Lovely Day — Reclaiming Faith as a Present-Tense Practice, with Bill Withers and Ross Gay (6/14/2026)

<p>The season two finale of The Pulpiteer is a love letter — to a congregation, to podcast listeners, and to a word that has been weaponized for too many people: faith.</p><p>Preached on Flag Day, the service begins with the Great World House reframing the flag not as a banner of war but as a covenant — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as promises that carry duties, renewed by ordinary people in small rooms who deliberate, vote, and stay at the table. The Voice of Wisdom, read by Michelle Augustine, comes from Ross Gay&#39;s <em>The Book of Delights</em>: flowers placed by anonymous hands into the fist of a statue, and what that impulse says about human nature.</p><p>The sermon walks the narrow path between pollyannaish optimism and soul-destroying pessimism, and lands on a distinction worth keeping: hope is a future thing; faith is a present-tense practice. Along the way: the Buddhist eightfold path as eight gauges to keep in the green, leadership as contagion, why you are enough and worthy — and special, but not <em>that</em> special — Brené Brown on foreboding joy, the boxes we tape shut and bequeath to the people we love, healing as a duty rather than an indulgence, and Margaret Mead&#39;s small committed group with their levers on the boulder.</p><p>Recorded live at San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Georgetown, Texas, at the close of the second season and second year of this shared ministry.</p><p></p>