I presented this sermon again, with slight revisions,
at First Unitarian Society of Denver on 11 January 2026
How could this1 possibly speak to us today? Within the last forty-eight hours the president of the United States ordered the kidnapping of another nation’s president. This after weeks of escalation off the coast of Venezuela. This alongside and following drone-strikes in Nigeria and threats to put military pressure on Iran. What’s the use of an old story when the latest headlines cry out for attention, for witness?
I imagine some of us here in the room or online are asking questions like these. They’re appropriate. They’re questions I’m asking myself, but I can’t let them be rhetorical. These are questions that help me dig into the wells of my life. To find something that will sustain this life I share with you.
Perhaps on the other hand, you’re tired of witness. Perhaps you are looking for a couple of hours of rest this morning. I can’t blame you for that. Rest is what I invited us to embrace a couple of weeks ago. And it is as important now as it was then.
So then, we find ourselves in a place of tension. Tension between a collective need for rest and a longing to find some outlet for our faith’s values. I invite you to stay in that tension and work through it with me this morning. Let’s see what comes out on the other side of it.
People have turned to stories for eons to work through the tension filling our lives. Stories can relieve tension by distracting us from it. But if we let them, stories can also hold mirrors up to our lives, allowing us to see something from an angle we couldn’t before. But still, Euripides’ play The Bacchae2 maybe an unlikely companion for us today. It is an ancient Greek play, older than the Gospels. It has it’s moments of humor, but ends in tragedy. When it ends, the city of Thebes and its ruling family sit in ruins. I’ll leave you to find out how if you want, but I am not interested in it’s actual ending today. There is an unlikely gift inside it, and I want to explore that with you.
At first glance, the story seems to be spurred on by a willful God. Dionysos is capricious, with no obvious concern for human dignity. For men's dignity, anyway. If we look at the plot from another angle, the play revolves around a powerful, flawed man and his downfall. Pentheus is a young petty tyrant of Thebes, used to getting his way and keeping others under his heel. The men and women of the city are his pawns and property. The order of the day benefits him, until that order is upended.
From the very beginning we know he’s frustrated. An upstart has weakened his grip on the city. There is a new God in town, a foreigner from across the sea, Dionysos. He's turned out to be all the rage with young and old alike, especially among the women of the town.
In the scene we took in for our reading, the wheels are falling off of the order that Pentheus took for granted. The women of the city have become maenads, ecstatic followers of Dionsysos, up on a nearby mountain. The women have slipped out of Pentheus’ grip. Being the kind of man that he is, he cannot imagine these women having a life outside of his control. Eons of men have felt threatened by liberated women, and Pentheus is among them. He assumes that they can’t possibly have spiritual lives of their own – they have to be up to some debauchery on that mountain.
So Pentheus continues to lose his cool as he loses grip of power. Dionysos, still disguised as a priest, tricks him into some problem solving. He knows that, more than anything, Pentheus wants to regain power. The power that he has taken for granted all his life as a prince, and then a king. Pentheus has been sitting at the top of his world for most of his life. Dionysos sees an opportunity to knock him down a peg.
He suggests the unthinkable to a macho man like Pentheus. You should dress like a woman. Dionysos knows what’s really in Pentheus’ heart, and knows he can undo him with it. The story takes a sharp turn from here. This could have been a turning point for Pentheus. But it wasn’t.
Ending here with the story, where do we go next? As I return to this play I wonder how it could be different. Pentheus took Dionysos’ suggestion because he was filled with lust for power. So he chases it to his heart’s content. That’s the only reason he could imagine dressing like a second-class citizen. But what if he approached the God’s offer differently, with sincerity? Dionysos’ trick could have been an invitation.
Dionysos dressed Pentheus in drag, and it reminds me of a recurring bit in RuPaul’s Drag Race3. The contestants face the challenge of dressing straight men in drag. When these men sit down at the makeup mirror next to the show’s expert shape-shifters, something kind of beautiful happens. We watch some of these men take the queens up on their gifts. We see them get in touch with a feminine side of themselves. A side they’ve been hiding, because their parents and teachers and media says their genders can only be rigid and small.
I imagine another unfolding of The Bacchae where this happens to Pentheus, too. Pentheus accepts a God-given gift, and it frees him. He lets go of his lust for control and domination. He puts aside all the ways he’s been limited by the expectations of manhood. He says yes to liberation. But first he has to accept what he’s given as a gift, an invitation, an opportunity.
