There is a bit of spiritual advice that is attributed to St. Francis de Sales: everyone should pray for half an hour a day, unless they are reeaallyy busy. In that case they should pray for an hour a day. It is also said that Martin Luther prayed two hours a day unless he was too busy; then he prayed three hours a day.

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.

You gotta love Huck’s enthusiastic, single-mindedness of purpose, don’t you? His total body engagement in the pursuit of flowers. He’ll eat anything, but flowers are his favorite. And when flowers are involved Huck can’t resist!

There is a story we tell in our western culture. It’s a story about a story. We tell it in our books for middle grade kids and in our movies and sit-coms. We tell the story that most normal kids go through a stage during which they fantasize (tell a story) about their parents not being their parents.

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.

When the finance committee settled on this year’s stewardship drive theme just over a week ago, I didn’t hide the fact that I didn’t much like that theme. But I’m new here, and we were short of time, so I bowed to the decision of the group. I may have grumbled a bit on my way home from church that evening, but by morning I knew the committee had given me a gift: I’ve never had an opportunity to preach about enriched uranium before. More on that later.

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.

Next Monday it will be six years since Judge Robert Docherty of the 5th Judicial Court in Minnesota declared my daughter and me a legal family. For almost two years before that Lucia had been in and out of my home in foster care and respite care. These eight years, from age nine to seventeen, have been marked by a series of lettings-go. From having Lucia physically with me almost every minute she wasn’t at school or camp, to allowing her to spend a few hours home alone in the parsonage.

As I see the blooming tulip-trees around town I’m reminded of my favorite mnemonic device from my divinity school days: TULIP.

Total depravity;

Unconditional election;

Limited atonement;

Irresistible grace; and

Perseverance of the saints.

You’ve probably heard someone say, “I feel closest to God or most connected to the Holy or most spiritual or most centered _______________” . Fill in the blank at the beach, in the desert, in the woods, on a mountain, by running water. “ So I don’t need to go to church.” You may have said it yourself, sometime in the past or very recently. Lots of people say this.

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.

Last week I reminded us that "wherever we go, there we are." Today I am going to add some nuance to that observation: "wherever we go, there we are–but sometimes we get lost anyway." Sometimes we lose track, not so much of where we are geographically or in physical space, but where we are, the us of us.

Do you remember this final Calvin and Hobbes comic strip? The boy and his tiger pal perched on their toboggan at the top of a hill of untouched, untrodden snow. The world looks brand new, the pair say, a new year…a fresh, clean start! It’s like having a big white piece of paper to draw on! A day full of possibilities! It’s a magical world, Hobbes, ol’ buddy! Let’s go exploring!

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.