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Rev. Carrie Holley-Hurt
October 12, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Anger, like all our emotions, can be a powerful tool for awareness, motivation, and value creation, but it has also been misused and abused. So what do we do with all this anger, and how do we disentangle it from all its baggage? Rev. Carrie explores anger and how we can cultivate a healthier relationship with it.

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

“But anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification. For it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies and those with whom we have grave differences. Anger is loaded with information and energy.”

– Audre Lorde

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Reading

BLESSING IN THE ANGER
by Jan Richardson

Let it be no stranger.
Let it be visitor, teacher, guide.
Let it be messenger.
Come to tell us what we most need to know,
hard though its words may be to hear.
Trust Even when you cannot believe it,
that it will carry its own constellations,
that it knows what to do with what has shattered.
Trust that the other face of anger is courage,
that it holds the key to your secret strength,
that the fire it offers will light your way.

Sermon

Before I begin this sermon, I want to let you know that I am going to be talking about anger and some of that includes a discussion of abuse. I want to encourage you to take care of yourself. If you need to get up and walk around, leave, come back, not not come back…Please do not hesitate to tend to yourself.

I also want to remind you about our caring companions and that both Rev. Chris and I are here for you if you need pastoral care.

Now with that said, How many of you have uttered “I am just so angry.”

I have said this so many times lately and I have heard it so many times lately “I’m just so angry.”

When I hear this, I affirm and bless that anger.

I’ll say, “Yes it makes a lot of sense that you would be angry.” “Yes, anger is the appropriate response to the dismantling of our democracy.”

• To the scapegoating.
• To all the oppression, violence, marginalisation, and erasure.
• To the absurdity of calling good things bad and bad things good.

Yes, to your anger! 

And because of that I wish that this sermon could just be…. Your anger is holy because it is pointing you to action, its helping you hone and refining your values and skills, and it means you still have hope.
Blessings on you.
Blessing on your day.
Let’s go have some coffee.

But while anger is holy, and it does those things It also carries a lot of baggage and we have to acknowledge that baggage before we get to blessings and coffee.

Anger is holy …except when its policed.

The Harvard Kennedy Center did a study that showed that, and I quote,

“expressing anger decreases influence for women and African Americans but does not decrease the influence of white men.”

First off – duh!

Secondly, this is a pretty milk toast way to say that for marginalized groups… and I’m going to say that this includes most anyone who isn’t a white, cis, hetro, male … for those of us, anger is policed, it is policed differently depending on our set of identities, but it is policed and that can lead to real world ramifications.

For example, Bryan Stevenson, who by all measures is successful. Harvard Law Graduate, won cases before the supreme court, has received award after award often has judges assume he is the defendant because he is black. And when he corrects them, he has to be polite and not show his anger.

He said of one particular horrible encounter when the judge and prosecutor were mocking him he had to tell himself “you can’t get angry, you are going to have to smile” because he knew if he got angry, which would be a reasonable response. If he got angry it could impact the outcome for his client, which is exactly what the Harvard study showed.

Anger is policed differently depending on your unique identities but all of this policing is about power and control. Its about keeping you in your place – often with a threat attached to it.

Anger is holy but not everyone can express it freely and safely. And when we can’t express we trap our anger. It gets stuck.

Lama Rod Owens, wrote “If I am afraid of my anger and not dealing with the energy of anger, …that energy keeps cycling in our experience with no way for it to be expressed or metabolized.” It builds up and as we know what we push down, what we repress hurts us. It causes mental health issues like depression or even physical health issues like autoimmune disease.

And because white supremacy and patriarchy hurt everyone.

For white men, anger is often the only emotion that is socially acceptable to express. Not sadness, not hurt, not fear but anger. Thats what’s allowed. What awful feeling that must be.

Which brings me to my next point. Anger is holy… unless it’s protecting the wrong thing.

A few months ago I was doing that horrible ritual of doom scrolling when I came across a post from a relative that said “Y’all need proverbs not pronouns.”

My first thought was “Y’all is a pronoun”…kind of famously.

My next thought was… I’m going to comment that. That’s funny and its going to make this person look so stupid….

Y’all, my anger can make me mean and trust I was angry! And then, mercifully, the angels of my better nature closed my laptop.

Sometimes its easier to be angry then hurt, or scared, or sad. I wanted to lash out, to take this energy that came with the anger – blame that person for my feeling but something deeper knew that wasn’t going to help. I need to, as Lama Owens teaches, turn towards my woundedness. Or as Rev. Chris preached so beautifully last week, I needed to meet myself with compassion.

While anger can often be protective, it might actually be protecting us from something a bit deeper. Something we need access so that we can metabolize and process it.

For me that something a bit deeper was my sadness and grief. Grief over not getting a loving and supportive extended family. Grief over the state of the world. And the sadness and fear that I feel about how trans, non-binary, and intersex people are treated in our society.

I have a lot of sadness and grief that I am dealing with these days… and I know I am not the only one.

