Palm Sunday
Read moreMinister's Message: Passover Lessons
Passover Lessons: Celebrating Freedom From and Freedom For
Did any of you ever try to run away from home when you were a kid? I mean the kind of unserious attempts we make when we mostly have stable home lives but are mad about being grounded or not being able to eat a second cookie and are generally learning how to navigate this tricky business of being thinking, feeling individuals. We pack barbies and hot wheels and some mismatched socks into a school backpack and walk down to the end of the driveway trying to escape the confines of childhood.
Often, when these attempts at childhood rebellion are discovered, an adult will ask, “where were you planning on going anyway?” Some kids may have elaborate plans in mind, but often that part is an afterthought. Our child brains and tender child hearts are mostly focused on what we want to get away from—chores and rules and curfews.
Our early attempts at something like liberation are often about freedom from. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s an important step, but then we’re left standing, literally or metaphorically, at the end of the driveway or cul de sac, wondering which direction to turn next.
This coming Wednesday marks the beginning of Passover, the Jewish observance that celebrates the Israelites liberation from slavery in Egypt. What I love about this story from the Hebrew Bible is that it reminds us that freedom from is only one step on the road to true liberation. The book of Exodus doesn’t end with the miraculous and climactic parting of the Red Sea, like some blockbuster movie. It asks us to grapple with the difficult, messy questions of what comes after. Where are the Israelites going, how do they get there, and how do they stay faithful during the journey?
The story tells us the Jewish people aren’t doing a particularly good job of answering these questions, at least at first. They are worshipping idols and treating one another poorly and struggling to figure out how to navigate this newfound freedom. That’s when God gives them the Ten Commandments—not as a punishment but as a gift. The Ten Commandments are a covenant, a shared expression of how the Israelites want to behave in order to be faithful to their God and to one another. Because it turns out true freedom is actually pretty hard in practice. Maintaining freedom and flourishing for all, not just for some, requires an ethic of communal care; and an ethic of communal care requires some ground rules about how to treat one another and some mechanism of accountability when we fall short. The book of exodus reminds us that none of us are free until all of us are free, and that’s not possible as long as we’re harming and killing and coveting.
The Exodus story isn’t only a story of freedom from, but also freedom for—freedom for relationships, freedom for community, freedom for mutual flourishing. True liberation requires attention to both.
During our own era of economic inequality, war, and oppression, I know it can be difficult to imagine that next step. But if we don’t, if we stay focused only on freedom from, we run the risk of turning around at the end of the driveway and sulking back to our rooms with our backpacks. We run the risk of not actually experiencing liberation at all. We need to know what it is we’re running towards, not just what we’re running away from. So my invitation this Passover, is to ask what comes next after the Exodus. What is possible when we break free from barriers, from unjust social structures, from harmful ways of thinking or constraints placed on our hearts and imaginations? What do you want to be free to do? How do you want to be free to be? Who do you want there alongside you? What work needs to happen to make that a reality? What covenants and accountability structures need to be in place to help us all get there together?
May part of our liberatory work involve formulating an answer to that gently chastising, parental question “where exactly were you planning on going anyway?”
Chag Sameach to all of the Jewish members of our community celebrating this coming week!
In faith,
Rev. Danielle
© Rev. Danielle Garrett, 2026
Sermon: "Can I Pray for You?" (Rev. Danielle)
Many of you know that my call to ministry came mid-life and I was not religious as a young person. I was adamant in my atheism and found it unbearably embarrassing when my grandparents would make us pray before a meal in a restaurant. It felt, as the kids say these days, extremely cringe. We all have our own brand of religious baggage and associations depending on where we grew up and I grew up in the south in the 90s, in the age of What Would Jesus Do bracelets, brightly colored Teen Bibles, and christian clubs with hip sounding names that met in the cafeteria before school. Those were the people I know who talked openly about their faith, wondered about how they could get closer to Jesus and who would offer to pray for me (always with a hunt of judgement in the offer). And teenage Danielle wanted nothing to do with that.
Even as my faith evolved and I discovered Unitarian Universalism, it was easy to avoid extemporaneous prayer or overtly public displays of faith. Sure, I was happy to go to a protest and talk about how my values called me to act in the world. But no one asked me who or what I thought God was and if I talked to God or what I thought happened when I did. Community, social justice, putting faith in action all felt fine but talking about religious belief, or prayer, or my relationship to the divine still felt embarrassing at best and offensive at worst.
So it was unexpected when I found myself as a chaplain in a hospital room, holding the hands of a woman I had just met and praying “Lord Jesus we ask that you lower gas prices.” She was the only visitor for a friend of hers who was dying. She was not especially well off and lived quite a ways away and the regular drives there were a financial burden. I did not believe, in the literal post-enlightenment sense of that word, that Jesus is sitting up in the sky at some kind of cosmic control board regulating the international oil market. But I knew this was not the time to say to this person in pain, “ I believe in praying with our feet. Here are the most politically effective ways to impact economic policy.” She had both deep faith and deep need, so I prayed with surprising earnestness, for Jesus to ease her burden. I can’t say if it actually did anything. I honestly can’t remember what happened to gas prices that summer. But I saw how her request was one borne of deep love for a dying friend,I saw her love for her God and the truth the Christian story held in her life, and I wanted to hold and honor all of that with her in the most sacred space we could possibly create in that hospital room. Prayer was the scaffolding for that space.
