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Rev. Michelle LaGrave
May 18, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Theology, as well as its scriptural sources, tends to come with a lot of baggage, both personal and cultural. How might we unpack, or set aside, this baggage to reclaim lost sources of spiritual wisdom? What new insights might we gain? Let’s bring our sense of imagination out to play in the spiritual realm.
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
GOD RUNS LATE FOR CHURCH
by the Rev. Gretchen Haley, adapted
Today God is running late, trying to find their seat
Scanning the room for someone they know
Or someone they don’t
God’s feeling evangelical, but not in a judgy way
Mysterious, but not manipulative
God can’t stop thinking about the James Webb telescope
And the possibility that time is not linear
Which God might have guessed
From the never-ending urgency of some upcoming legislation
And the likelihood that sometime next week Halloween candy
Will show up in the grocery store.
God is tired.
Tired of grief and white supremacy,
And the warming of the oceans
Not to mention they usually come to the evening Vespers service
And it’s hot. Why haven’t
the public swimming pools been opened yet? God wonders.
And of course we’re all like – No kidding
God, can’t you do something about that?
But God’s hearing aid batteries ran out and
They haven’t had time to order more
Or, that’s what they say when asked
And can hear the question, but really
That last emergency room visit maxed
Their credit cards, and their partner’s been
Working Door Dash for some extra cash,
But it’s just not enough, and really
God just wants to BE PRESENT
STOP WORRYING ABOUT EVERYTHING
SING. BREATHE. LAUGH –
We got you, God, we say.
We’ll settle in, and we’ll be present, and we’ll sing.
We’ll tell stories, and breathe deep
We’ll remember ourselves, and offer whole
Galaxies of gratitude for all this beauty
For still-blooming roses, and newly-hatched owlets
Zucchini bread and the US women’s soccer team,
For protest letters and
Entire villages of people saying
You are safe here
God,
Your creation is not yet done
Creating you.
Come, let us worship, together.
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Reading
PRAYERS FOR THE COSMOS
by Neil Douglas-Klotz
The reading today comes from Neil Douglas Klotz, a scholar in ancient languages. This is going to be a reading about the Aramaic language. The Bible, in the Bible, in the Christian Old Testament and the Christian New Testament and the Hebrew Scriptures, there is a mix of languages, primarily Hebrew and Aramaic. Aramaic is the language that Jesus and all the disciples spoke. The Bible was originally spoken.
The stories were not initially told in either Greek or Latin. It was all Hebrew and Aramaic. So we’re going to be talking about translation a little bit later. So this is what he has to say about the Aramaic language.
The Aramaic language is close to the earth, rich in images of planting and harvesting, full of views of the natural wonder of the cosmos. Heaven, in Aramaic, ceases to be a metaphysical concept and presents the image of light and sound shining through all creation. Like its native Middle Eastern predecessors and like other ancient native languages around the planet, Aramaic is rich in sound meaning. That is, one can feel direction, color, movement, and other sensations as certain sacred words resonate in the body. This body resonance was another layer of meaning for the hearers of Jesus’ words and for the native Middle Eastern mystic. In fact, this writer finds similarities between some of the most important words used by Jesus and words used in Native Middle Eastern chants for thousands of years before Jesus’ own time.
Sermon
NOTE: This is an edited ai generated transcript.
Please forgive any omissions or errors.
I begin with a disclaimer. This sermon was not paid for or sponsored in any way by Beacon Press, the Association of UU Musicians, also known as AUUM. This congregation’s music department or Brent Baldwin.
I found myself in a time of reflection recently, both with the upcoming ends to this interim period which will happen in just two short weeks from now, as well as my having recently celebrated the 15th anniversary of my ordination. So, I’m going to share a story that goes way back to the beginning of when I first became a Unitarian Universalist. I found myself in far northern Maine living on the Canadian border in a very small UU congregation, which might have 12 or 13 people present on a snow day. And I struggled.
Now keep in mind I had made a simple theological shift to the left by showing up at a UU congregation in the beginning. I did not have any kind of history of religious trauma or harm, I was just getting even more liberal than I already was. But I struggled. I struggled to grasp what this Unitarian Universalist theology was, what it was all about. I read the pocket guide and all the introductory books, and it still just wasn’t jelling in my head,
But the music did, so I asked for and was given a UU hymnal for Christmas one year. This was way back in the beginning of the hymnal. It was only maybe four years old or so at the time, and it felt pretty radical to me. I loved it. I sat in my recliner and spent hours just flipping through the pages, reading the lyrics to the hymns and songs, playing the melody I could read music, playing the melodies in my head, focusing on hymns that we had recently sung in church, thinking about new ways to conceptualize God, sin, salvation, evil, heaven, all the big theological words and concepts.