Anger is holy but sometimes it’s protecting the wrong thing. It’s preventing us from those other emotions that might feel too big or too scary to face.

Finally, anger is holy… except when it is used as an excuse for abuse.

For many people and probably some in this room, the anger of a parent, a partner, or even a random stranger has led to abuse. To pain, to violence both emotional and physical.

For those of us in this room who have had to shrink, had to do the impossible task of controlling everything so that their parents or partner wouldn’t get angry, wouldn’t hurt you. I am so sorry.

That should have never happened to you.

If you have complicated feelings around anger, yourself, or others, I completely understand.

I can understand how anger can be scary and unstable. I can understand how you might have felt the need to suppress your own anger and/or how you would have really complicated feelings around it.

But abuse isn’t about anger. Anger is often the excuse used but abuse is using behaviors in order to maintain power and control in a relationship. Abuse is about power and control.

Abusers weaponize anger as an excuse to exert their power and control. They take anger, which is an innate emotion and they weaponize it.

If you have experienced or are experiencing this, please know we are here for you. And If you are the person who has or is committing the abuse, please know we are here for you as well. You can reach out to a caring companion after service, or to me or Rev. Chris. We are here for you.

Anger is holy, but not when it has been weaponized for abuse.

If anger has been weaponized, it can be difficult to feel safe in yours or others feelings of anger. I get that.

And I still believe anger is holy.

I believe it is holy because it is an innate emotion and our emotions – all of them – pleasant and unpleasant are there to tell us something.

If we come to a place with our anger. If we can recognize all the ways anger has been misused and abused and start to separate that from what we are experiencing, I believe we can begin to listen to what it is telling us and use it as a tool.

One of the things that anger tells us, is that what is happening goes against my values. When we find ourselves faced with atrocities and we feel our anger rise, that is a powerful thing.

Because It helps us to hone in what we believe. As, our call to worship from Audre Lorde told us: “Anger is loaded with information and energy.” And right now, having a strong and clear understanding of your values is of the utmost importance because our values guide our actions and actions are what are needed right now.

Anger can help us activate to help others or even to protect ourselves and our loved ones… Like standing up for someone who is being harassed.

But I think that the reason we are sitting with so much uncomfortable anger these days is that there aren’t any immediate actions we can take.

Like when we watch videos of families being ripped from each other hundreds of miles away or we read dehumanizing proclamations about ourselves or our loved ones.

So what do with that anger then?

I don’t have all the answers – I have way more questions than answers, but I think that these instances, this activating anger, can be a way to motivate us into either the actions we can take.

For those big instances of injustices like what is happening with ICE or the dismantling of democracy, there is always something we can do, but there probably isn’t anything you can do alone.

I believe our anger calls us into community. Calling us to take our energy and our focus and place it with others. Whether through donating or volunteering, its calling us to join something bigger than ourselves that is holy work. This is the work of this church!

But let’s be honest, there are a lot of atrocities and donating to an organization isn’t exactly going to expel all that energy.

Which is why we need to, as our kids taught us, work to become aware of our anger. When we can listen to our bodies and name our anger we start to have agency over it. This skill, this building a relationship of agency with our anger is such an important skill for us to have.

And maybe, like our kids taught us, once we identify what’s going on we choose to move that energy throughout by moving our body or tearing up some paper. or another action.

And sometimes, anger might be calling us to learn to sit with our discomfort.

The work of transforming lives, doing justice to build the beloved community, isn’t going to be comfortable work, especially if we are doing it right. Sometimes we are going to have to sit with our anger.

And the good news is that if we acknowledge it then its not going to get stuck in us, cycling with no way to metabolize. When we acknowledge our emotions we can watch them like we would a wave, rise, peak and fall.

And from a place of agency we can learn from our anger. We can ask it- “Is it that there is a deep woundedness and I need to address? Is there some action i need to take?”

Or could it be that I am just human, having a human experience and my heart is open and because of that this is what I am feeling at this moment.

Finally, your anger means you still have hope. Because, even if you don’t feel hopeful, anger is a sign that you do believe that change is both necessary and possible.

Right now, we are experiencing a barrage of injustices. I believe the all the actions and messaging are to make you feel helpless and in despair. But I will not comply with despair. And we are not helpless.

Not a single word of the future has been written.

And so to remain hopeful when everything else is trying to make you give up, is to take back the narrative and act in a way that will write a different future than the one they are so desperately trying to sell us.

My friends, Your anger is holy, It is pointing you to action, It is honing and refining your values and skills, and it is full of hope.

May the fires it offers light our way.

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

 

Our benediction today comes from Robert Monson.

I pray that love finds you today.
Love that reminds you that there is more than enough room in this world for nuance, for beauty, for grace overflowing.
And I pray that unconditional love and care and support be the anchor that holds you when the cruelty comes.
I pray that beauty and love show you how to be brave.

Go in peace.

SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 25 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link above to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

PODCASTS

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link above or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Carrie Holley-Hurt
September 28, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

This church has so often stood against the societal tides of dehumanization and marginalization. We have been a soft place to land for those of us who did not fit in and have felt alone in our opposition to the dominant messaging of oppression. This church has been and will continue to be needed by those here now and by those to come. But what does that say about our role and responsibility to one another and to those we will never meet? Rev. Carrie explores who we are, what we are about, and how Living Love can help us.

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

COMMUNITY MEANS STRENGTH
by Starhawk

We are all longing to go home to some place we have never been, a place half-remembered and half-envisioned. We can only catch glimpses from time to time, community.

Somewhere there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere, a circle of hands will open to receive us. Eyes will light up as we enter. Voices will celebrate us whenever we come into our own power.

Community means strength. That joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends, some place where we can be free.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Reading

WE HOLD HOPE CLOSE
by Reverend Julianne Jamaica Soto

In this community, we hold hope close. We don’t always know what comes next, but that cannot dissuade us. We don’t always know just what to do, but that will not mean that we are lost in the wilderness. We rely on the certainty beneath, the foundation of our values and ethics. We are the people who return to love like a North Star and to the truth that we are greater together than we are alone.

Our hope does not live in some glimmer of an indistinct future. Rather, we know the way to the world of which we dream, and by covenant and the movement forward of one right action. And the next, we know that one day we will arrive at home.

Sermon

NOTE: This is an edited ai generated transcript.
Please forgive any omissions or errors.

I think this church is a miracle. Not a miracle in parting the Red Seas or Buddha levitating over a river, but rather a miracle in that after years of people in this country tending towards isolation and disconnection and loneliness. At a time when we use the word epidemic for loneliness, this community exists.

This community bucks the trend by staying strong and growing. To me this is a miracle and it’s deeply needed. This church has always been a place That’s been needed and it will always be a place that’s needed. A community. And not just a community, but a community with an ethos of being about what is right. About opposing the harmful status quo.

Now we might not do that right perfectly and we definitely don’t always get it perfect. We are still growing and we have a lot to go until we are safe space for everyone who could come and find comfort here. But from what I understand of our recent history, we have been a place where many people who feel a deep resistance to the dominant culture or who have experienced marginalization because of the dominant culture could come and find community.

For example, this church has supported queer people since the 1970s by either providing space for things like the National Conference of Gay Liberation in 1971, providing dances for lesbians, my favorite, for partnering without you so that queer kids could have a safe and fun prom.

This community has done the right thing. It might have taken some coaxing every once in a while, but it did do the right thing. And it did it at a time, which feels a lot like this time, when homophobia was celebrated, encouraged throughout society and into the highest levels of power, where queer people face violence, where our government allowed AIDS to ravage the community when discrimination was the reality for so many people. It wasn’t popular and it wasn’t what most churches were doing, but then again that’s not what we’re about.

We aren’t about what most churches are doing. We aren’t about, or at least we try hard not to be about, those this close that harm, hurt and dehumanize. Instead, our mission is about one another, about humanity, it’s about liberation.

This church has taken a firm stance for the rights and dignities of people. We have a commitment to dismantling systems of supremacy in ourselves and in our church. Right now, Our values and commitments are in direct opposition to the powers that be.

Because of that, this church is positioned to be a community for those of us whose souls and hearts grate against the pervasive dehumanization that are the structures of this society. A place for those who have been deeply hurt by their spiritual houses of worship.

For so many people in this church we can be a place of belonging and healing. Now has it always done that perfectly? Nope. That’s because this church isn’t some removed magical thing. When I say this church or when I say this community I want you to hear you.

It’s you, church is you, and it’s me, it’s we. And it is the people that came before us, and it is the people that will come after us. All of us throughout time are this church. And because we are all people, we are not perfect. We are human, we have faults, but we seek to be better, we come together to be better.

My prayer is always that may we have more clarity than our ancestors, and may our descendants have more clarity than us, may it always be so.

So our religion has a polity, and it’s just a word that means organizing philosophy. It stretches way back to the 17th century, it’s called the congregationalist polity. Which just means that we, the members of this church, create and we maintain and we direct what we do as a body. So we don’t have a presbytery or a bishop or a pope that sets over us that dictates what we should do or how we should believe.

This is why we say we come together not by creed but by Covenant. We try to make good promises and have good boundaries so that we can create the kind of church that will set out to do the important work of our mission. And through living into these promises and commitments to one another, we keep this church alive.

We press against the marginalization and dehumanization out there. We make sure that those who need us can find us, and hopefully start to feel as though they have found their way home, or at least are on the right path. It’s us. We do this. And it’s the beautiful interplay of the individual and the communal.

It’s Leo Collas who’s created Easter eggs all over this church so that we can be inspired by those who came before us. People like Paul Kirby, who bought the poster that’s just right outside the sanctuary. It has the seven principles when the seven principles were first passed in the 1980s. Paul Kirby, who also, while being sick himself, helped organized doctors and nurses in this church to get vital and life extending medication to AIDS patients. To take the medication from those that have passed and to give them to those that were still alive.