The chaplaincy work all ministers are required to do is ostensibly to sharpen our pastoral care skills, but I think one of the great gifts that it gave me was that it forced me to take other people’s faith seriously. Not to pick it apart academically or poke holes in the theology but to sit with them in the depths of it, the strength it gave them, the language it provided when words were hard to find, and the questions and doubts that are its regular companions. So often it took the form of prayer. I came to see prayer as a kind of sacred vessel for holding all of that. A way of saying, these questions and hopes and longings, this relationship you have with the divine, these things are so very precious, let us place them here in this place of safety and reverence. I realized that what made prayer so powerful wasn’t its utility but the way it honored that part of a person’s life. The way it made space for the questions the doctor’s didn’t have an answer for, the hopes that were too fragile to speak aloud, the truths that can’t be proven scientifically. To pray with someone was to let them know their soul deserved care in the same way their mind and body did. I begin to understand “Can I pray for you,” not as a condescending judgement but as a tender offer to help someone hold something very precious. UU minister of worship arts, Erika Hewitt writes. “Prayer is a way to connect and reconnect to ourselves and to that which is life-giving; the mechanics don’t matter as much as the intention: remembering ourselves as magnificent, fragile vessels of love, sometimes with intimates and sometimes with strangers, and affirming our choice to remain connected so that we’re not lost in the vastness of space and time.”
Two years after I prayed for Jesus to lower gas prices, I let down my guard enough to pray for myself. Not meditate or contemplate a poem or read a devotional, but pray in a child-like, petitionary, ask God for something kind of way. I had just returned, exhausted from a cross country trip for a family member’s funeral. And I was on the way to church to preach what I knew would be a difficult sermon in the life of that congregation. As I drove over the drawbridge crossing the Willamette River, I prayed simply, “God, give me a steady voice today.” It was a small ask and spontaneous. The prayer over before I even reached the other side of the river. But it was a vulnerable moment, an admission that I needed support from something greater than myself, a recognition of my own human limitations, and a way of honoring that what I was carrying that morning was precious enough to hold in sacred space. It was, as a recovering atheist, still, deeply embarrassing. But beautifully, powerfully effective.
Now, I am not just trying to convince you to start praying—for yourself or others. Not exactly. Although I wouldn’t be sad if that was the outcome. What I am trying to do is convince you to treat that piece of yourself and others, that we honor in prayer, with care and attention. To recognize that just like our bodies and minds, our souls also deserve tending. I want to normalize prioritizing our spiritual lives and spiritual growth, normalize supporting each other on that journey, and normalize talking about it with one another. Because our faith matters. What we believe matters. And how we stay in touch with and nurture those things matters. Always, but especially right now.
It’s only been two months since ICE agents murdered two unarmed American citizens in Minneapolis. It probably seems like longer because since then the news cycle keeps bringing us increasingly upsetting, major stories like the release of some of the Epstein Files, and a war with Iran that some conservative leaders are framing in Biblical and apocalyptic language. Meanwhile, we’re grappling with things like the ethics of emerging technology and AI, having conversations that make us question our definition of truth and reality and what it means to be human. We live in times that ask with new urgency old questions about who we are and whose we are, where we come from and where we’re going, and what moral obligations we have while we’re here. And we live in times that weigh heavily on some deep part of our souls, times that threaten to disconnect and isolate us from one another and our inner voice. Wrestling with those questions while staying tethered to both our humanity and to what’s transcendent is spiritual work. It’s soul work. And it needs space separate from the other facets of our lives. Prayer, silence, reading sacred texts, deep discussions like soul matters or the anti-fascist theology reading group here at the church.
So often when I counsel people, and ask them about their spiritual lives, they will admit to letting their spiritual practices be one of the first things that slips when life gets busy. And when I say people, I mean me. Or they’ll double or triple up for maximum efficiency. Well, I’ve heard meditation is good for your productivity and health so that’s my spiritual practice. I was in a recent training with other Unitarian ministers where the leaders shared that families consistently rank church low in their list of obligations, skipping church before they skip sports, school clubs, and music lessons. I once taught an adult class at church on building your own theology and one of the participants was stationed there in the military. They were supposed to be on duty the night of one of our classes and asked for a religious exemption. You should have seen the rest of the classes faces when they heard that. It had never occurred to them that anything related to Unitarian Universalism would carry that kind of religious or spiritual weight!
Raise your hand if, in the past let’s say 6 months, you’ve asked someone else in the congregation how they are feeling physically maybe after an illness or surgery? Have you asked someone in the congregation how they’re job is going? In the last six months have you asked anyone, “how’s your spiritual life?” Even in church we don’t do a great job of prioritizing prioritizing the spiritual life.
For those of you who are a bit more utilitarian, who maybe have a harder time justifying tending to the spiritual life for it’s own sake, I’ll close with an interesting conversation between journalist and comedian Trevor Noah and NY mayor Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani was talking giving his diagnosis for the failure of the political left in America, which he ascribes to a lack of imagination, saying, “we are robbing ourselves of ambition and imagination, and we’re telling people that their choice is between settling or sacrifice. And neither of these are enough. You have to have an affirmative vision of how life can be better than this, because this life already is suffocating people.”
Trever Noah responded, “I sometimes think it’s because of the decline of religion on the left.” He continues, “One of the things that faith requires of you is the ability to believe that this current state that you are in is not the end. There is a possibility that something can be greater. And even though you cannot see it, you believe that it can happen.”
Viewed in this light, someone asking me to pray for lower gas prices isn’t just an amusing or touching anecdote about my faith evolution. That prayer was her affirmative vision of a better life. It represents the possibility that something can be greater. It was a powerful vision of equity and ease and the ability to care for one another. A vision of a society that values being present with the dying and doesn’t erect barriers that would prevent such an act of love. For Noah and Mamdani, faith is necessary to the political work of sustaining a vibrant democracy, of building the beloved community, of imagining a world centered on love and liberation.
Our spiritual lives are worth tending to. Our faith is worth being taken seriously. So lean into your role as spiritual companions to one another. Be accountability partners and help one another stick to spiritual practices or show up to church events that are important to you. Talk about what you believe and what you aren’t sure about. Talk about who or what God or goddess is for you. Read sacred texts together. Talk about why you pray or don’t and what it means to you. Ask each other to pray with you and for you. Ask me. I know you’re New Englanders and I know it might feel awkward or embarrassing but this is how we tend our soil so the sowers’ seeds take root. There’s no short cut.
