When I was hospital chaplain many years ago, I received a phone call one day from someone who begged me, sobbing, to go visit her grandmother- in-law. The caller was terrified that that woman would die without having accepted Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior, and thus not go to heaven.

Sophie proclaims her Auntie Claus. And really, that is the word not just for his fabulous sister but for Santa Claus, too. So many mysteries–how does that elevator get from a New York City penthouse to the North Pole? What exactly does Auntie do from Halloween to Valentine’s Day? Santa declares he couldn’t be ready for Christmas without her help but we don’t see her in the mailroom. Is she sequestered in package wrapping, where Sophia never quite makes it?

Two weeks ago, I mentioned Jan Huss, a Bohemian Catholic martyr who was burned at the stake for, among other critiques, saying the Catholic church of his day got it wrong in restricting the cup of communion wine to priests alone, excluding the laity. I tied Huss’s theology of more broadly inclusive access to the elements of the Eucharist to my understanding of the meaning of our Unitarian Universalist symbol of the flaming chalice.

The Buy Nothing Facebook group I belong to mandates that all posts begin with either the word “gift”’ or the word “wish”. If you want to give something away you label it gift. If you’re looking for something, you label it wish.

When my dad was nominated to join the board at our family Unitarian Universalist church he wrote to following in the church newsletter:

"I believe that my employment…[has] developed the two assets I can bring to the Board of Trustees: perspective and positive outlook on life. Corrections, when approached as a helping profession, teaches much about good and evil inherent in all individuals and institutions, and about their ability to grow."

Why do you come to church? Why do you connect with Zoom and put up with the frustrating glitches that our dedicated A/V team works hard to prevent and troubleshoot but that occasionally disrupt your experience anyway? Why do you get dressed and leave your house and hunt for parking spaces?

Congregational ministers, in my experience, spend a lot of time talking about how to attract and keep members. Way more time than we’d like to spend on that topic–for many reasons, both valid and questionable, all a subject for another sermon. Today I mention it only to say that in recent years one of the bits of wisdom we pass around in those conversations–with anecdotes from personal experience, or hearsay, or data points from organizations that study church growth–is that people come to faith communities looking for ways to be of service to the world.

If only it could be. Picnics and dances forever. Or, in the case of a church, worship and potlucks, maybe a parade or ice cream social now and then, and a monthly game night. And in a month devoted to Delight–flowers, a game night for grown ups, and a game Sunday up in RE.

Every once in a while I’m blown away by how contemporary some snippet of historical Unitarian Universalist thought sounds today. Even words I’ve known for years can surprise me from time to time by how applicable they are to the current moment.

I love the enthusiasm and creativity Tom and Milne have brought to our stewardship drive. I particularly love that they have centered much of the discussion about supporting our church around foundational Unitarian Universalist principles, but my heart kind of sank when I saw our flower children with their 8 principles signs a couple Sundays ago, because I knew I’d be preaching today about how those principles will soon be neither official nor prominent among our public discussions and statements of what Unitarian Universalism is, and who UUs are, and what both holds us together as a faith movement and sets us apart as a distinct faith movement.

So, in my head all week I’ve been calling this today’s sermon Beyond Rebellion, but on Friday, when I went to create the Facebook post, I discovered that the title I put in the newsletter was A Preference for Resistance. That semantic stumbling block pretty much characterizes my prep for today!

Someone once, during Holy Week, made a not-altogether-complimentary reference to “Lisa and her little hopes.”

I suppose hope is one of the central virtues and perhaps weaknesses not just, as it is sometimes said, of liberal theology in general, but of my own personal theology as well. I don’t ignore the long night that must precede the dawn or the gaping emptinesses that sometimes overtake us when previously whole lives are cracked.

As an intern minister thirty years ago I taught a course of the old adult RE curriculum Building Your Own Theology. During one session or another, I said with all the convocation and naivete of a new minister and a life-long Unitarian Universalist, “ we don’t have to accept narrow, fundamentalist definitions that deprive us of rich religious language.

I probably won’t be with you in the parade tomorrow–not physically. I need to help transport the Savannah State choir to the church for the concert, and the end of the parade is too close to the start of the concert. But I’ll be with you in spirit. And, in fact, I’m already there in my imagination.

Surely there are cloudy Christmas Days, and snowy ones. And of course Christmas Eve lasts twenty-four hours, many of them in daylight. But in my mind Christmas Eve is always nighttime, and Christmas Day is always a sunny, sparkling morning.

Many years, especially as a new minister, at the approach of the Winter Solstice, as the days grew shorter still, the nights longer, and we waited, waited, waited, for the earth’s angle in relationship to the sun to shift, I would say, light-heartedly yet seriously, that Arlo Guthrie is right: "you can’t have a light without a dark to stick it in."

469 years ago this week Spanish physician and theologian Michael Servetus was burned at the stake, on orders of John Calvin.

Servetus had published a couple books that brought him under the scrutiny of both Catholic and Protestant authorities.