To me, this story exemplifies how we, with our beautiful and precious inherent dignity, bring our hearts and our talents and our resources to this place and then we do the work with others to make beautiful and wonderful things happen. Those doctors and nurses they were at great risk for what they did but what they did was beautiful.

They weren’t supposed to be helping people with AIDS the way they did but it was the right thing to do. It was a compassionate and humane thing to do even though what they did would have been considered a crime but they understood that the bigger crime was to let people die when medication was available.

They acted justly and they acted at great personal risk and they were able to do it because they acted in community. Together, they ensure that people who needed medication got medication. And decades later, Leo is sharing their story with all of us, beautifully moving the past and to the present as a way to model and fortify us for the work that’s ahead of us. A beautiful dance between the individual and the collective. It shows just how much we need one another, how much we need each other to show up in all of our fullness.

When we bring ourself to this place, when we bring our talents and our hearts, our commitment and our resources to the collective, we do important and needed things, Things that will impact lives now and reverberate well into the future, just like those doctors and nurses. And because of this, we have a great responsibility to this place, to this community, to this church, to one another.

As Mary told you, today is Commitment Sunday. It’s the official kickoff to our pledge drive, and we are going to be hearing a lot about it between now and October 19th, about committing our pledges to this place. We do this every year and I bet for some of you it might be a little off-putting. I’m looking at you people who stream when NPR is doing their fundraiser.

How about some of you have been taught that talking about money is crass or rude? It’s not. It’s just a necessary tool to doing the work of living love.

There was a time in our country for our proto-Unitarian churches where there wasn’t a need for pledge drives. The state would just sponsor the churches. And while that seems way easier than what we’re doing right now? It wasn’t very UU. The separation of church and state are such a fundamental value to us, and rightfully so.

But the part about that separation is that it becomes our responsibility to keep this beautiful community that gives us so much going. It’s our responsibility to nourish those things that grow us that help us to live into our values so that they can continue to exist for us for each other and for those that we haven’t even met yet.

And money, because that is the way of the world is a major part of how we do this. Money is the reason that we have a building That even occasionally has air-conditioning. Money is the reason that we can buy curriculum and food and pay musicians so that we can nourish souls. Money is the reason that we can transform lives through things like supporting amazing work of the Texas Unitarian Universalist Justice Ministry or the Austin Sanctuary network. And it allows us to provide spaces to life-saving organizations like PFLAG.

And money is the reason we can meet week after week and we can stream week after week. It is the reason we have a computer program that is frankly very useful to reach people and share news and opportunity and rapid responses all in an effort to do our part of building the beloved community.

Money is also part of our values. And I wouldn’t say it’s even part of our shared theology. As Unitarian Universalists, we are committed to distributive justice, meaning we believe that people should be paid fairly for their work, paid a wage which allows them to live without struggling. We have been working hard to pay our staff up to the UUA’s standard, just like Mary told you. And my hope is that we can make it happen. I would love to see it happen this go around.

Because I want our staff, who do the everyday, sometimes challenging and often mundane work necessary to keep this place going, to be paid equitably. Money matters because it’s how the world operates, but most importantly, it matters because it’s how we make our missions happen.

And ultimately, living into our mission is what it means to live love. To live love is to do the very real and very tangible work of nourishing souls, transforming lives, and doing justice to build the beloved community. To live love means we put our focus and our resources on those things that will benefit each other and those we haven’t even met yet, or may never meet.

As these next few weeks unfold, I hope that you will not numb out, I hope that you will not start streaming your podcasts, but rather that you’ll think about the ways that you’ve been impacted by this place, the ways that you want to impact the world, and the ways that this community, this church, makes it possible. And then think about what makes sense for you based on your life and your other responsibilities.

Because we are needed. We’ve always been needed, and we will always be needed. The work we do is built on a foundation of those who’ve come before who felt responsibility to this place.

And the work that we do now, the contributions that we make of our time, and our talents, and yes, our treasure, will be the foundation that those who come after us will build from.

All of us, throughout time, dreaming of a more beautiful and just world, and all of us doing the tangible work to bring it into reality, so that, as Reverend Soto says in our reading, by covenant and movement forward of one right action and the next, we know that one day we will arrive at home.

May it always be so.

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

As we leave this sacred time of community, know that you are loved, know that you are held in love, and know that what you do matters, and know that we are needed. May we always remember that. Go in peace.

SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 25 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link above to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

PODCASTS

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link above or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Carrie Holley-Hurt
September 14, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

When we work towards justice, we are building a world of belonging. But what does that look like in our community, and what do we need to do? Rev. Carrie explores how we might build belonging and how our religious roots can help us.

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

IN TROUBLED TIMES
by Reverend Stephen Schick

From the loneliness of troubled times we come,
to discover that we are not alone.