This is how we deepen our faith and we live in times that require a deep faith: a faith that helps us hold one another’s pain and tender hopes, a faith that buoys us in trying times, a faith that brings us moral clarity in the face of injustice, and a faith that allows us to imagine a better world.
May we never consider time spent tending to our souls, to one another’s souls, time wasted.
May it be so. Amen.
© Rev. Danielle Garrett, 2026
Minister's Message: Planning Ahead for Easter
Planning Ahead for Easter (or A Case for Coming to Church on Holy Week)
We are still a few weeks away from Easter, but I know how quickly schedules fill up in the spring. I wanted to share our plans for Holy Week with enough notice for you to mark your calendars and decide how you’d like to honor this sacred time in the liturgical year. I also wanted to share what this week means to me and encourage you to think about attending services and inviting friends or family to join you.
We long to be an Easter people—people who believe that the forces of life will always overcome the forces of death, people who believe a humble message of love is powerful enough to defy the violence of empire. We are the faithful descendants of Unitarian minister Theodore Parker who declared,”I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one…from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.” And yet, it is often hard to believe that is the case when we bear witness to so much hatred, violence, and injustice in our own times—as we watch schoolgirls in Iran killed by US bombs or fight to protect our own neighbors from inhumane immigration policies. It is demoralizing, and perhaps even dishonest, to hold onto such a faith without making room for struggle and lament; without wrestling with and atoning for our own complicity with violence and injustice; without making space to name and grieve the painful realities of our current moment. We know from experience that resurrection does not come easily or cheaply. We don’t get Easter until we confront the truth of Good Friday.
Holy Week provides us a chance to sit with the whole story and to move through each motion with attention, reverence, and open hearts. We begin with the defiant, anti-imperial “counter-protest” of Palm Sunday’s procession into Jerusalem. The story then invites us into a more intimate, tender, embodied expression of care and community with the shared meal and foot washing of Maundy Thursday. We see our own fragile, imperfect humanity reflected in the disciples' inability to stay awake and be present to their friend’s suffering, in Judas’s betrayal, and in Peter’s denial. On Good Friday, we sit with the painful reality of state-sanctioned violence. We remember theologian Dorothee Soelle’s assertion that,“The cross is no theological invention, but the world’s answer given a thousand times over to attempts at liberation.”We understand why those who have faced violence at the hands of the state identify with Jesus’s story, like black American theologian James Cone who compared the cross to the lynching tree. On Holy Saturday, we wait. We sit in the quiet, mournful, hopeful space between suffering and rejoicing where we spend so much of our lives.
And then, Easter arrives. We affirm our stubborn belief that “joy cometh in the morning.” We sing “Hallelujah!”, celebrate the triumph of life over death, and declare that a new way is not only possible, but already here. We say, “The Kingdom of Heaven is already present among us” and then we recommit to living our lives in a way that won’t make liars out of all of us.
It is a beautiful and powerful story, but one that needs to be told in its completeness. I hope you’ll join us in remembering it—all of it—together.
In faith,
Rev. Danielle
Minister's Message: Here for Times Like These
Last Sunday, I was absolutely delighted to share the pulpit with Jonathan Streff to honor the anniversary of Leslie’s Retreat. And this Sunday I will be equally delighted to turn the pulpit over to Marlene Warner and some of our sixth graders to mark the beginning of women’s history month. I can’t think of a better way to launch our Stewardship campaign than with two collaborative services that so perfectly capture our past, present, and future, and celebrate the many ways our community members contribute to the life of this historic congregation.
Leslie’s Retreat Sunday reminded us that our church has a long, fascinating past that shapes and informs our present. We know what it’s like to be witness to pivotal moments in our nation’s history and we have experience discerning how we respond to moments that demand clarity of conscience. The service reminded me of our shared responsibility to be good stewards of that history and to carry that legacy into the future. We are at another pivotal moment in our nation’s history and we desperately need spaces of belonging, respite, spiritual nourishment, discernment, prophetic voice, and faithful resistance. Working with Jonathan also reminded me of the full meaning of church "stewardship," which is about so much more than just money. What a blessing to have someone willing to share this history in such a meaningful and engaging way. We have such deep wisdom, talents, and passion present in this congregation and such a generosity of spirit for sharing those gifts.
This coming Sunday, we will officially kick off the stewardship campaign following a multi-generational lead service. Some of the participants in this service are the same youth who installed the gum-ball machine at church as their contribution to our fundraising efforts—the same group of kids who told me so confidently on my first Sunday here, “You should know we do a lot for this church!” They remind me that stewardship of this congregation isn’t limited by income or age. I love that our congregation embraces that idea with an enthusiasm that is pretty rare, in my experience. Our children and youth know that they are both recipients of the gifts others share and stewards of this congregation in their own right. They also remind me our faith has such a bright, energetic, creative future.
I actually get choked up thinking about the story these two services tell about who First Church has been, who we are, and who we can become. I hope you feel proud when you reflect on this community’s rich history and bright future. You should. And I hope you’ll make that pride, love, and hope concrete by engaging in this year’s stewardship campaign.
The stewardship team has set a visionary financial goal that will put us on a healthy financial trajectory, fund a sustainable staffing structure, support programming for justice and spiritual growth, and help maintain our historic building so we can welcome folks in for years to come. Over the month of March, we will be asking you to take time to think about what the church means to you and how you can contribute financially to its future. But we will also take this time to reflect on stewardship in the fullest sense of the word. This stewardship season is an opportunity to come together and dream big about how our church can show up at this critical moment in history and discuss what unique gifts we have that we can share with one another and our community to make that vision possible.