“Liberator” is not the God I thought Dionysos was when I first began including him in my weekly devotions as a Pagan. Perhaps like some of you, my first encounter with this God was in the Disney movie Fantasia4 as a kid. In the movie’s vignette set to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, Dionysus is a jolly old God of Good Times. Eating and drinking sumptuous, delectable things, he is the personification of indulgence and the worship of pleasure. But The Bacchae shows a different side of him, more complex than his Disney-fication would tell us. In this story, he is a trickster god. He is a being who keeps the world spinning in its spiral dance by disrupting order, stasis, stagnation.
In some myths, he was a literal liberator. In The Bacchae, he frees himself and his followers from imprisonment by Pentheus. He slipped loose from capture in a similar way in the Homeric Hymns5. Among his many names, Lysios was another name his followers called him, meaning “he who frees, he who sets loose, redeemer6.” Across the ages, he has been a giver of unlikely gifts.
We are also givers of unlikely gifts to one another. We have the power to disrupt the order that constricts each other. The order that seems to give our lives structure, but which in fact limits us to old, narrow ways of living. Like Pentheus, we might have taken the order for granted. Maybe we even benefited from it. Maybe we’ve taken it for granted that men and women can only act certain ways. That churches can only teach certain ways. That governments and economic systems can only run certain ways. Certain, predictable ways.
But in big and little ways, many of us live lives that slip out of these rigid orders. We bend our genders. We build church around relationship instead of dogma. When we get to know each other, we can break free of those beliefs. We can broaden our perspectives by getting to know each other’s. We each have the power to invite one another into new habits, new ways of living with each other. But these invitations need love and relationship to be really enticing.
Our faith has been going through a bit of a Universalist renaissance in the last few years. Our Universalist ancestors believed that Love was the order of the Universe. That Love was so powerful that no sin was powerful enough to break the relationship between God and humanity. We don’t take God or belief in Hir for granted today, because not all of us are moved by Gods. But we Unitarian Universalists are remembering the central power of love again. We are remembering that individual intellect will not save us by itself. We are remembering that we need each other, and each others’ gifts. We are remembering that loving relationship holds us together, and sets us free.
We find our liberation in many different places. Some of us finding it by keeping ourselves current on the news. Some of us find it at drag shows, or by truly expressing our genders. Some of us find it in biking instead of driving, or eating plant-based diets. Many of us are doing the things we think will make the world better, because it’s made our own lives better in some way. And we can invite each other into these things, or whatever else has freed us. But relationships we build through love, care, and attention make those invitations deep and meaningful. Love, care, and attention make these invitations into gifts. The gifts that help us find freedom together.
These loving relationships are where our liberation begins. Our world asks a lot of us. To witness and change the pain we see, caused by forces far beyond our immediate control. It’s enough to make anyone rage or despair. But beneath all the rage and despair, right under our noses, there are changes we can make together. We begin by opening ourselves to the problems in each other lives, in each other’s homes and neighborhoods. We might find we have solutions we had forgotten.
But even if we don’t find solutions, our relationships are stronger. And stronger relationships, knit together, increase our collective power to affect greater change. Changes in our neighborhoods, our local governments, rippling out into the world. That is the power of people, and the power of church. I’ve seen it when neighbors and congregants get together to share their problems and resources. These relationships won’t change the course of nations overnight, but they will change the lives we share.
Liberation is a gift we give one another. Sometimes it’s the gift we didn't know we needed. But still, we can't receive it with crossed arms and closed fists, thinking our old worn out tracks will be the path that carries us forward. We find liberation when we open ourselves to change. To let our assumptions get challenged. To answer calls to return for repair. These aren't the only ways we'll find liberation, but we will never find any of it on our own. The little gifts of liberation add up to create new worlds.
So when you meet a God in disguise who offers you this gift, I hope you say yes.
1. The reading immediately preceding this was an excerpt from Emma Pauly, translator, "The Bacchae, by Euripedes," The Mercurian: A Theatrical Translation Review, 7, no. 4 (Fall 2019) https://the-mercurian.com/2019/12/13/the-bacchae/
2. Ibid.
3. RuPaul's Drag Race, season 9, episode 10, “Makeovers: Crew Better Work,” directed by Nick Murray, hosted by RuPaul Charles, featuring Kesha Rose Serbert, Zaldy Goco, and Ross Matthews, aired May 26, 2017, VH1.
4. "The Pastoral Symphony, by Ludwig van Beethoven," Fantasia, directed by Samuel Armstrong et al. (1940; Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Feature Animation, 1991), VHS.
5. "Homeric Hymn 7 to Dionysos", 11-14, translated by Apostolos N. Athanassakis (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020).
6. Apostolos N. Athanassakis and Benjamin M. Wolkow, translators, The Orphic Hymns (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 157.