Into the dwelling place of togetherness we come,
to collect remnants of hope.

From fear that all is lost we come,
to discover what will save us.

Into the comfort of each others arms we come,
to build a strength that is not yet vanished.

From darkness we come,
to wait until our eyes begin to see.

Into the refuge of fading dreams we come,
to remove illusions and focus new visions.

From despair that walks alone we come,
to travel together.

Into the dwelling place of generations we come,
to pledge allegiance to being peace and doing justice.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Reading

 

EVERYTHING IS STILL ON FIRE
by Reverend Julian Jamaica Soto

Everything is still on fire, despite your best efforts. In addition to living, it is clear that fire or not, you must level up in what it means to thrive. Right now, that means wrestling with the truth and the fact that everything is not all your fault.

I am sorry that everything is still on fire. Once hate catches the winds of “not my problem” blow, and the blaze is hard to stop. But hard is not impossible. Not yet is different than never.

You and community have an answer. You have a response to systems of power and control and to the cost of suffering. You and your community together are the answer.

You are not only a people of flame, but also a people of cold, clear truth. You know both where you fall short and where you flourish and where you still reach. Everything is still on fire but all is not lost.

You remain more nimble than steadfast, more unshakable than swayed by the latest rage. You are here to put out the ravenous flames and heal the world. Enough is enough.

Sermon

NOTE: This is an edited ai generated transcript.
Please forgive any omissions or errors.

So we’re gonna go back to the 19th century for a few moments. In the 19th century Universalist minister Hosea Ballou was out riding the circuit in New Hampshire. Now the circuit was when ministers would go from town-to-town preaching at different churches, on horseback, of course.

On this occasion he’s riding with the Baptist minister. And of course, they’re debating theology. And at one point, the Baptist says, “Brother Balllou.”

Now, I don’t know New Hampshire accent, so we’re just going to imagine New Hampshire’s in the South.

“Brother Balllou, if I were a universalist and feared not the fires of hell, I could hit you over the head, steal your horse, and saddle, and ride away, and I’d still go to heaven, because I believe it.”

Ballou looks over at him and says, “If you were a Universalist that idea would have never occurred to you.”

I love that story because it’s funny and it’s witty and I can just imagine the Baptist minister getting turning red and like having no response at all. And, let’s be honest, as a Unitarian Universalist that scratches my ego quite a bit.

But what does that mean? Does my religious affiliation really mean that I wouldn’t have such a violent thought? And if that’s true, is it a chicken or the egg situation? Is it that peaceful and kind people are drawn to this religion? People who would never think about stealing someone’s horse. Are those the ones that show up at this church? Or is that the teachings of this religion lead us to be people who would get all those horrible ideas just right out of our head?

I think a case could be made for both. We definitely are a self-selecting people. When I decided to come back to Texas, Austin was my non-negotiable. But there’s also something to be said about how our communities, religious, or others shape us and our actions.

For example, growing up, I had a front row seat to what we now, or what we called at the time the religious right movement, and I saw how it played out in people’s lives. I experienced people who loved their kid, they expressed levels of empathy for other people’s suffering and other people’s kids, and they would consistently vote for candidates who would vote against free and reduced lunch and vote against gun reform and vote against systems of support for parents.

But those candidates also promised to do away with Roe versus Wade. And as we know now years and years of those candidates getting the support of those single issue voters has led us to where we are now.

Now I can’t speak for those people who did that. I am sure that at least some of them, had they had their way, would not have wanted to the slow erosion of policies that protected children. Or maybe not. I can’t speak for them.

But what I do know is that often these kind and empathetic people were voting with the belief that the ends justifies the means. Yes, this person goes against everything I say I believe, but they said the magic words. And so I’m gonna vote for him.

And the fruits of those ends have not worked out for most anyone, but especially those in our society who are most vulnerable and are less likely to fit into the controllable blocks of white supremacy hetero-patriarchy, those that have been and continue to be marginalized.

The outcome of the religious right, backed by the ends justify the means, has resulted in who belongs in this country and who belongs in power getting narrower and narrower by the day. This week’s Supreme Court recent ruling in favor of racial profiling is a prime example of that.

Now many books have been written about how the religious right movement used those single issue voters for nefarious ends. We know that Jerry Falwell and others were upset that their tax exempt status was going to be taken away unless they integrated their white-only academies. They wanted a world that existed before the civil rights movement, and so they used an issue they thought would motivate people. They used abortion to get what they wanted. They grew their desires for a pre-civil rights America right into the Christian nationalist movement that we are living in today.

Now, I simplified that a lot, but I use that example because it’s a good one. We are in a place in our history where we can see this fully, we can see how this philosophy has played out, but mostly I brought it up because it has a lot of rich lessons for us right now.

And while I don’t mind exposing what’s happening, and I think it’s really good to take a historical look to see how we got where we are. I’m more concerned about what we’re going to do about it than anything else.