I hope you’ll join in these conversations beginning this Sunday, March 1st at the Stewardship luncheon in Wilson Hall following service and then at small group potlucks throughout the month. You’ll be able to sign up for those potlucks starting Sunday and I’m going to attend as many of them as possible so I can hear firsthand about your vision for the future of this community.
I am so grateful to the dedicated and enthusiastic stewardship team, Anna Brandenburg, Mike Giauque, Charlie Hildebrand, John Wathne, and John Wendelken. It is, always, a blessing and a privilege to be on this journey with you all. I’m looking forward to this month of creativity, community, and commitment with great joy and anticipation.
In faith,
Danielle
Sermon: “The Fast Before the Feast” (Rev. Danielle)
Friends, for the first time in weeks, I wrote this sermon without wondering whether or not we were going to have to cancel in-person church service. It has not been an easy winter and I know we are all looking for signs of spring in the air. We are waiting for the ground to thaw. I always feel like I see the light at the end of the tunnel when pitchers and catchers report. So my mind has been drifting towards dreams of ballpark hotdogs, but as a reminder that we don’t always get we want, but sometimes what we need, this week in the liturgical calendar of two religious traditions, we enter a season of fasting. This Wednesday marks the beginning of the Muslim observance of Ramadan, as well as Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Christian liturgical season of Lent. They are very different observances, of course. Ramadan, which honors the revelation of the Quran and all holy scripture, has a more celebratory nature, with communal pre-dawn and evening meals bookmarking the daily fasts. Lent, the 40 days in the Christian calendar leading up to Easter is more solemn, focused on prayer, sacrifice, and almsgiving as observers prepare their hearts to hear the story of Jesus’s death and resurrection. But both call for practices of self-reflection, fasting and restraint. Both ask observers to give something up in order to make room for the holy.
As an atheist teenager, I was terribly judgy of my friends who observed Lent. The giving up of sugar and junk food felt like a way to reinforce diet culture and cloak it in piety, which was an affront to my feminist values. I am embarrassed now to remember how, full of teenage bravado and scorn, I declared, “I don’t think Jesus cares if you drink diet coke.” As I matured and my relationship with religion changed, I discovered Lenten traditions that weren’t based on sacrifice. Lent became a season for focusing on practices that brought me closer to the sacred and sometimes those practices can be additive; for example, a new spiritual practice, a new book of devotional readings, doing one act of justice/resistance a day, posting an inspirational photo or quote on social media daily, etc.
This made me more comfortable with the season for a while, but this year, I’m not sure comfort should be the goal. I don’t know about you, but I could use some help figuring out how to give things up. Because I can think of so many recent examples of when I’ve refused to sacrifice my comfort for the collective good. The Amazon boycotts that lasted until an “emergency” requiring overnight delivery. The Disney+ boycott that lasted until my desire to see the Taylor Swift eras tour documentary won out. The single use plastics, and red meat, and international flights that are increasing carbon emissions. And heck, forget the collective good for a minute, there are so many times where I’ve refused to give something up for my own good. Scrolling on facebook and instagram even when I can feel it ruining my attention span, making me angry, dissatisfied, and numb to name just one example.
We humans are not good at giving things up. We are not good at choosing discomfort and inconvenience, even when it might be in our best interest. We are hard-wired to want to have our cake and eat it too. Ask any minister what church attendance is like on Ash Wednesday, Maundy Thursday or Good Friday versus Easter morning. We want the joy of resurrection and new life without the loss and death. We want the health benefits of meditation without the hard hours of practice and boredom and learning proper posture. We want the solace of community without the discomfort of conflict. We want better schools but we don’t want to pay higher taxes. We want to save the earth, but at the end of the day, aren’t we all kind of hoping someone invents a machine that will magically reverse climate change without us having to drink out of paper straws?
But friends, the stakes these days are too high to rely on magical thinking. The truth is, living our values, really putting our faith into action, might mean giving things up. It might mean sacrificing some temporary comfort, and abandoning old habits and old ways of living that aren’t centered on love, that don’t serve our neighbor or our planet, that don’t serve collective liberation. Shopping habits that exploit workers, convenience products that destroy the earth, tech platforms that threaten democracy and further enrich the powerful.
This is what feminist eco-theologian Sally McFague argued. Towards the end of her life, McFague made a move unusual for a liberal theologian. She began writing passionately about the Christian concept of “kenosis,” or self-emptying. The act of letting go of ego and power and like Jesus committing to acts of self-sacrificial love. You don’t hear a lot of feminist theologians talk about self-sacrifice. For good reason! But McFague cared deeply about creation care and economic inequality and she worried our habits of overconsumption were killing one another and the earth. The only way forward was to practice radical restraint and humility. To give things up. McFague writes, “This ‘crisis’ has to do with how we live on a daily basis—the food we eat, the transportation we use, the size of the house we live in, the consumer goods we buy, the luxuries we allow ourselves, the amount of long-distance air travel we permit ourselves, and so forth. The enemy is the very ordinary life we ourselves are leading as well-off North Americans.” The kenotic paradigm, she says…includes the recognition that life’s flourishing on earth demands certain limitations and sacrifices at physical and emotional levels. The realities of our time mean that the vocabulary and sensibility of self-limitation, egolessness, sharing, giving space to others, and limiting our energy use no longer sound like a special language for the saints, but rather, like an ethic for all of us.” Pope Francis echoed this call in his 2019 Ash Wednesday address when he said, “We need to free ourselves from the clutches of consumerism and the snares of selfishness, from always wanting more, from never being satisfied, and from a heart closed to the needs of the poor,”
I hear them. I do. But then I remember my many failed attempts at an Amazon boycott. It’s hard! Our brains can be frighteningly simple sometimes, wired to desire instant gratification and to avoid discomfort. Sometimes self-denial feels like trying to overcome our very nature.
