as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, August 10, 2025
Preaching is a craft. Like any craft, it is something that has to be learned. And, like any craft, success–however that might be measured–comes from a mixture of preparation and inspiration.
There is an old joke along this point that a few of you may have heard before. It comes to me by way of the Unitarian Universalist minister Christopher Buice and concerns the Protestant theologian Martin Luther. He was notorious for meticulously drafting his sermons and then reading them word for word.
One day an older member of his congregation came to him and said, “Martin Luther you are a great and learned man. You do not need to write down all of your remarks before you preach a sermon. You should just get into the pulpit and let the spirit of God move you.”
Martin Luther is said to have replied, “I did that once. I got up into the pulpit and I heard the spirit say, ‘Martin Luther, you should have prepared a sermon.’”
My topic this morning is revelation, the disclosure or discovery of knowledge of the divine. We will leave aside quibbles over the nature of the divine–the ground of all being–other than to note that in the Unitarian Universalist tradition there is no fixed understanding of it. It is what has been revealed to you, to me, to us, collectively. For some, this might be something we might call God. For others, it is the absence of that entity. For still others, it is something else entirely.
Whatever this unnameable cosmic essence is, my thesis this morning runs that we best uncover it–find it revealed to us–through a combination of preparation and inspiration. Preparation, we do the ongoing work of opening ourselves to the possibility that we might yet discover something about what the Unitarian minister and writer Ralph Waldo Emerson called our “original relation to the universe.” Inspiration, opened to such a possibility we encounter that relation not in “the dry bones of the past” but in what Emerson named the “floods of life [that] stream around and through us.”
Around and through us, the earliest uses of the word inspiration are instructive. We tend to think of the word as meaning the awakening of some kind of creative energy or impulse. Saying that the painting, the poem, the sermon, was inspired is a way of suggesting that it contains some sort of essence that goes beyond that found in an ordinary work.
The first uses of the word went in a slightly different direction. Inspiration once meant the act of blowing into or on. In the sixteenth century to inspire something could mean to inflate it. But it could also mean the act of breathing in. So, we might think of inspiration as the spirit of the divine blowing upon us followed by our inhalation of that spirit.
The refreshing celestial winds blow across us. We are prepared–open to the possibility that they might be coming–and so we inhale and find within them inspiration. If we are prepared, practiced in seeking inspiration, then we might encounter such an experience in any moment. It is like Emerson said, the “sun shines to-day also.”
We gather as Unitarian Universalists to help prepare each other to receive that inspiration–the wind that blows where it may. In this congregation, we offer a variety of spiritual practices to help you uncover your own original relation with the universe. These range from meditation and discussion groups to yoga to opportunities to make music together to that perennial practice of justice making.
For my part, I am tasked, to find some inspiration to share with you most weeks. Like Martin Luther, I tried extemporaneous preaching once. Like him, my experience involved hearing the spirit tell me, “Colin Bossen, you should have prepared a sermon.”
Since then, I have done my best to enter the pulpit with a text I can at least improvise off. Part of my practice for preparing that text is to read the sermons of great preachers. Emerson in his famous essay Nature is skeptical on an over reliance on relying “forgoing generation beheld God and nature face to face” for an understanding of the divine. I disagree with the sage only in that I have repeatedly uncovered in words of those who have gone before hints that open me up to revelation.
One such set of words is Gardner Taylor’s 1972 sermon “Strange Ways of God.” Taylor was one of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s mentors. The sermon was offered as an homage to the fallen civil rights icon and took as its text Luke 3:1-2. That text reads:
“Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judaea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of Ituraea and of the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias the tetrarch of Abilene, Annas and Caiaphas being the high priests, the word of God came unto John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness.”
Inspired by this text, Taylor began his sermon:
“Now Dwight D. Eisenhower, being president of the United States, John Patterson being governor of Alabama, J. Edgar Hoover, being the omnipotent autocrat of the FBI, and Billy Graham and Norman Peal, being the high priests of middle America, the word of God came to Martin King.”
Taylor’s point was that the civil rights movement had proven that the word of, the spirit of, God was still coming into the world. Revelation was not sealed in the dry bones of the past. It was ongoing, something that could be found any time people came together to build a more beautiful world.