So one thing I want us to take away from this example is that the purpose and the impact of Christian nationalism is to narrow down belonging. They want and are making great headway in having a protective in-group and a vulnerable out-group.

Which means our call as a justice-loving and justice-seeking people is to do whatever we can to push against laws that have this at their heart. Like the bathroom bill that was recently passed here in Texas that is a blatant attempt to remove and erase trans and non-binary people. Or the Supreme Court ruling and all the ICE raids that are trying to further instill this idea that to be American, to deserve protection, is to be white. Or the many many attacks on reproductive rights that seek to control people’s body and put cis men in authority over everyone else.

Now of course this isn’t anything new. White supremacy heteropatriarchy has always existed in this country and has always shaped legislation. It has always been protected. There’s always been an in-group and there’s always been out-groups, but right now we find ourselves in a time when a concerted effort is underway to roll back all progress that has been made. And not just that, it’s a time when racism and sexism and homophobia and transphobia are celebrated.

So the good news is this isn’t new, right? This isn’t new, we know what to do. But we have to be louder than we have been and we have to fight harder against the normalization of it. We have to condemn it when we talk to our friends and our family, we have to condemn it. When we talk to the city councilors or school board members or the legislature or any person in any position of power, we have to condemn it with consistency and frequency pointing out what is happening and say wholeheartedly that we condemn it.

When we do this, when we use our voice and when we take actions, we plant seeds for a more just world. For the beloved community that we’re always talking about. And we do it with the sort of stamina that comes from knowing we are not going to see the fruits of our labor. At least not most of us.

What we are seeking to do external to this community is a long game, and we keep doing it. But here in this building, in this community, we act to see those fruits now. We do the work of growing ourselves and making sure to see where we see our own barriers of belonging, and we dismantle them now because while the work of building the beloved community will take generations, the work of building belonging in our community won’t.

And this is where we get back to Reverend Ballou. In order to be a community where we are building belonging, a community that honors and respects and supports the full expression of humanity, We must also be a people to do the work. The work that will make sure we aren’t the guy who would hit the other guy over the head and take his horse. To do the work to understand that the means, they don’t justify the end, they condition the end.

What we pour into ourselves, what we pour into our community, and what we pour into the people around us will shape what happens and will shape the ends. And this comes from the work of educating ourselves and then doing the spiritual work of taking what we learned from head knowledge to heart knowledge so that we live it. This is the spiritual practice of anti-racism, anti-oppression, and multiculturalism. It doesn’t just stay in books we read, we must embody it. We have to let what we learn be embodied so that we and the way we operate is fundamentally changed.

For those of us who are white, this means examining the way that white supremacy has shaped our world-view, how it has shaped how we view the global majority, what actions we take to uphold the systems, because systems cannot work unless we comply. And then we do the hard and the very sacred work of dismantling white supremacy in ourselves.

For those of us who are cis, we need to do the hard work of seeing how patriarchy has shaped our notion of gender, and how we comply, How possibly we weaponize it and then we do the hard and the sacred work of dismantling it in ourselves.

For those of us who are straight or able-bodied or have citizenship status or who have class privilege, those of us who hold any privileges, we must examine how we are complying to these systems that hold up so much oppression. We must examine the ways that we uphold those structures that seek to narrow belonging, because that’s what they are doing. And then we do the hard and very difficult work of dismantling them in ourselves and in our community. Because we just don’t become the person who wouldn’t knock someone off their horse. We have to work to be those people.

Reverend Ballou said,

“It is well known and will be acknowledged by every candid person that the human heart is capable of becoming soft or hard, kind or unkind, merciful or unmerciful, by education and habit.”

It takes work. It takes education and action. It takes learning from books, yes, and learning from each other. It takes empathy and risk and failure. It takes stepping outside of our comfort zone and growing ourselves. It takes education and habit.

This type of growth of spiritual practice and transformation is embedded into our religious tradition. Both Unitarians and Universalists believed it was important to work on personal growth. Of course, sometimes they missed the mark, especially the Unitarians, okay? They were often more individualistic than was helpful at times.

But the idea that we can learn and we can grow and we can be different from the larger system around us. That’s inherent to our faith. Our religious foundation is about finding that third way, not ping-ponging back and forth, not just doing the opposite of what those causing harm are doing, but breaking out of the paradigm of oppression altogether and doing things differently so that we can have more meaningful, more beautiful, and more inclusive outcomes.

I believe that justice, real justice, where everyone has a place, where everyone is protected, where everyone is represented, happens because those working to justice have worked to transform themselves. Have worked to dismantle systems of supremacy in their own heart. Have allowed themselves to break from the larger system. And that’s the liberation that flows into the community so that we can be a place of belonging. A place where our whole selves and where everyone’s whole self can come and find belonging.

And that work toward personal and collective liberation will imbue our work. It will create beautiful and fertile soil to nourish what will be born out of our work and the fruits of which will be expansive and beautiful and it will happen in the here and then now, all the work we do, all the movement towards widening our circle in this community, when we stretch our notion of belonging will benefit us all in this community, in the here and now, all of us, all of us, in the here and the now.