But this, this is what religion is good for. Some scholars say all theology is really anthropology. Religious traditions understand the best and worst of human nature and offer us stories and tools and frameworks for dealing with all the limits and possibilities of our humanness. There are ancient spiritual technologies that help us grapple with the idea that sometimes we need to let go of something, go without, give something up for our own good or for the good of our shared life together. Observances like Lent and Ramadan that give us a chance to practice this hard work. Now, I know these practices have caused a lot of harm for folks, and I do not want anyone to engage in a practice that might be physically or emotionally damaging. If you remember from our second reading, a fast can take many forms that aren’t just about food. So my goal isn’t to convince you to observe fast or ramadan, but to contemplate some of the ways these practices can be informative or instructive as we figure out how to live our lives in ways that lead to collective flourishing.
And there are three things about these practices that I want to lift up. First, they remind us, in Omid Safi’s words, that “Our Bodies Are Means by Which We Live Out Our Faith.” There is a materiality—and embodied quality to both Lent and Ramadan that reminds us that our bodies and souls are deeply connected. We can’t just think our faith, we have to live it, in the real world with the flesh and bones and earthy resources we’ve been given. Fasting or giving something up for 40 days helps remind us of the agency and power we have to express our faith in tangible, embodied ways. We might think it’s silly when our friends give up diet coke or chocolate for Lent, but that practice serves as a reminder that what we consume, when, and how is an expression of our faith values. These practices help strengthen that soul, body connection for us. They create short cuts in our brain that remind us that what we eat and how we travel and where we spend our money and how we spend our time are not disconnected from what we hold most sacred.
Second, these practices bring us deeper into community. They remind us we don’t and can’t do this alone. Whether it’s reducing our consumption and changing our habits to combat climate change, boycotting a business that’s supporting harmful policies, or better distributing our wealth and resources to care for the least of these, it’s going to take a critical mass to be successful. One person reducing single use plastics or refusing to shop at Target until they stop cooperating with ICE won’t have much of an impact. We need all of us. Lent and Ramadan invite us to practice fasting as a communal endeavor. We enter these seasons knowing generations of ancestors have already tread these spiritual paths. We know we have companions for the journey to hold us accountable and provide us encouragement, and we get to remember that the feast is that much more delicious when we’ve shared in the fast together. I love Omid Safi’s warm memory of his Arabic professor taking a group of students to Waffle House for the pre-dawn meal. The experience of living our embodied faith collectively is powerful.
And finally, and most importantly, these observances help reframe practices of self-restraint or sacrifice, seeing them not as pious acts of willpower done for their own sake, but as steps towards greater joy and wholeness. Sally McFague writes that we are called to “restraint, not for the sake of ascetic denial of the world, but in order that “abundant life” might be possible for all.” The work of achieving abundant life for all should be joyful work! If we’re going to stick in the fights for justice and equity for the long haul, we need to find pleasure and meaning in making decisions that serve our neighbor and care for the earth.
Ramadan and Lent remind us that there can be joy, richness, and spiritual fruits in practices of restraint. After all, Lent comes from an Old English word meaning “spring season.” It ends on Easter, with the promise of resurrection, of new and abundant life. Ramadan is a celebratory month, with each day’s fast ending in an iftar, a communal meal. Many people who celebrate these sacred practices will tell you that what is gained is far more than was given up. A deeper relationship with God or the sacred, a better understanding of what’s most important in their lives, a new sense of spaciousness when they let go of something that is no longer serving them.
Ramadan and Lent are reminders that restraint, denial, and sacrifice do not always look like loss. They are reminders that sometimes in giving something up, we can gain something more beautiful, more lasting, more worthwhile, more holy. And I don’t know about you, but I need those reminders. Because they will help give me the courage to let go of things that are no longer serving me, to give up the things that are no longer serving my community or the planet, even when it’s hard and uncomfortable and inconvenient.
During this season of fasting, this season of embodied, communal, joyful, faithful restraint, may we, in the words of Walter Bruggemenn, find ways to depart from the greedy, anxious anti-neighborliness of our economy, departure from our exclusionary politics that fears the other, depart from self-indulgent consumerism that devours creation. And arrive in a new neighborhood.
May it be so. Amen.
© Rev. Danielle Garrett, 2026
Minister's Message: Love Notes for Valentine’s Day
Happy Valentine’s Day weekend, First Church Community!
This seems like a good time to remember that “love” is not a feeling reserved only for romantic partners or a saccharine sentiment used to sell Hallmark cards and candy hearts. Love can be a radical and active force in the world—holding us in our most despairing moments, calling us back to our sacred centers when we feel lost, and driving the work of justice and liberation.
Love, in fact, is the central tenant of our faith. It is at the heart of our theology and the origin of our historical heresies. The new articulation of our Unitarian Universalist shared values, place “love” at the center of six interconnected values that encircle it (justice, equity, pluralism, interdependence, generosity, and transformation). The language reads, “Love is the power that holds us together and is at the center of our shared values. We are accountable to one another for doing the work of living our shared values through the spiritual discipline of Love.” In a reflection on love as our central tenant, Rev. Dr. Sheri Prud’homme reminds us that is not just our present commitment but our theological inheritance, writing, “The great Universalist heresy—the one that so threatened evangelical and Calvinist groups in New England in the late 18th and early 19th century that they vehemently opposed it, denying Universalist preachers access to their pulpits and to positions of public power—was that the nature of God is Love.” Our ancestors believed in a love so powerful it was deemed heretical. That’s not exactly the stuff of hallmark cards!
We can know this intellectually. We can memorize the language of our values and parrot them back in conversation. But it is a different matter altogether to know the radical power of love in our hearts and in our bodies—to practice it and live it and organize our life around it. Love as a theological concept always feels squishy and undefined until we witness it in practice.
Nevertheless, there are a number of thinkers who have helped me understand more deeply what love looks like. I share a few of them with you this Valentine’s Day and invite you to choose one or two of these quotes to spend some time with. Perhaps journal about one that moves or perplexes you. Repeat one yourself on a walk as a form of moving meditation. Or choose one to discuss this weekend with a person you hold dear. And if you have favorites that aren’t included here, please share them with me!