Inspired by Gardner, today we might say:
Now Donald J. Trump, being a caesar like president of the United States, Greg Abbott being a cruel governor of Texas, Kash Patel being the sycophantic conspiracist running the FBI, and Mike Johnson and Pete Hegseth, being high priests of Christian Nationalism, the word of God came to…
The word of God came to who? Our state is at the center of a profound national crisis. As I speak, many Democratic politicians, including some friends of the congregation, are out of state in a bid to prevent the legislature from voting on an absurd redistricting act. It will fundamentally undermine democracy in the state of Texas and the United States of America. It will give one party disproportionate representation. It is bad enough that in the last election Republicans received 66% of the seats to represent Texans in the United States of House of Representatives with only 58% of the vote. If the planned for legislation passes they could get 79% of the seats with the same percentage of the vote.
The word of God came to who? One of the most enduring commonplaces in our tradition is that “revelation is not sealed.” This means, amongst other things, that in such moments of crisis we are each challenged to uncover a little bit of wisdom that might help us collectively make a way out of no way. There is some path forward through this morass, even if we do not yet know what it is. For one truth is that no right-wing regime has endured forever. Perhaps sitting amongst us, or listening online, are those of you who might take this sermon as a bit of the preparation you need to prompt the inspiration we all need to rejuvenate democratic practice in our hearts and across this land. The word of God came to who? To you? To each of us? To all of us?
Here I turn away from politics to reveal a further piece of the inspiration for this morning’s service. It is the annual auction sermon, one of my favorite assignments.
For those that do not know, each year at the service auction people get to bid on the right to pick a subject for one of my sermons. The winner then selects a topic. I have to figure out what to say. Sometimes this presents a challenge. There was the year when someone wanted to hear reflections on the spirituality of Neil Diamond, a musician who, to that point, I knew little about.
Other years I get lobbed a bit of a slow pitch, an easy hitter. This is one of them. The chosen matter is “Continuing Revelation in Unitarian Universalism.”
This idea, that revelation is not only found in the dry bones of the past, is central to our communion. The Unitarian Universalist theologian James Luther Adams has described us as adhering to the “prophethood of [all] believers.” This means that we do not hold that the minister alone is responsible for uncovering revelation. Instead, we are all enjoined, as he put it “to share in … analysis, criticism, and transformation” of the world. The word of God, as Gardner Taylor might put it, has the potential to come to all of us. Rebecca Parker, another Unitarian Universalist theologian, has described the matter somewhat differently. She tells us that when we reach a moment of crisis, when we “come to a time when we realize that the faith we have inherited is inadequate for what we are facing” we must“become theologians.”
There can be danger in this sense that we are all theologians and that revelation might come to any of us. There is an infamous character on the fringes of the Unitarian Universalist tradition who has spent years harassing Unitarian Universalist ministers and one particular congregation because our movement has not accepted the revelation he experienced. Apparently, he saw God in an eclipse and needs the rest of us to know that is the most proper place to find the divine. Since not every other Unitarian Universalist agrees with that point, he has become rather obsessed.
I offer this illustration in part because it reveals something about how we understand ongoing revelation. The truth claims we offer each other must, in Adams words, be tested against “the capacity to discern.” If I want to convince you of the veracity of my revelation, then I must tend to something other than just my personal experience. I am sure that the person who saw God in an eclipse really did uncover the divine in the blocking of the light. But he has not been able to successfully convince others that the moon traversing the sun is the true source of holy revelation.
The measuring of truth claims in the search of revelation is one reason why we have communities like this one. I share the truth I have found. You share the truth you have found. Together, we discuss, debate, dialogue, and, perhaps, come to a better understanding of what has been revealed to us. The openness to such conversations is part of the preparation for inspiration practiced by Unitarian Universalists.
The necessity of such preparation is born in many of our spiritual quests. I was reminded of this some years ago when I had a passing obsession with the cult docudrama “What the Bleep Do We Know?” I name it a cult film for two reasons. The first is that it is a sort of underground classic. Postulating connections between quantum mechanics and consciousness, it made a splash on the art house circuit. For a time, it was popular with people interested in the relation between science and spirituality.
