Keep the Circle Unbroken
Rev. Douglas Taylor
September 27, 2026
Sermon Video: (coming soon)

I wonder how many of us have a memory about coloring outside the lines as a child, or learning about the importance of staying inside the lines. I don’t have such a memory myself, but it is a common enough experience that many adults can reflect back on it.

My colleague Rod Richards says

“We humans are the line-drawers. We are the border makers … the census-takers. We draw a line to separate this from that, so we can see clearly what each is. We create a border to define our place, so we can take care of what’s there.”

Rod goes on to say, however, that compassion does not have such boundaries, “God has no borders.” “The lines we draw,” he says, “disappear when viewed with eyes of compassion.” We can say, perhaps, that God loves those who color outside the lines.

In the September 17th issue of Braver/Wiser from last year, UU leader Clint Nicely https://www.uua.org/braverwiser/crossing-lines reflected on this, sharing his experience at the Smithsonian at age 8:

“I learned that lots of great art doesn’t have clearly defined lines. It was an epiphany, and within a few years I was questioning everything. Some musicians, as it turned out, didn’t always play the music as written. Teachers didn’t always follow the textbook. My mother often took liberties with recipes. Though I was not yet consciously aware of it, crossing and blurring the lines had become a metaphor for everything in my life, a new way of experiencing the world.” 

Last week I preached a sermon about breaking out of unhelpful cycles, patterns of harm. https://douglastaylor.org/2026/09/21/breaking-the-cycle/ I urged us to break with tradition. Following Nicely’s reflection, I urged us to not play the music as written, to not follow the textbook, to take liberties with the recipes. As Unitarian Universalists, I think we’ve come to expect this sort of perspective from our pulpits. It was Ralph Waldo Emerson, after all, advising the Harvard Divinity School graduates to

“Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse all good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of [humanity], and dare to love God without mediator or veil.” 

Eschew tradition, break the cycle, dare to be original, color outside the lines! Allow me to moment to acknowledge the power and importance of all that, and to say – we don’t need to do that every time. It is worth learning when to cross the line and when to hold it. There is a value in knowing how the break the cycle and how to keep the circle unbroken – because both behaviors are needed depending on the circumstance.

I was at a multi-day minister’s conference a few years back, the topic was on leadership and authority. There were a few dozen of us participating, and when we came in to the room after our lunch break on the second day, the presenters had set up a game for us.

There was masking tape on the floor dividing the room into thirds. We were each assigned a section with most of us in one section, a smaller number in the middle section, and about five people in the last section. We were given only one rule – don’t cross the lines.

At first, knowing the course was about leadership and authority, we played along. After about ten minutes, we started crossing the lines just to see what would happen. When nothing obvious happened, most of us roamed the room. Some people pulled up the tape and used it to make art or create new boundaries. I started at the big end, but over the course of the activity I occupied every section of that room you can be assured. Eventually I sat down and started a rousing hymn sing.

Some of what we learned while processing the experience is that when left with no direction or aim, no leadership, people tend to accomplish a significant amount of nothing in particular. We also learned from our experience something about our basic anti-authoritarian streak so prominent among folks in our faith tradition.

We Unitarian Universalists tend to be ‘boundary crossers.’ We are iconoclasts. Our favorite stories from our history are the ones about the rebels, the heretics, the trail blazers, and tradition breakers. A. Powell Davies, the Unitarian preacher serving in Washington D.C. during the McCarthy Era, wrote “How strange and foolish are these walls that separate and divide us.” But are all walls foolish?

My middle child is an artist. He draws with ink and pencil, and more recently has learned to draw digitally. When he was little, he spent months tracing pictures out of books. We had a reem of that really thin printer paper – the kind that was all connected but folded along perforated lines … and it had the punched holes along the edges to spool through the printer which you would need to tear off after it was ready. Do you remember that paper? It was very thin and we had a lot of it. Our son would hold a piece against one of his books about whales and trace the creature. Month after month! We had so many sheets of traced whales. So many! He spent so long just tracing other people’s art. 

And now he can freed-hand all manner of creature. He can sketch a heron in a few minutes. I saw him create a frameable drawing of three bears climbing a tree in an afternoon based on just a conversation in the morning with someone. My point is that he started by not even coloring inside the lines – he just drew the lines exactly as they were. Not all walls are foolish, not all lines need to be crossed, we don’t need to break every rule. Such boundaries are supposed to serve a purpose, to protect something important or support someone in need.

We had a shift in our Unitarian Universalist ministry when we were training new ministers to be change-makers, border-crossers. This was when immigration was becoming a central issue in national politics, when authoritarianism was beginning to take root. A few prescient teachers in our seminaries saw that we needed to develop this mindset and these skills in our communities. 

I admit when I first learned about the focus of ‘border crossing,’ or ‘boundary crossing’ as it was called originally, I was concerned. I had spent my seminary training and the first handful of years as a minister navigating the impact on our ministry of inappropriate boundary crossing. My seminary training occurred in the shadow of the clergy sexual misconduct scandals. I learned the importance of ‘healthy boundaries.’ While I have never had a personal or direct connection to any such misconduct, the reality of it impacted the breadth of society. Not all boundaries are bad; there are useful walls that divide.   

Useful dividing walls serve for when we want to make the lines clear between what is mine and what is yours, such as with your bank account or my body. Conversations of consent and rape culture are a response to a type of ‘boundary crossing’ that is harmful.

Tearing down a wall can be a good thing and it can be a bad thing depending on the boundary, what it was meant to protect, and why it is being crossed. In our game at that minister’s conference, we tore up the tape boundary without establishing first what the boundary was for or clarifying if it was a boundary in the service of justice or of injustice.

Becca Beorger, the author of our reading this morning, reminds us of lessons from cell biology – lessons that are analogously applicable to maintaining individual integrity and the health of a community. She wrote that the reality for our cells, and a goal for our communities, is to have boundaries that are flexible. That our lines, walls, circles, what have you, give us both support and stability as well as the ability to change and grow; protection for what is precious and invitation to something new.

When Jesus exhorted his followers “love your neighbor as yourself,” it was less about tearing down the division between Jews and Samaritans, and more about finding one’s integrity and compassion given the divisive social structures of the day.

“A certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robber.” Priests refused to help the man, passing on the other side of the road instead of stopping to help; until finally, a Samaritan came by. “When he saw him, he was moved with compassion.” (Luke 10)

The parable of the Good Samaritan recognizes that humanity must find a way to deal with the divisive instinct within us. The deeper question is not if the boundary should be held or torn down. The deeper question is how can you live with integrity given the reality of the walls around us. That is the discernment question to know how to respond to our walls, which to maintain and mend, which to challenge and tear down.

Crossing boundaries is good and just when we are partnering with the oppressed, when we are meeting the ‘other’ across our differences, when we challenging a status quo that causes harm. Crossing boundaries is bad when we are abusing our power or other people, when we are taking advantage of the trust that has been given to us, when we see every boundary as just a challenge rather than as a guide to navigate the needs of the individual with the needs of the group.

Boundaries are a tool, how we use them is the question. We do need to break harmful cycles. We also need to hold close to the unbroken circle of love and connection which is the tap root of what we are building as a community. With all the destruction and division that abounds in our world, yes, we need to also tear down the barriers that cause harm. But more importantly, I contend, we must hold the line for the integrity of our values, keep the rule of kindness and inclusion, mend the wall that holds up the world we are building together.

We must stay within the unbroken circle, because that is where we all heal and grow.

In a world without end

May it be so