“At the center of nonviolence stands the principle of love. When we rise to love on the agape level, we love men not because we like them, not because their attitudes and ways appeal to us, but we love them because God loves them. Here we rise to the position of loving the person who does the evil deed while hating the deed that the person does” - Martin Luther King Jr.
If love is really the active practice — Buddhist, Christian, or Islamic mysticism — it requires the notion of being a lover, of being in love with the universe… To commit to love is fundamentally to commit to a life beyond dualism. That’s why love is so sacred in a culture of domination, because it simply begins to erode your dualisms: dualisms of black and white, male and female, right and wrong.”- belle hooks
"Justice is what love looks like in public" - Dr. Cornel West
“What else do we all want, each one of us, except to love and be loved, in our families, in our work, in all our relationships. God is Love. Love casts out fear. Even the most ardent revolutionist, seeking to change the world, to overturn the tables of the money changers, is trying to make a world where it is easier for people to love, to stand in that relationship to each other.” - Dorothy Day
“The beginning of this love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.” - Thomas Merton
“Love is the motive, but justice is the instrument.”-Reinhold Niebuhr
“We’ve made it private, contained it in family, when its audacity is in its potential to cross tribal lines. We’ve fetishized it as romance, when its true measure is a quality of sustained, practical care. We’ve lived it as a feeling, when it is a way of being.” - Krista Tippett
“Is it strange to say love is a language / Few practice, but all, or near all speak?” - Tracy K. Smith
“When we were sitting in, it was love in action. When we went on the freedom ride, it was love in action. The march from Selma to Montgomery was love in action. We do it not simply because it’s the right thing to do, but it’s love in action. That we love our country, we love a democratic society, and so we have to move our feet.” - John Lewis
In faith and love,
Rev. Danielle
Sermon: “Put Your Money Where Your Faith Is” (Rev. Danielle)
First Reading: 1 Timothy 6: 2-10
Second Reading: “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” by Wendell Berry
“… Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant…”
Sermon:
As a child, apparently disappointed in the going rate for lost teeth in the early 90s, I decided to hang on to one of my teeth for a while before putting it under my pillow. When my parents inquired as to why I wasn’t cashing in right away, I told them I thought I’d get more money for an antique.
I love that I thought this magical flying fairy, who travels the globe sneaking into children’s rooms unseen and leaving coins behind in exchange for lost teeth operated under our earthly economic system. That she would have had the same definition of what’s valuable as I did. I’ve talked to some parents recently and it does seem like the tooth fairy is keeping up with inflation, so you know, I wasn’t entirely wrong.
And I was, as it turns out, in good company. I joined in a long line of humans throughout history who have tried to financially transact with divine beings. In the ancient Greco-Roman world, the spheres of religion and economics were deeply intertwined. Temples housed banks and deities had their own bank accounts, managed by religious officials. People leased lands that belonged to gods and the gods were parties to those lease contracts. Statutes of gods and goddesses were used as weight standards in the marketplace. You would buy 10 zeus’s worth of grain. If you want a fun academic word to throw around at cocktail parties, New Testament scholar Jennifer Quigly calls this entanglement “Theo-economics.”
Quigly was my professor for “Letters of Paul,” and she was interested in this ancient entanglement because it was the context of the earliest Christian communities. Paul was writing his letters, the basis for so much modern Christian theology and doctrine, in a society that saw no separation between religious life and economic life. So, now, when you’re at home with your Bibles reading the Pauline letters for fun, as I’m sure many of you do regularly, you might start noticing how much economic language Paul uses. In his letter to the Philippians, Paul refers to the gospel “venture,” and describes the community in Philippi as being “joint-shareholders in grace.” So Paul is using the language of his context, but he does something a little transgressive. Paul, by and large, is not writing to wealthy communities. His followers make up the 99% in the Roman Empire. So he says, yes, religion and economics might be interlinked, but we’re going to use a different accounting method. Our ledger sheet looks different from the Romans. This is what he’s doing when he asserts that Christ has come to turn death into profit, writing “living is Christ, dying is gain.” We are the wealthy ones, despite what our bank accounts indicate, Paul tells the early Christian communities.
So obviously, I’m not up here to preach that Christ came to turn death into profit. So why am I telling you this? We might think it absurd today that people once set up bank accounts for Gods, but I don’t think we’re as far away from that world as we might think. If you think Paul’s letters don’t impact us, I invite you to watch house speaker Mike Johnson’s press conference where he uses Paul’s letter to the Romans to defend immigration crack-downs. So Paul’s context continues to inform our context. And I think knowing this history prompts us to starting looking for our modern theo-economic entanglements, the ones that might be a bit more hidden. Religion and economics have never been separate spheres and they still aren’t today. We can decide what we want to do with that: embrace it, transgress it, subvert it, try to sever it, but before we do any of those things, we need to see it.
So when do we invite God into our financial transactions? What are our modern equivalents of Athena’s temple bank account? It’s easy to point to all of the examples we don’t like. Televangelists embezzling money and exploiting vulnerable believers. Prosperity gospel preachers who ignore the beatitudes and promise that Jesus actually wants you to be rich and if your aren’t, you must not be praying hard enough. Or a “God Bless the USA” branded Bible that earned Donald Trump $1.3 million in royalties for his endorsement.
But religious and economic entanglements aren’t solely the domain of conservative religion and Christian nationalism. Did you know that the phrase "cleanliness is next to Godliness” is not in the Bible, it’s a phrase attributed to John Wesley that found its way into popular vernacular in the 19th century through advertisements for the brand new commercial soap industry who decided to use clergy like Henry Ward Beecher to help convince Americans it was their moral duty to buy soap.