The second reason why I describe it as a cult film is that it is the product of an actual cult. Its writers and directors all belonged to Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment. The leader of the school claims to channel a 35,000 year-old-being called Ramtha the Enlightened One. Ramtha, or more likely the woman who claims to channel her, teaches her followers a variation of the assertion that consciousness creates reality.
Ramtha appears in the film alongside a number of scientists. The core claim of the movie rests upon a controversial interpretation of quantum physics that many scholars have called pseudoscience. It is the belief that we live amidst multiple universes and that each and every time we make a decision we create a new universe, or rather universes. Essentially, the argument goes, right now I have a choice between emphasizing my point with my left hand or with my right one. Since there are two options available there are two universes about to be born, the left-hand universe and the right-hand universe.
They are both going to exist after I make my decision to gesture. In fact, I am going to split in two with the two universes. The version of me that gestures to the left will be aware of the left-hand universe. The one that gestures to the right will be aware of the right-hand one.
If you are finding this all a little hard to follow then you are not alone. David Kehr panned the movie in the New York Times. He wrote that the “transition from quantum mechanics … into … hazy, spiritual beliefs … isn’t … effectively executed. Suddenly people who were talking about subatomic particles are alluding to alternate universes and cosmic forces, all of which can be harnessed in the interest of making … [the main] character feel better about her thighs.”
At least one of the scientists interviewed in the film complained that his comments had been taken out of context. He spent hours with the filmmakers explaining why consciousness and their understanding of quantum mechanics were unconnected. The footage of him was edited so aggressively that he appears to say the exact opposite and agree with Ramtha the Enlightened One’s representations of reality.
Despite its absurdities, the film touches upon issues central to the ongoing nature of revelation. These include the place of personal experience in uncovering the nature of the divine. Is my consciousness at the center of the matter, as its misty mysticism suggests? Or does a larger material reality determine the nature of experience? Where shall we go for religious authority? Ancient scriptures? Self-declared spiritual leaders, the woman who says that she channels Ramtha has grown wealthy off her thousands of followers? Clergy? Science? If so, what do we mean by science? How shall we–who are mostly not experts–judge the claims of science? One of the compelling things about “What the Bleep Do We Know?” is that it cloaks its strange spirituality in the veneer of quantum mechanics.
Portrayals of multiple universes are popular, after all. They can be found almost endlessly in Marvel movies. One is even named “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.” I will not attempt to recount its convoluted plot other than to share that like most such ventures it contains questionable science, a lot of running, a fair amount of punching, and a good portion of bouncing between different universes.
It is tempting to imagine that there are multiple universes out there. The poet Franny Choi reflects on such dreamings in her poem “Introduction to Quantum Theory.” In it she offers that of the parallel universes out there “In one, he isn’t dead.” She suggests “I could tell you / about the many universes in which bad things / happen to people other than the people / you love.”
But the enduring existence of the deceased in another universe is not the revelation she seems to ultimately share. Instead, the lines that turn the poem for me, are these: “Sure. You can have these worlds. / You can warm them in your hands at night. But know: / by signing, you agree also to be responsible for the universe.”
You agree to be responsible, revelation, in our tradition, I have been suggesting has three parts. There is the preparation, the practice that leads us to be prepared to receive some knowledge of the ground of being. Then there is the inspiration itself–the moment that comes, sometimes unbidden, sometimes long sought after, when we find ourselves, “face to face” with “God and nature,” as Emerson put it. When the word of God, the new knowledge, the opening up, the fresh experience … whatever we might call it …comes how do we measure it or evaluate it? This is why we have this community. It is what we speak when we say in our covenant that we will “seek truth in love.” In these times, with a would-be Caesar as President of the United States, I might share something of the spirit of justice, you might share something of that spirit, together we might uncover a bit of the word of God of which Gardner Taylor spoke. Or we might encounter other truths together.
I offer these words in the hopes that they might have helped you in your preparation to find the inspiration for revelation. If not, then perhaps I will leave you thinking, “Colin Bossen you should have prepared a different sermon.” Either way, I invite the congregation to say Amen.
