon series–a narrative of a kind–on what it means to be a dissenting religious tradition. As Christian Nationalism rises, as people like the Secretary of War appear to invoke end of times theologies to justify illegal wars, as the governor seemingly casts Islam as other than and threatening to Texans, one of the ways that we dissent is by rejecting what the Unitarian Universalist theologian Rebecca Parker once named “fictions of purity.”
Political reactionaries, white supremacists, religious zealots who make exclusive claims about the nature of theological truth, there is a tendency amongst the advocates of rigid hierarchies of class, gender, and race to draw firm boundaries around human stories. Such boundaries do not naturally exist. But in their narratives, there are such things as a Christianity that is not a synthesis of all the Middle Eastern prophetic and mystic traditions that came before. Some Jewish influence, perhaps, but surely not Babylonian, Zoroastrian, or Sumerian. And the textual truth that god of both Christians and Jews incorporates, as the biblical scholar Tikva Frymer-Kensky noted, many of “the functions and attributes of female goddesses,” not so much.
The Sufi poet Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī pushes such insights into a more mystical direction when he rejects the idea that any religion has a full grasp on theological truth. He sings:
Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu, Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion or cultural system. I am not from the East or the West, not out of the ocean or up from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not composed of elements at all.
And then he concludes:
I belong to the beloved, have seen the two worlds as one and that one call to and know, first, last, outer, inner, only that breath breathing human being.
Breath breathing human being, Rumi rejected the fictions of purity. Instead, he taught that spiritual enlightenment could be found along many paths. “Truth is one, the wise call it by many names,” is how the Rig Veda puts it. Forrest Church stated it somewhat differently. “God is not God’s name,” he told us. “God is our name for the mystery that looms within and looms beyond the limits of our being,” he continued.
Still, in the versions of Unitarian Universalist history that are often taught in our congregations we are frequently reminded of the Christian origins of our faith. My ministerial mentor Mark Belletini did this beautifully in a sermon. Built around the refrain, “Before we were born,” Mark recounted, in his humorously titled text, “The Entire History of the Unitarian Universalist Movement and Institution in Twenty Five Minutes Flat,” the long lineage of “Christian radicals” and “Heretics”–those “who choose not to conform”–that eventually coalesced into the contemporary Unitarian Universalist movement.
“[O]nce before we were born, we were called Arians,” after the ancient North African preacher Arius who upheld the idea that “‘The Unknown Unbegun,’” neither Father, Son, nor Holy Spirit, was the source of all things.
“Once before we were born, we were called Origenists” after the North African theologian Origen. He taught, “there can be no eternal hellfire, and all people universally must come into wholeness.”
“Once before we were born,” Mark’s list is lengthy–a two thousand year long litany of names that might be familiar to some of you. There are the “Pelagians, after the Irish monk Pelagius.” Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit, Anabaptists, Socinians, eventually Unitarians and Universalists, the refrain in the sermon, “Once before we were born,” somehow has made it stick with me more than twenty five years after I first encountered it.
But it does not quite answer the question, “Where do we come from?” In his sermon Mark quoted the Roman philosopher Cicero. He wrote, to “be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to never grow up.”
To grow up, I suspect that one of the reasons why you come to First Unitarian Universalist is to pursue spiritual maturity. I know that, despite all of my imperfections, my own efforts in religious leadership are directed towards the pursuit of what we occasionally name growing a soul. In our religious tradition, we understand that religious work is a kind of lifelong learning–we must constantly be striving to understand, to uncover, to discover, what it means to grow in the likeness of the divine.
Once before we were born, it is a sign of spiritual maturity–a measure of the growth of our souls–to be ever seeking to understand our origins. Physicists offer us clarity into the unfathomable nature of existence when they recount that the first stirrings of the universe are wrapped in the Big Bang. There is a bit of Rumi’s wisdom–”My place is placeless, a trace / of the traceless”–in the mysteries that they pursue.
Once before we were born, evolutionary biologists remind us that our very consciousness is shaped by the primordial that preceded us. Crudely, my brain and your brain contain the structures of fish, lizard, and earlier mammal brains.
Once before we were born, on an individual level family systems theorists help us recognize that patterns in our families of origins shape our own behaviors. On a societal level historians empower us to do the same. It matters that Texas was once a part of Mexico, was the center of the Comanche Empire, is a state founded by enslavers, served as a refuge for European revolutionaries who escaped the consequences of failed nineteenth century uprisings, and was the onetime home of Barbara Jordan, Ann Richards, Molly Ivins, and Mickey Leland.
Once before we were born, one of the practices of religious dissent is the rejection of the fictions of purity. That applies as much to understanding where we came from as who we are now. Today, in this congregation and throughout Unitarian Universalism, we reject theological purity and embrace, as Rebecca Parker observes, “religious ‘mixity’ as a religious dance.” We have interfaith families that are Jewish and Christian, Hindu and Muslim, Muslim and Christian, Jewish and atheist, plain old Unitarian Universalist and Hindu, Buddhist and Christian, and… well, you get the idea, and if I did not list your own family in there it is not a matter of oversight but rather a concern for time.
Over the next few months, as part of our practice of religious dissent, we will be looking back to our history. Probing “where do we come from” will help us better understand the theological pluralism of our movement. With that understanding will come a better sense of the “who are we” and “where are we going” that is central to our collective story.
Once before we were born, this month and next we will touch upon the Islamic origins of our movement. Then in May and June we will examine how the religious traditions that sometimes get called Hinduism have shaped us. By lifting up both, especially in these times when non-Christian communities are being targeted by the powers and principalities of the hour, we might encounter new ways to both be in solidarity with our neighbors and grow in our spiritual maturity.