And have any of you ever taken a yoga or meditation class at work? Or downloaded a mindfulness app as part of an employee wellness benefit? In her book, “Work, Pray, Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley,” sociologist Carolyn Chen argues that, “Work is replacing — and in some cases, even taking the form of — religion among many of America’s professionals.” She writes about how, in Silicon Valley, “tech companies have taken up pastoral and spiritual care as a way to make their employees more productive.” She shares the example of one tech start-up that implemented an employee meditation program, drawing heavily from Buddhist thought, and saw a two-dollar return on investment for every dollar spent on the program. The company concluded that “Personal conversions…translate to higher organizational returns across the board.” Talk about the-economic entanglements.
The examples I’ve given so far are pretty cynical, but this relationship isn’t always negative. It isn’t always in service of capitalism and corporate greed. As Unitarian Universalists, the way we financially structure our churches is a direct expression of our relationship to God. This is not a stewardship sermon, but I don’t think our stewardship team would mind me reminding you that your financial pledges to the church are connected to our theology. We descend from traditions that believed we needed no intermediary between us and the divine We hold as one of our values the idea that each person has a right to freely and responsibly search for truth and meaning for themselves. We are non creedal and non dogmatic. No one tells us what to believe, or tells who is allowed to preach in our churches, or what they can preach. And part of maintaining that autonomy means being financially independent. Money is power, and in our churches power rests with the congregants and no one else, so it is the congregants who fund the church. We value freely exploring and defining our own relationship with the sacred, so that means not giving up our financial control to anyone else. When the stewardship campaign rolls around this year, you can view your pledge not as a donation but as a theological commitment. That is our Unitarian theo-economics.
Once you see it, it’s hard to stop seeing it, all of the ways our economic lives are shaped by religious beliefs and values and vice-versa. And for those of us who distrust religious movements that seem too preoccupied with wealth, It’s easy to become jaded. But when I remember the sacred freedom that comes with our own tradition’s financial structure, when I look around and see all of you as joint shareholders in a common venture, I feel earnest pride and joy. And I see powerful possibilities. I wonder if, like Paul, if we can see this intersection of religion and economics, not as reason for cynicism but as a site of transgression and re-imagination. A place to redefine what we consider profit, gain, and worth in a way that aligns with our most sacred values.
Isn’t that what Wendell Berry is arguing for when he writes,
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit.
Call that profit.
I’m reminded of Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 speech at the University of Kansas where he too questions what we call profit. This is a much longer quote than I usually use in a sermon but I think it’s so powerful, so bear with me. In this famous speech, Kennedy says, “Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.” He continues, “Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”
Friends, we live in an era where the fundamental values we hold as people of faith, as people living in America, are being tested. It’s becoming riskier and riskier to protect our neighbor, defend democracy, and side with love. So what we consider of ultimate worth and what price we are willing to pay for it have become questions of fierce urgency. Like the Apostle Paul, like Robert Kennedy, like Wendell Berry, we too are invited to ask, “What do we call profit?” Paul’s faith called him to proclaim the powerful paradox that “dying is gain.”Our congregationalist ancestors decided freedom of conscience, freedom of thought, freedom of the pulpit was worth paying for. They decided that the return on investment, which couldn’t be measured in dollars, was well worth the upfront costs. What is our generation’s defiant restructuring of the divine accounting ledger?
In a society that tells us our worth is tied to our economic productivity and we need to monetize our hobbies and pick up side gigs to make ends meet, can we say “Rest is gain.” In a society that glorifies individualism and wants us to fear our neighbor and build walls and fences can we say “community is gain?” In a society that wants to monetize every natural resource, clearing our forests, polluting our oceans and stripping our mountain tops, can we say “conservation is gain?” In a society that tells us immigrants are taking our American jobs and driving down wages and making it harder for us to buy groceries, can we say, “Radical welcome is gain.” Peace is gain. Humility is gain. Mercy is gain. Love is gain.
We may never be able to entirely divorce prayer from profit, but as Paul and Wendell Berry suggest, we can decide what we call profit. May we choose carefully and courageously.
May it Be So.
Amen.
© Rev. Danielle Garrett, 2026
Minister's Message: Honoring Black History Month is a Sacred Act
This month marks the 100th anniversary of Black History Month. In 1926, in a deeply segregated America, journalist and historian Carter G Woodson designated February as a month for celebrating, teaching and learning about the history of black Americans. He chose the month deliberately, to honor the birthdays of Frederic Douglas and Abraham Lincoln.
Finding ways to honor the month feels especially important this year, as our government continues efforts to erase and rewrite history, in particular the histories of marginalized populations. For example, National Parks have been ordered to remove dozens of signs and exhibits about the history of slavery and mistreatment of Native Americans in the US. The moves are more than simply symbolic. It becomes that much easier to dismantle civil rights legislation and protections when we’ve erased from our collective memories the reasons why we needed that legislation in the first place.
So this year, I think we have a particular ethical and political obligation to help keep that history alive and present—and not merely as a way of “sticking it” to the Trump administration. Honoring the stories and histories of black Americans isn’t about scoring political points but about grounding our commitments to equity and justice in the real, lived experiences of our neighbors and ancestors. It’s a way of furthering our commitment to telling the truth and understanding that our future as a nation depends on our ability to be honest about our past. Many of the most effective movements for resistance and justice throughout history have understood the power of memory and storytelling.
Honoring Black History Month can be an act of political resistance but for us, as Unitarian Universalists, it’s also an act of faith. I might even venture to say it is sacramental—meaning an outward sign of that which is sacred. One of our sacred values is a belief in the inherent worth and dignity of every person. One way we make that value real is by ensuring that people’s stories are told, their humanity is honored, and their lives are not erased. We also believe each person has a sacred right (and perhaps obligation) to engage in a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. One way we make that value real is by opening ourselves up to new encounters and sources of knowledge. Our understanding of the divine is enhanced, not threatened, by knowledge. Our faith calls us to learn and tell the truth. More recently, we have come to understand that our journey towards spiritual wholeness involves the work of dismantling systems of oppression, including racism.
