First, let me bring you greetings from the larger family of faith of which you are a part. The Unitarian Universalist Association is the coming together of, now, 1055 free, liberal religious congregations in North America....

When I was a child, the world felt safe and whole and meaningful to me. It reached out and embraced me in a comfortable, welcoming, protective way. I felt "at home in the world," to borrow from the title we use for one of our Church School curricula....

It was Spring. At long last there was no hint of snow on the ground. It was even warm, sort of. Birds and bugs had, at last, returned to Milwaukee. And so in the great flush of Spring madness, Jan and I decided it was time to barbecue....

Your presence here in such numbers today is a wonderful indicator that this congregation is important to you and to people you love....

Last spring, I got a message from the universe. Now I don’t get too many messages from the universe; sometimes I don’t even get my phone messages. But this message was very loud, and it came at four in the morning in the form of a tremendous thud from my closet. This particular message was one...

It has been a not-so-quiet week in Lake Wobegon! On Monday, I found that, apparently over a long period of time, a large sum of money was taken from me. What I thought I had safely saved toward some of my future dreams was gone! Have any of you ever been robbed? Do you remember how it felt to be...

Readings 1: The Gospel of Mark, Chapter 14, verses 3-91 While he was at Bethany, in the house of Simon the Leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came in with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head....

The question for us today is: what does it mean for us to stand with our faith, for us to stand with this church?

It was in Alaska, right before the first Gulf War, that I first realized how music can “teach us how to hear the world differently,” as jazz critic Jed Rasula once said. I was in the Air Force “Gateway to the West” jazz band and my unit was temporarily deployed to Alaska, waiting anxiously...

The first step is to notice the mountain. It is there. And it belongs to a range of mountains. There’s no going around it. The next step is to reach the kind of acceptance that has us praying in our hearts: "Lord, I don’t ask you to move the mountain, just give me the strength to climb." The...

We retell the birth, life, and death of Dr. King to symbolize that it is not until humanity can measure the worth and meaning of a single life, that it can extend worth that to all souls. But, this is a new day....

Fantasies sometimes reveal undisclosed information about ourselves: our hidden phobias, unspoken desires and unexamined motives. And group fantasies say much about our culture—our society's real values as opposed to the ideals that receive mainly lip service.

Introduction One year for the November Service Auction, [a member] asked and I agreed to have a sermon topic listed among the many items available for bidding....

"Whatsoever you wish that others do unto you, do so to them; for this is the Law of the Prophets."—Matthew 7:12 I should probably get one thing clear at the outset: I don’t claim to know much about stability, much less to possess it. In fact, when I think about what I’ve experienced in life,...

I have a story to tell you, about the less-than-triumphal first appearance I made in a pulpit. I was a first-year seminarian, doing my field work at the old First Parish in Lexington, Massachusetts. When they invited me to preach my first sermon on such an important day as Palm Sunday, I was...

When we remember those whom we have loved and lost, help us to remember also, O God, how great a privilege is human loving, and that not to have loved at all would have been loss far greater still. Amen. “What’s a soul?” Not a question Unitarian Universalists ask very often. We are more likely...