The hymnal, this very hymnal, became my own personal UU scripture. It is filled with bookmarks and notes and scribblings all over the place. And I also used it, not just for growing spiritually and theologically, but also for comfort.
Some of my favorite songs that helped me to re-imagine theology, re-imagine God, included number two, “Down the Ages We Have Trod, Many Pass in Search of God, Seeking Ever to define the eternal and the divine. That’s what we UUs are all about, isn’t it?
In this hymn, I found God described in multiple ways as parenthood, nature, humanity, love. I loved number 23, bring many names. Many names for God, beautiful and good, celebrating in parable and story, God as mother, not just father, not just old, but also young, a young, growing God.
All these things began to break open my mind’s and my heart’s and my spirit’s. And I began to not just reinterpret, not just to grow theologically and spiritually, but to reimagine my faith. Now, I had my own personal UU hymnal and study that I did solo at home. You all have, you’ve all had an amazing experience this past year, and I think there’s still a couple more to go this year of Evening Vespers with Reverend Carrie and Biss. They have been leading Vespers all year and using the hymnal as a source for lectio devina practice. If you haven’t joined in a vesper service yet, I highly encourage you to do so. It is a great way to sort of break open some of those old concepts and come to new understandings.
And I may as well, I mentioned now that yes, it’s not 1997 anymore, and our hymnal is already getting old and already in need of some updates in terms of language, especially around gender, which is still pretty binary in here. But it’s also still pretty radical in a lot of circles.
We as Unitarian Universalists are a tradition of come-outers. Many of us who are raised Unitarian Universalists do remain as UU adults. Some do not. But many, many more come out of other faith traditions and join us as UUs as an adult. What this means for us is that along with our children and youth, our adults are also in many, many different places of spiritual, theological, faith development. We’re all in different stages all at the same time, which can be challenging. It also provides an amazing opportunity where we can support each other as we learn and grow.
Now, I do want to say that unlike my simple theological shift to the left, there are many people, especially queer people, who come out of traditions which have caused significant harm, even trauma, even PTSD or PTSR. That’s important to remember as we go forward, not just in this sermon, but in our shared life together, that there are some sensitivities around that.
That said, we are going to try to have some fun with the Bible and theology today. Someone once said that our UU musicians are some of our best students. I absolutely believe this truth. It makes sense to me, not just because of my own personal history, but also because much of the Bible, in its day, when it was still an oral tradition, was sung, not spoken. We don’t think about that we’re reading lyrics to songs. We think we’re reading a book, right, but much of it was actually shared in song.
So if we are to begin to reimagine theologically and spiritually, we need to begin with some very basic understandings of the Bible. Many of us were not raised in churches or in churches that used a Bible very much. And so we may have vague ideas of some biblical references and some biblical stories, but may not feel quite all there. Others of us are possibly pretty expert in it, depending on what church you came out of.
And yes, by the way, our hymnal is chock-full of biblical references and biblical stories. So if you think you’re going to our very liberal, fun, fun, radical UU gray hymnal to get away from the Bible, you’re not. Sorry. The references might be a little more subtle. They might have been re-imagined somewhat, but they are all there.
So why look at the Bible? Why is the Bible important to us as modern scientific based Unitarian Universalists in the 21st century. Well, for one reason, because both Unitarianism and Universalism were originally Christian. One of the radical aspects, especially of early Unitarianism, was the use of biblical criticism. William Ellery Channing, who some call, rightly or wrongly, the father of Unitarianism, studied the Bible in its original Hebrew. He did not rely on the King’s James or any other version, but went back to Hebrew himself and did his own form of biblical criticism and applied the use of reason to the Bible, which was radical in its time. And unfortunately, it’s radical again. But that was sort of the origin of our Unitarian faith.
And the other reason that I think is important is because of our national culture. We are currently fighting things like keeping church and state separate, keeping the Ten Commandments out of the public schools. We kind of need to know what we’re talking about when we show up and protest this.
Also, it’s filled, the Bible is just saturated throughout our contemporary culture. There are biblical references everywhere all the time, things that we very easily miss if we have not ever had any exposure to the Bible ourselves. So it’s just good for general sort of understanding our own culture.
So why make the effort? I mean figuring out the Bible is a heck of a lot of work. I could dedicate all my time to studying the Bible and still not get all the way there. And yet, it is important so that we can, so that I can grow spiritually as we come into, as I come into, new understandings of old theological language.
We often talk about a certain aspect of Christianity having a very literal interpretation of the Bible. So I want to take a moment to point out that while we, UUs tend to think that we’re very metaphorical when we look at and read the Bible. Lots of times we’re not. And here’s the sign. Here’s how you can tell if you are taking it literally. When we get upset at reading the Bible, we’re taking it literally. That’s our clue. When you start feeling it in your body and in your heart and in your spirit, it’s time to try, if you can, keep it in your mind. There’s possibly some aspect of trauma that’s a little more challenging to work with, to shift into a more metaphorical, more story-based version of the Bible. We can look at it, hopefully, without getting any more upset than when we read Winnie the Pooh getting stuck in that hole in the tree because he ate too much honey.