Once before we were born, the relationship between Islam and Unitarianism goes way back. Some historians have claimed that the sixteenth century Spanish theologian Michael Servetus should be thought of as an originator of our faith. His rejection of the Trinity was inspired by his readings of Arabic and Hebrew texts as he dreamed of a world in which there was religious harmony between Christians, Muslims, and Jews.
Once before we were born, I want to take a different turn to one the first uses of the word “Unitarian” in the English language. It concerns a letter that was never read and a meeting that never took place. The unread letter and the unheld meeting, I found reference to both in the library of Unitarianism and religious dissent I sometimes haunt in Oxford, England. The letter that was not read was written in the summer 1682. The meeting that never occurred would have happened that same year too–but, of course, it did not.
The letter and the meeting, the letter was attached to a bundle of papers that some Unitarian ministers attempted to deliver to the Moroccan ambassador just as he was getting to leave London. He refused to accept them on the basis that they concerned religious matters. They were passed over to an English civil servant who by turn gave them to an Anglican priest. He deposited the papers in an archive where they lay, likely, unread until they were discovered in the late nineteenth century by a historian. He promptly claimed the unread letter as “the ‘primary document of Unitarianism.’”
For that historian, it marked the start of the time when English speaking Unitarians recognized themselves as coherent movement. These ministers did so, he argues, through an understanding that they shared, in their words, a worship of the “onely Soveraign God (who hath no distinction or plurality in persons)” with Muslims. They were trying to connect with the Moroccan ambassador because they believed, in Susan Ritchie’s words, that they were “children of the same God.”
Children of the same God, our unread attempt at inter-religious dialogue is fascinating on a number of points. It tries to synthesize Unitarianism and Islam to find common points of unity while acknowledging areas of difference. It suggests that both groups come together in theological opposition to reject the “Scourge of the idolizing Christians,” namely Trinitarianism.
Children of the same God, this unread letter which resulted in a meeting that was never held might change something of how we Unitarian Universalists understand ourselves. Some historians have sought to narrow our theological influences and, in doing so, suggest that we should primarily be in dialogue with liberal Christianity as we consider the great questions, Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? In a facetious passage one writes, “As between Calvin and Servetus, or Calvin and the Socini, who has the greatest influence on … Unitarianism [in the United States]? … Calvin, of course.”
Calvin, of course, what the unread letter suggests, what historians like Susan Ritchie and theologians like Rebecca Parker argue, is that our movement has been multi-religious in its orientation since its inception. Once before we were born, should include not just those who put themselves in dialogue with Christianity but those who sought conversations across religious traditions.
Once before we were born, children of the same God, there a numerous other stories that could be told about our tradition’s interactions with Islam. I could tell you about how the Edict of Torda, the great Transylvanian Unitarian proclamation viewed as Europe’s first statement of religious tolerance, has origins in the legal regime of the Ottoman Empire. Or I could talk with you about Imre Thòkoly, the Hungarian Unitarian count who, in the late seventeenth century sided with the Ottomans against the Catholic Hapsburg Empire because he thought that Muslims were more likely to embrace theological diversity than Christians. Or the ways in which early Unitarian feminism arose largely in response to exchanges between Unitarian women from England and Muslim women in Turkey. Or I could tell you…
Once before we were born, all of the answers that we will ever find to the question, “where do we come from will” always be partial. So much that lies in the past–whether it be of our families of origin or of our religious communities–that we will never know. But somehow the stories of those we do not know continues to shape us.
In his sermon, Mark shared a reflection from the poet Jane Hirshfield on this point. Titled “The Heart’s Counting Knows Only One” it reads, in part:
In Sung China, two monks friends for sixty years watched the geese pass. Where are they going? one tested the other, who couldn’t say. That moment’s silence continues. No one will study their friendship in the koan-books of insight. No one will remember their names.
No one will remember their names, part of our dissenting tradition, I posit, is having the humility to recognize that where we came from, who we are, and where we are going are all more complicated than we can ever truly understand. Against the fictions of purity, we are called to embrace that life is a mystery. Our past contains the unknown, the names never remembered, and the unknown. When we learn something of a new name then we are called to reconsider something of who we are.
Once before we were born, our tradition calls us to embrace fluidity rather than fixity. Once before we were born, it challenges us to recognize that we have no single origin point but instead, to invoke the Unitarian Universalist folksinger Pete Seeger, are in a good sense, “all mixed up.”
In that spirit I close with a story from the Sufi teacher, Mulla Nasrudin, as recounted by Idries Shah, not because it offers us an easy pure answer but because it reminds us that spiritual maturity often resembles embracing confusion and contradiction. Nasrudin was a contemporary of Rumi and something of a trickster.
The story runs like this. A great theologian was deathly ill. He sent for Nasrudin in the hopes that the Sufi might provide him with a prayer that would ease his transition into the afterlife.
“Nasrudin,” he said, “you have a reputation of being able to communicate with another dimension. Can you teach me a prayer that will help me along my way?”
“Here is your prayer,” Nasrudin said, “God help me–Devil help me!”
Stunned, forgetting that he was on the edge of death, the theologian bolted upright. “Heretic,” he shouted.
“Not at all, my dear fellow,” Nasrudin replied. “A man in your position cannot afford to take chances. When he sees two alternatives, he should try to provide for either of them working out.”
With Nasrudin, with the writers of our unsent letter, with all those whose names have not been remembered, against the fictions of religious purity let us say, “Truth is one, the wise call it by many names.” Let us recognize, as Rumi did, that “first, last, outer, inner, only that” [we are each] a “breath breathing human being.” Let us acknowledge, that however we answer the question, “where are we going,” however we name the ultimate, we are all, be a matter of metaphor or reality, children of the same God.
That it might be so, let us say Amen.
