November 16, 2025 | Rev. Bret Lortie
In the story for all ages this morning I told of a time in my life where I found that what I had thought I had wanted, a bowl of goldfishes, wasn’t really what the universe had in mind for me. In the end, I was given some wonderful pets, a set of African Clawed frogs, that were great teachers about hunger and attachment.
It reminded me of that great Rolling Stone line:
“”You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, well you just might find, you get what you need.”
My frog story is fun but not the deepest theological inquiry. But it’s a starting point for our message this morning. Learning to discern our wants from needs is a central spiritual task in life, and a first step in finding true gratitude. And a real challenge. It’s that middle phrase in the Rolling Stone’s song that gets forgotten: “but if you try sometimes,” Mick Jagger screams, you might just find, you get what you need.” It’s as the Buddhist eight-fold path teaches us: sometimes it takes right effort to reach enlightenment. It can take a very long time for gratitude to settle in, to realize where our needs have already been met.
And… there’s something else that came to me this week as I re-approached this topic of balancing gratitude with our needs and wants. I delivered a different version of this sermon almost 15 years ago, in a very different time. For many of us it was an inspiriting time. Our country had just re-elected it first Black president. The Iraq War was finally behind us. Our country was emerging from a post-911 malaise built up from fear and xenophobia into something that felt lighter. Or at least it felt lighter to me. I was doing a lot of community organizing alongside my church in San Antonio at the time, and we were making progress. We were getting what we wanted and what we needed. City leadership moved from a city council of mostly White men to a truly diverse group that reflected the makeup of the city. We elected Julian Castro as the city’s first Mexican American mayor. The city police department partnered with progressive churches to stop a variety of practices, from traffic stops to detentions, that had the effect of turning over immigrants to ICE agents. As the police chief at the time told me, “these people are my friends and neighbors; I don’t want them to fear me.”
A different time, indeed.
Just writing this paragraph earlier in the week brought me to tears of grief. So much has been lost this year. That sense of hope and feeling of lightness. As our anthem suggested, today we are left praying “for what we know can be… we hope for what we still can’t see.”
I enjoy rewriting sermons and messages sometimes more than I like writing them. You get to revisit, and revise, your old theology, some of it just plain bad. You get to bring in new material and insights. And you get to move a favorite story into the context of new times.
That is where my original message, today, fails. In those lighter times, discerning our wants from needs felt like a worthy and legit spiritual challenge. Exercising our gratitude muscles, the theme of this month, is a worthy enterprise. For people of privilege, it’s a time to evaluate our wants through a lens of abundance. For people struggling, it may be a time to realize where supports exist, and reach out for them. There may be glimmers of hope in the storm and allies in the struggle not just for justice but basic needs.
But this jingle today: “You can’t always get what you want, but you might get what you need.” This jingle today has lost its jangle.
Get what you need? And feeling gratitude in the midst of THIS cluster mess? Fuhgeddaboudit. Not the right time. Nobody’s getting what they need.
In the public space, when it comes to justice, compassion, empathy, LOVE!, human dignity, freedom from fear, respect, you name it: nobody feels like they’re getting what they need. Not immigrants, federal workers, educators, health care professionals, social workers, military, maybe you. Because our basic psychological needs of safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization feel beyond reach. We don’t feel safe in the streets, especially if you’re a person of color or LGBTQ+. We’ve lost sight of our commonality, unity. We question to what vision we belong. Even our sense of self-esteem as Americans is hard. The United States has some hard truths in its past—atrocities, attempted genocide of native peoples, slavery, imperialism, oppression—you know the list. But I’ve built a life on hope that we somehow were getting better. Even a leeetle tiny bit. I felt hope that we could leverage the good aspects of our republic’s ideals—freedom, democracy, diversity, equity, inclusion, promise—to do better.
Our reading this morning was from the Lotus Sutra, the primary sacred text for Japanese Nichiren Buddhism. In the story, a man is getting ready to go on a long trip. His friend, knowing the man’s needs, sewed a precious jewel into his coat, but because the man is sleepy from all the food and drink at his going away party, he doesn’t learn the jewel is there. He lives out his voyage in scarcity. He even loses his ability to notice things of value around him. The jewel is right there for him to find.
I’ve spent many years thinking about this story, a favorite of mine. I was first introduced to it in seminary, circa 2003. Do the math. This story has been bouncing around my head for a long time. And I think I’ve gotten it wrong.
I’ve thought about it this way: that the man with the jewel in the robe had what he needed all along, but never knew it was there. How sad. He was just a victim of ignorance. The other message I now see is the importance of cultivating awareness so we’re able to see where others, the universe, the Spirit of Life itself, has left jewels close at hand to satisfy our needs—if only we know how to notice them.
The traveler also forgets who he is. He parties too hard, imbibes too much, and falls asleep. He forgets he once had a friend who cared about him, that he was a person worthy of such friendship. The traveler wanders through his journey not just thinking but believing his needs weren’t being met. He starts to believe in disconnection and even the comfort of isolation. It’s an imprisonment of the mind. It’s less about the jewel and more about the connection.
And even in times like these, with so many societal dumpster fires ablaze, we can find gratitude in our connections. Rich or poor, privileged or not, we can all cultivate connection. And, perhaps, find the gratitude we need there. Because the ability to feel gratitude is a basic spiritual tool for getting through hard times. We may not be grateful for the hot mess, but we can be wise enough to seek the type of connection necessary to see us through. And you’re here, doing it, connecting—so you’re on the path. Good job. Just keep doing it.