May it always be so.

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

As you leave this place and return to the normal rhythms of life May you feel held. May you feel held by this community and may you feel held by love. May you know belonging, and may you be the reason that someone else feels that they belong. Go in love.

SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 25 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link above to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

PODCASTS

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link above or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

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Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Carrie Holley-Hurt
August 31, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Every generation in our church brings something beautiful and unique to our living tradition. This Sunday, we will explore how the youth have helped shape our faith and how those of us who are older can encourage and provide space for them to grow and contribute.

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

By Elandria Williams

We are the children of freedom fighters, visionaries, and radical liberal theologians.

We are the phoenix rising out of the ashes of the McCarthy era and the civil rights, women’s, and queer liberation movements.

We are the survivors and beneficiaries of youth-led and youth-focused beliefs and programming that encouraged us to be change makers, boundary pushers, and institutionalists at the same time.

We are and will be the ministers, religious educators, congregational presidents, organizers, and social change leaders our faith has led us to be.

We wear our faith as tattoos on our bodies and in our hearts as testaments to the blood, tears, dreams, and inspirations of our community ancestors and elders.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Reading

Connie Goodbread

“Faith development is all we do. Unitarian Universalism is the faith we teach. The congregation is the curriculum.”

Sermon

Who loves Unitarian Universalism? Raise your hand or make some noise.

Me too!

Now who loves the chalice? So do I. It’s just such a beautiful and rich symbol, isn’t it.

So here is the thing, we don’t have Unitarian Universalism and we don’t light the chalice if we hadn’t listened to our youth.

Unitarian and Universalist way back in the 19th century kept looking at each other and saying …should we be friends. Should we make it official?

Maybe they kept running into each other at the same protest or annoying all the same people.

So the adults would get together and work towards merger but something would come up and they would say “we aren’t ready yet” or “maybe it not a good idea.”

Not to digress too much but one of the best pieces I found that might explain the reluctance to merge was found in a paper by John Cummins… he writes…

“One Back Bay matron was heard to sniff that Universalists were ‘nothing but Baptists who could read.'”

Universalists complained that Unitarians didn’t feel they’d had a good sermon unless they didn’t quite understand it themselves.

You got to love church history!

So the adults are struggling to make this coming together work.

But the youth of those groups said, we will do our own thing then and in 1935 they essentially merged. Now the Universalist General Convention voted that down but…

Well that did not deter them

And by 1949 their religious educators took their lead and formed the Liberal Religious Educators Association or, because its still around, you might hear it called LREDA.

The youth merger was motivating. And soon the adults started to take on lots and lots of merger work and finally in 1961 the Unitarians and the Universalists merged and became Unitarian Universalism!

Now I told that story the way I did, not to demean the really hard work and the millions of hours that must have gone into this really important decision, after all there were real theological differences between the groups. There were questions of polity and asset management.

Having set in my fair share of board meetings, I know those people did the phenomenal work for our faith.

But I wonder, would we still be debating merger or if one side would have died out completely … if our youth hadn’t motivated us.

To me This story highlights how vital our kids and your youth are to the heaith of our congregation. They bring a perspective that those of us who have to think about things like Polity and merger or assets don’t have. They can nudge us to move more quickly.

It doesn’t mean that youth were better than those adults or us adults, it just means that have a different lens.

I am a big believer that we need all sorts of lens… all sorts of perspectives… in order to live out our values. In order to keep our living-tradition living and evolving into something more beautiful and more encompassing of the vastness of creation.

Their perspective, their clarity of seeing how these two groups could and should work together was powerful. And I am so grateful that those adults took their lead.

Now onto the chalice.

The image of the flamming chalice was created for the Unitarian Service Committee in the 1930s so they could have an officially looking image to stamp documents they needed to get jews and unitarians away from the Nazis.

But for about almost 50 years, the chalice was just an image. It did get an update after merger, when the two circles around the chalice were added. But it wasn’t until the kids get involved that we get this very tangible symboi of our faith. In the 1970s the kids in religious education along with their religious education teachers would talk about the chalice, and explore the meaning, and then they would craft their own. Susan Richie writes that we think the chalice first made its way to the sanctuary when the kids would have their service each year.

Isn’t that beautiful?

I just imagine sweet little kids, like the kids in our church, bringing in their homemade chalice and lighting them as part of their worship service.

And from there some adults must have said, I like that, thats a good idea. And fast forward to today. Sunday morning chalices are lit in churches from Austin to Australia.

What a gift those kids brought into our lives.

Our kids and the youth in this church – with their different perspectives, with their own curiosity and ideas, their different ways of worshipping, have so much to offer us.

Maybe even the next chalice.

But here is the other part of the story… those kids and those youth were able to do what they did, merge two religions and give us our richest and most consistent religious symbol – because they had adults who created the structure for them.