So this month, I invite you to make it part of your spiritual practice to learn and share more about the black history of our nation, our community, and our faith. Perhaps begin here, with some stories of the black leaders, writers and activists who have shaped Unitarian Universalism. I’d love to hear what you learn and how you’re remembering and celebrating black history this month.
In faith,
Rev. Danielle
© Rev. Danielle Garrett, 2026
Special Sunday Service: Pastoral Care Team
Call to Worship:
In Need of Healing by Maureen Killoran
Reflections: On Pastoral Care
Good morning. I’m Sally Millice. The Pastoral Care team is all about service to members of our community who need help. This may involve bringing a meal, providing a ride to a medical appointment or making a call to one of our elderly or shut in congregants.
We all need help once in a while. This committee is currently made up of me, Pat Small and Debbie Sylvester. There is a team of over 20 care volunteers who provide the services. If you want to be part of this ministry, let us know. We’ll put you on a list of those to be contacted when needs arise. If someone needs a ride, we’ll contact you with the details and you can let us know if you can volunteer. When meals are needed, you’ll see a link in the order of service or online news and you can sign up on the meal train website.
Let’s hear from one of our congregants who received meals this past year…
During the past year, our congregation provided 40 or so meals and gift cards to those in need through the Meal Train program.
DEBBIE: Taking care of our elderly and shut ins is part of our Pastoral Care ministry. Each holiday, a group of crafters prepares gift bags for these folks. Nancy Peluso coordinates this effort. One of the crafters is Penny Bigmore, who will explain how it works…
When we deliver these bags, they are a source of joy and surprise. The act of someone remembering them brings joy. Sometimes the person making the delivery does not know the receiver and may feel awkward. But there’s the opportunity to expand our circle and feel the connection.
PAT: In this New Year, we are beginning a new mission and vision for our congregation as we move forward. Now is a great time to expand our circle of friends and activities, to try something new. First Church offer many opportunities to keep learning and growing.
Research in Positive Psychology reveals that 80% of all people interviewed say that helping someone gives them joy. And studies in community effectiveness show that the happiest, most connected communities are those where members care for one another. Providing help to each other is a win-win. It benefits both and the giver and the receiver.
On the other hand, asking for help is very difficult for a lot of people, especially those of us who take pride in their own independence. Yet I have learned that however humbling it is to ask for help when needed, becoming vulnerable in that way shows me that people are, indeed good and are quite cheerful about helping out. In asking for help, we are giving someone else the opportunity to find joy in giving.
We are looking for more people to engage with us in this shared ministry. We want to make more calls to our elders, send card and make more visits. If you have interest in volunteering, please stop by our table at coffee hour. Give us your contact information or call one of us.
If you have provided a meal or a ride or participated in any care activity this past year please raise your hand.
Thank you for doing your part. We are deeply grateful.
See us at coffee hour if you want to be added to the volunteer list. May we continue this important ministry. Thank you.
Reflection: What does it take to make a community?
by Tiffany Magnolia
Faith — Trust -- Vulnerability
There is a now famous Mr. Rogers quotation that shows up when we are facing unimaginable tragedy: “Look for the helpers. There’s always someone willing to help.” And I think that when we think of community, when we think of what the Pastoral Care team or the Religious Education Committee, or maybe even the Church itself does, we focus on the helpers; we see ourselves as the “helpers” that Mr. Rogers told us to look for, to focus on. But what I want to offer in my reflection this morning is the flip side of the helpers, and it is this other part of community that is just as essential, and one which we don’t often discuss: the vulnerable. Because there are no helpers without folks who need help, which means these two are inextricably linked.
You see, faith and community have something very fundamental in common: they require the vulnerability of not “knowing.” When folks find themselves on the “helping” side of the community equation, yes, they don’t know how their help will be received, but they know their own capacity to bake a lasagna or to drive to Danvers. They know their capacity, and there is a kind of power in being able to “deliver” for someone else, in short, there is little vulnerability in doing these actions. For the person asking for the help, though, there is only vulnerability. Will I get the help I need? Am I asking for too much? Will the help be there when I need it? What will happen if I don’t get it? For the vulnerable, there is no certainty. For the vulnerable, there is only faith.
I have a good friend who is quite high up in a branch of government in DC. She is as close as it gets to DC royalty, having grown up with an ambassador as a father and a famous senator as a step father. She has moved in the kinds of political circles that most of us could never imagine. And, she hides the fact that she is deeply involved in the Episcopalian church in DC. You see, if her colleagues found out that she teaches Sunday school, that she never misses a service, they would ridicule her as a person of faith. She guards that vulnerability because she recognizes that those of us with faith, with strong faith, are not always in the mainstream. We are “quaint” to folks who are confident in their Atheism or Agnosticism. Something about the vulnerability of “faith” doesn’t sit well with others, so in claiming it, we are performing an act of resistance.
And this is the confluence of community and faith that I want to leave all of you with today. There is an inherent vulnerability in how we define our faith community. We are living at a time where religion is used as a blunt instrument. To declare ourselves part of a religious tradition is in many ways to draw a line in the sand that connects how we help with a recognition of faith at its core. It is vulnerable because it exposes how we move through the world in ways not often understood or valued by those outside our community. In turn, though, it cements us as a community, it reveals how we are interdependent–just like the care I mentioned at the opening, there are no helpers without the vulnerable. There is no faith community without seeing in one another the foundation of this place, this service, this history, this connection we all share as one of mutual dependency, as one of vulnerability. Let us value it for all its complexity, its mystery, and let us nurture it whatever side of the equation we find ourselves in at any moment. Blessed are the helpers and the vulnerable, for they shall find community with one another.
© Tiffany Magnolia, 2026