Central to the Lotus Sutra, which contains this story, is also the idea that when we can see past our immediate desires for pleasure and success, our so-called “wants,” a need for liberation emerges—liberation from greed, anger, and delusion. Now that captures these times. Greed, anger, delusion. Liberation and gratitude are strangely interconnected. It’s very hard to feel gratitude when you feel trapped. And it’s easy to stay trapped without the glimmer of hope flowing outward from a sense of gratitude. And in our UU faith, we know that our individual liberation is tied to the liberation of others. We are in this together.
To be liberated from food or housing insecurity, or retirement insecurity. Liberated from doubt or depression. Liberated from fear. And from these feelings of liberation and freedom, feelings of gratitude naturally arise. That’s how we get from here in these times to gratitude.
Our church is rooted in the now, and both gratitude and liberation are very much now kinds of things. People don’t usually say with nostalgia, “ah, back in the day, I was free; I’m so grateful I used to be free.” Freedom and gratitude that exist only in the past are empty, in the future they are mere hope. These spiritual attributes matter most when they’re experiences in the “now,” and we are a religion rooted in the present. Unlike a lot of religions, we don’t talk much about eternity. It’s there. Eternity. We believe a loving creation won’t leave us hanging. One way or another, conscious or not, soul or not, God or not, we believe eternity will be peaceful. Because we believe in Love, then and now. See, UUs do have an eschatology, or a theology of last things. We’re just not preoccupied with it. We are built for these times, Rev. Aaseng taught us a few weeks ago, because we exist in these times. We are built for these times. And when it’s tomorrow, for then, too.
We’re focused on promises rooted in present conditions. What’s happening down the street, or in city hall, or across town, or in our schools. Our church itself is a place to come and rest, even for just an hour a week, to learn what is possible in the present. For example, of you have food needs, there’s a pantry. It’s not much, and it’s not a substitute for food security, but it’s part of our sanctuary of promises. And it’s such a “now” thing. I’m proud of us for not monitoring who gets what and how much out of our pantry. The food is just there, ready to meet the hunger in our community. On the UW campus there are several religious organizations that have signs our front: “Food available for UW students and staff.” I passed three of these signs on my way to my spiritual director’s office this week. You have to go in these buildings, present your ID, and you are given food. No ID. No food. It’s privilege.
Are there some who come to our pantry and empty the shelves? Occasionally, yes, but it’s not like the food isn’t needed, or won’t be eaten. Hoarding food comes from being afraid you won’t have enough, so we’re not just feeding one person’s family—but ministering to a social sense of fear. Granted, we’re wise and don’t put out everything at once. We put out as much as we can. When we run out, the miracle of church provides more.
We are sewing jewels into robes. Providing a bit of hope. Just the little panty building is amazing. Powered, climate controlled. A hungry family drives up to that and they know they matter to us. This [gesture around] may be one sanctuary, another sits in our parking lot. As an interim pastor, it’s my job to reflect back to you the things I see as a “newcomer.” I see you in our pantry.
As our anthem this morning also proclaimed: “Even though we all can still do more: There’s so much to be thankful for.” We are being the change.
The work of liberation is here. We organize for justice. We incubate love. Today we are going to take some of that incubated love over to the AT&T store on State Street and express our disappointment in AT&T’s ongoing support for ICE. This action is taking place outside 18 AT&T stores all over Chicagoland. 14 of those actions were organized by UUs. We’re saying: If you supply ICE with telecommunication infrastructure, enhance their ability to track and monitor our immigrant neighbors, make billions of dollars off the suffering of American residents, we’re going to show up.
We are sewing jewels into robes.
These are some of the miracles of church community.
There is nothing “given” about this gathering, this space, this place. It exists only because people dreamt this into existence. It exists solely because of hope and gratitude. Hope for the future, and gratitude for the gathering.
When we accept all of what we are given with gratitude–the struggle, the resources, the questions–there can be an amazing positive result: it frees us to do the goodness we want to see for the world. But it works collectively. Our resources. Our effort. Our responsibility. That’s why sometimes I don’t have a lot of patience for church squabbles. With the number of personal wants in the room, there’s a lot we could complain about. Heck, my office is routinely too warm. But if I come in here and start complaining about things that aren’t perfect for me, someone else is impacted. When my office is the perfect temperature, Rev. Joyce is down the hall freezing. It only works collectively, or we lose focus of the mission of this church, which is to nurture your spirit and sew those jewels of Love into the robes of others, and to discover the jewels others have left for us.
Sometimes, as in my frog story, the jewel in our robe is surprise itself. The universe puts something unexpected into our plans, and we wind up surprised. And do you know what surprise does? It wakes us up. Surprise may even be uncomfortable, but it awakens possibility and potential. That’s another part of this interim work: waking up to the gifts you already have. Even remembering moments of congregational challenge reminds you of resilience and patterns of strength. Jewels sewed into your… you get it.
“You don’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might just find, you get what you need.” If Mick is talking about surprise, maintaining a sense of awe and wonder in desperate times, connection despite all the odds—all leading to a flicker of gratitude—then maybe he is right. Maybe in our striving for liberation, and working for the liberation of others, we do get some of what we need. We might even get some satisfaction, but that’s another sermon.
It is a blessing to be here with you, in this church home, with so many jewels sewn into my robe. It is a blessing to serve this congregation.
Closing Words by Chandogya Upanishad
You could have golden treasure buried beneath your feet,
and walk over it again and again,
yet never find it because you don’t realize it’s there.
Just so, all beings live every moment in the city of the Divine,
but never find the Divine because it is hidden by the veil of illusion.