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Rev. Michelle LaGrave
April 20, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Join us as we celebrate Easter. The service includes joyful music, a child dedication, and Rev. Michelle LaGrave’s retelling of the Easter Story.
Chalice Lighting
This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.
Call to Worship
LOVE BRINGS US BACK TO LIFE
by Peggy ClarkEaster is a holiday of miracles. It is life from death, joy from sorrow, celebration from mourning. Easter reminds us that all is never lost, that the story continues as long as we are here to tell it. So gather up your worries. We are going to bury them beneath the ground and watch them transform into flowers of hope. Pushing through the earth, reminding us on Easter morning that love brings us back to life. Calls us from sadness, from grief, from anxiety, into a world renewed and alive and filled with joy once again.
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Reading
CHILDREN WILL WIDEN THE CIRCLE OF OUR BEING IN WAYS THAT ARE LIMITLESS
Gary KowalskiEvery baby that’s born connects us to our history, our parents, our grandparents, and unknown forebears who brought new life to the world in each successive generation. Each baby that’s born links us to the future, to a world yet to come that belongs to our descendants and that we hold in trust for our posterity whom we will never know. Each child connects us to nature, to the innocence an exuberance of a world always hatching newborns, kittens, and pups, and lambs, and babes. Each child reminds us of the kinship we share with people and of other lands who love their young as purely and tenderly as we do. Each child connects us to the universe, to the holy mysteries of birth and death, and becoming from which we all emerge. Children widen the circle of our being in ways that are limitless.
Sermon
NOTE: This is an edited ai generated transcript.
Please forgive any omissions or errors.
“Oh, I can see clearly now the rain is gone.”
A long time ago, I lost someone very dear to me, my brother, Mark. He died in a rather sudden and shocking kind of way. There were, and there still are, a lot of questions about how and why he died, even though he was in a medical setting. I was at first in shock, of course. I didn’t know what to do with all of the questions, all of the unknowing, all of the loss, all of the grief. I was only 20 years old.
“I can see all obstacles in my way.”
I got through that first summer and the following months, my senior year in college, though I’m not quite sure how. The pain of the loss was intense. My 21st birthday, my college graduation, were celebrated without much joy. They were more like ritual markings than actual celebrations.
“Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind.”
The grief was like a dark cloud that followed me everywhere. The following year I knew that I needed a break from academics, a chance to get out of my head. I loved history, had been a double major in history and anthropology, was interested in working in a museum, and found the perfect opportunity. An internship on a 19th century living history farm museum in central Maine. I figured the physical labor would do me and my body good. So I packed up my bags and headed off to Maine.
I lived right on the farm, milked the cow, cooked on the wood stove, made homemade butter, homemade everything, planted the gardens, taught in the one-room schoolhouse, fed the chickens, collected their eggs, led the animals from barn to pasture and back again, helped birth the piglets and a calf, rode horseback, learned how to live interdependently with the land and the animals and my fellow humans became a vegetarian, slowly started to heal.
Then one day, when I was driving my car somewhere, I turned on the radio and a song came on.
“It’s gonna be a bright, bright, sun-shiny day.”
And I noticed how the music made me feel happy, happier than I had felt since before my brother died.
“I think I can make it now, the pain is gone.”
The pain of my grief had transformed from a dark stormy cloud into a shadow, still present but out of my immediate sight.
“All of the bad feelings have disappeared.”
I didn’t just enjoy the music, I reveled in it. I wanted to sing along and dance joy had returned to my life and with it hope
“Here is the rainbow I’ve been praying for.
It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiney day.”
I’m telling you this story because it reminds me of the holiday we are celebrating today. Who knows what holiday it is today? It’s Easter. Easter is the story that I want to tell you today. Do you already know the story how Easter came to be? One of the ways we celebrate holidays is by retelling the story of the holiday Sometimes it’s new for some people. Sometimes people have heard it 50 times already. But we keep retelling the story and bringing people in, welcoming them into the story. Sometimes the story goes the same way. Sometimes we tell it in a little bit different of a way.
So here goes. This is my true story. There once was a man named Jesus. He was Jewish, and he had grown up learning stories from the Hebrew scriptures. As an adult, he became a teacher, and he traveled all around the countryside and in the cities, preaching and teaching the old stories, but sometimes in new ways. He taught people to love your neighbor as yourself, to treat other people as well as you would treat yourself. He taught that people’s lives were more important than religious rules. That you, adults anyway, should stop and help someone who is injured and bleeding on the side of the road, even if religious rules tell you that person is unclean or distasteful in some way. And he taught that children were important.
The more that Jesus traveled and taught, the more followers he gathered. This was in the days long before social media, So, gathering followers was a lot of work. He and his students had to travel from village to village, town-to-town, temple-to-temple, and mostly by foot. It was a lot of work. Even so, crowds gathered to meet him everywhere he went. You could say he went viral.
And there were a lot of officials and very high offices who did not like that one bit. Jesus knew that his ministry, his teaching, was becoming dangerous even though he was only teaching good things. So, one evening he gathered his students who were called apostles together for one last supper and one last lesson to say goodbye. He knew that he would be killed soon.
“I can see all obstacles in my way.”
And he was right. The next day, he was sentenced to death in a horrific way. He was a victim of what you might call the unfair court procedures and excessive sentencing of the criminal injustice system of his day. He was dead by nightfall. Friday, the Sabbath. His followers, His parents, his family, his mother were devastated with grief. They didn’t understand how or why this could happen.
“Gone are the dark clouds that had me fly.”
Dark clouds of grief followed them over the Sabbath and throughout the next night, then on Sunday morning some of the women went to the tomb where they had left his body to prepare it for final burial, only to find it empty. His body was gone and they didn’t know where it went. They, the women and his family and his students, began to see him and hear him in various places they gathered, as if he were still alive.
This is a common experience people have, many people have, in the very first few days and weeks after someone dies. You might think you see someone out of the corner of your eye, or sitting in a favorite place, or think you hear them in the next room or in a crowd. I know this has happened to me and I’ve heard many stories of others experiencing the same.
Eventually the people who loved him realized that they could make it now, that the pain was disappearing or at least easing with time. They came to understand that even though Jesus was no longer with them and they could no longer see or hear him, they could still remember him. And they could still tell the stories that he had told and keep his memory alive in new ways. And they began to have hope.
“Here is the rainbow I’ve been praying for.”
Now here we are, almost 2,000 years later, still telling the stories that Jesus told, still remembering Jesus, still celebrating with joy this holiday that we now call Easter. Still insisting, still insisting that even if some people take Jesus’ words and teachings and twist them so far as to be unrecognizable, no one can take our memories or our joy or our understanding of what his life meant away.
We are gonna celebrate his life and his ministry and his teachings today. Are you ready?
“It’s gonna be a bright, bright, sunshiney day.”
All righty everybody now let’s join in together. Dance, sing, wave your arms.
Extinguishing the Chalice
We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we hold in our hearts until we are together again.
Benediction
Go in peace with love in your hearts, kindness on your lips and compassion at your fingertips. Blessing all others as you yourselves are now blessed. Amen and blessed be.
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