They had adults who volunteered in religious education, they had adults who listened to them, and maybe even helped them take their ideas and make them into realities. They had adults who said, what you brought to our sacred space is meaningful and we will follow your lead.

And that is what I want to nurture and nourish at this church while I have the honor of serving you.

I want us all to to embody what Connie Goodbread said in the reading. That the “congregation is the curriculum.”

I want that for us adults and I want that for our kids and youth.

So here what I am asking of you.

First,lets get experimental.

My favorite theological idea is praxis. It comes from liberation theology and its the idea that we reflect on our beliefs, our values, and then we act based on them and then we reflect actions and then act, reflect… you get it.

This requires creativity This requires energy This requires flexibility And it might even require some failure.

Sol and I ask for your input and your energy. Because our kids have experienced a lot in those early days of the COVID pandemic. And they are experiencing a lot right now. We all are. But could you imagine being 5 or 10, or 17 years old living through what we are living through?

Our kids need us to pour into them. And while I think we have been doing a really good job, I think we can reimagine things to meet the moment for these kids.

So how do you help with this? Well one we want your ideas. We want your thoughts and we want to hear what you are observing.

Secondly, be flexible. It is my desire to welcome all that come into this space with the best hospitality, and that goes for our kids. If “the congregation is the curriculum” then how we worship when we have all ages services, or how we treat kids (and their people) when they are in the sanctuary is all a lesson, it is all faith development.

Let’s make those lessons good and fun and loving.

And I get that what I am asking is a lot for some of you. I am asking you to sit with two important values and prioritize one.

We have a value of being a radically welcoming space. We say we want to embody the beloved community.

And some of us have a value that church be comfortable. That services be consistent and not deviate from the way things usually are. And I get that, and I do not want to deem that as a value. I am so proud that this church can be such a nourishing space for so many.

But when we have two opposing values like that.

The desire to embody the beloved community and the desire to have our services always be what we want, we have to decide which one takes priority. Which one helps us to live more into our values.

I know which one I am rooting for.

And that leads nicely to my next point, I may disappoint you in this role and you may disappoint me. Let me disappoint you. I rather try something new to nourish our community and disappoint someone, than to do nothing and leave people out.

Finally, I need your energy. You time and talent. We have a consistent set of volunteers for religious education but we need more people especially for our youth group.

We need you.

Even those of you who think that you aren’t good with kids or you have no desire to teach kids, that okay. We have lots of ways you can help out and never have to read curriculum at all.

But I need you to volunteer and not… just because the kids and youth need you, which they do.

No, I need you to volunteer because I care about your spiritual development.

Whether it is Chalice Circles or 5th to 8th grade religious education – being a part of religious education grows you spiritually and in connection to others.

But you don’t have to take my word for you it, I recently asked some of our consistent religious education volunteers for their thoughts. From Melanie “It is a joy to volunteer with our amazing children. I learn as much from them as they do from me.”

Paul wrote that volunteering for 5th through 8th grade led [him] to the conclusion that one of our most significant UU tenets is community.

Arywn said “Watching the kids grow, learn, and play has been a huge expression of my UU faith, and has been genuinely transformative for me.”

Volunteering for religious education, any religious education, is not a sacrifice, it is a profound spiritual experience.

So please volunteer… Orientation is going to be on September 6th.

I feel very strongly about our religious education, and how it can transform lives for the whole lifespan of a person.

I feel strongly about our responsibility to our kids and our youth and the importance of a strong religious education program to grow our church.

My own husband has a story like many of you. He wasn’t particularly a church guy but when I found this place he felt strongly that it would be a good place for our kids. And he was right. Our kids have grown in this church.

They have made connections. They have grown in their values and in the creation of their own belief system which is something that is deeply needed in a world where the Christian nationalist agenda is encroaching into the classroom.

And because they have grown, we have grown. There have been times that they were the ones dragging us here. Because we were here we were experiencing our own growth and transformation.

If we want to transform lives, a strong religious education program is the way to do it.

But, given the week we just had at the capitol and in Minnesota I almost didn’t preach it. I thought about doing something else… something more justice oriented.

But then I realized this is a justice issue.

That the assault on trans people. The assault on reproductive health care. The school shooting. Are all apart of the larger narrative that our kids face in this political climate.

Our political system is screaming at them that it does not care. It does not care for them. That it doesn’t care if they are safe in school. It does not care if they have food or shelter or health care. It doesn’t care if they are safe in their body. It doesn’t care if their belief system is respected. It does not care about them.

But this is a place.

In this church we affirm loudly through our words and our actions that We care for them.

We see them. Who they are matters. Who they are is respected. And what they bring to this community is valued. May our actions speak this. And may we be a loving and soft place for all those who come through those doors.

May it always be so

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

As we leave this place and go back to the natural rhythms of our life May you feel, the warmth of your faith. May you feel by ALL empowered in this community.

And May you feel held by love.

Go in peace

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SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 25 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link above to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

PODCASTS

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link above or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776