The story is told that on his deathbed, when his closest companions were bereft and asked him, “Who’s going to teach us now?” Shakyamuni Buddha said, “Be ye lamps unto yourselves.” And on his deathbed St. Francis of Assisi was asked by his closest companions, “What are we supposed to do now?” His response is […]

This is the text of the reflection I offered on Sunday, June 16, 2019 to the congregation I serve in Charlottesville, Virginia. A woman is doing some painting in her kitchen. She bumps into a small table and then, in that horrified slow motion way, watches as the jar of paint falls off. When it […]

As always, this text is close to what I said in the pulpit, but not exact, for a sermon is always a present-moment experience with the people gathered. Some of the wise lines in this sermon came from a few women who advised and discussed this topic with me in the past week; I asked […]

This was the Sunday of our annual Bridging Ceremony, the uniquely Unitarian Universalist rite of passage from “youth” to “young adult.”  It might be worth noting that these words were illustrated by project images.  (I’ve put the images at the end of the post, and noted throughout where they came.) Prior to the reflection, we […]

This is the text of the reflections I offered on Sunday, May 26, 2019. Every year until his death in 2012, Senator Daniel Inouye introduced legislation to change the date of Memorial Day from what it is now, the last Monday in May, back to what it had been before, May 30th (regardless of what […]

These are the reflections I offered to the congregation I serve on Sunday, May 19, 2019.  They had just a few days earlier received the news of my decision to bring our eight-year mutual ministry to an end, as well as the decision of our Director of Administration and Finance, Christina Rivera, to resign.  This was my […]

Rabban Simeon ben Gamliel whose words are at the heart of the piece the choir just sang, was a Jewish sage and leader who lived a little less than 2,100 years ago. Rav Muna, the other rabbi quoted in the choral piece, was one of the two rabbi who edited an early version of the Talmud, […]

The theme this month is Awe. It is a grand thing, awe. The very nature of awe is that it defies words. So this brings a dilemma of how to talk about it. So, I decided to break it down into five explorations to share with you this morning: Awesome, Awh! Aaaahhh, Shock and Awe, […]

It was just after 6:00 in the evening on Thursday, April 4th.*  The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had arrived in Memphis just the day before.  His plane out of Atlanta had been delayed because of a bomb threat, but he’d made it there in time to speak as scheduled at Bishop Charles Mason Temple.  The address […]

There is a story in the Hebrew Scriptures about a man named Nehemiah.  You might be expecting me to tell the story of Queen Esther and how she outed herself as Jewish just after the King declared his intention to exterminate all of the Jews in his kingdom, saving her people.  That’s the story that’s the basis of Purim, which was […]