Ancient people, this is also helpful to know as we try to reclaim and re-imagine some of these old stories, ancient people did not understand history as something factual, objective, unbiased. That’s a 20th century understanding of history. Notice I didn’t say 21st century. They were telling stories and re-telling stories, sharing them around the campfire and passing them down to their children. These stories grew and changed over time, and they probably all had or still have elements of truth, elements of reality, but not 100%.
My favorite example is the story of Jericho. You might have heard of it probably through song about the walls of Jericho tumbling down. If you read the biblical story it’s actually kind of funny because they like circle the city so many times and they blow trumpets and like there’s this whole ritual thing before the newly freed tribes of Israel, fairly recently, newly freed tribes of Israel, come in and take over this magnificent city of Jericho. They blow their horns and those walls just come crumbling down. Well, luckily we also have biblical archeology and from that we know that, Yes, the walls of Jericho did actually crumble down. They crumbled down a couple of millennia before the people arrived to conquer the empty city. Elements of truth. Maybe they even did it all the magical circles, I don’t know. But the walls were already crumbled before they moved in, and apparently had to rebuild, I would imagine.
So to begin to understand the Bible, it’s also important to keep in mind that the oldest stories are between 3,000 and 4,000 years old. Let that soak in for a moment.
We, in 2025, are still telling and talking about stories that are almost 4,000 years old. And in some cultures, that age is even older, but for the Christian and Jewish traditions and Muslim traditions, up to 4,000 years ago. That’s sort of awe-inspiring when I think about it.
When we study the Bible, it’s important to use multiple lenses as we look at it. Now this is just going to be a rocking sort of, we’re going to rock and roll and highlight some biblical things, any one of which we could do an hour-long class on.
So this is more of a teaser. We need to use multiple lenses when studying the Bible. We need to understand the culture of the times, as well as our own culture, because that shifts how we understand the language and the stories. I have a favorite social media meme that helps us keep things in perspective. You ready for this? 2,000 years from now, people will not be able to tell the difference between a butt dial and a booty call.
Let’s not think we don’t have the same problem looking backwards 2,000 years. Now, admittedly, LGBTQ+ issues might be one of the hardest aspects of the Bible for us to wrap our minds around. I know you’ve done some work on that in a couple of classes recently, this year and last year, with AJ Juraska. So some of you may already know this.
But one of my favorite examples is from Leviticus. We are told not to lie with a man as a woman because it is too bah. That’s the Hebrew. In English they translated this into an abomination. In English, abomination sounds pretty horrible, right? To more accurately translate from the Hebrew, it’s probably better to say, it is ritually unclean due to a crossing of boundaries or a mixing of categories. So this isn’t about morality or ethics. This is a priestly term about not mixing categories. It is about ritual.
So, one trick scholars use to better understand ancient words is to look at multiple uses of the same words. So in this case, we can ask, “What else, besides lying with a man as with a woman, is too Ebah? What else is abomination?” And then we can get sort of an idea of the degree of what we’re talking about in terms of ritual uncleanness.
- You can also improperly use incense,
- use a blemished animal in a sacrifice,
- eat unclean animals like shellfish or pigs,
- remarry your former wife,
- or have sex with your own wife during certain times of the month.
Those are all abominations as translated into English in some versions of the Bible. So that can help get us a little bit of perspective about what’s going on. In addition to this idea of ritual purity, part of what was going on during this time was laying out some rules for the Israelites who are moving in maybe or maybe not conquering the empty villages of Canaan to have their own culture, to keep their own culture, to have their own ethnic identity, to be separate in some way or undefinable in some way from the Canaanites.
So one way to do that, to not lie with a man as a woman, really probably had a lot more to do with a prohibition on not visiting or using the sacred male prostitutes that were hanging out in the temples of the Canaanites. So we’re not going to go use sacred prostitutes in the temples that the Canaanites use and go to. We have our own separate faith that tells us not to eat pigs and to use incense in a certain way and to not use male prostitutes.
Furthermore, ideas about sexuality and reproduction and orientation and gender were all vastly different from what we have today. So I’m going to talk a little bit here about, this is the sex-ed part of the sermon.
At the time, ancient Israel’s thought of semen as seed, remember, were very agrarian, very related to the earth. The semen was the seed and the woman’s uterus was the fertile earth. You plant the seed in the earth, stuff grows. You waste seed, if you spill it, it needs to go into fertile earth.
Also later Greco-Roman context had their very different, And we’re talking about a span of thousands of years, so there is not one biblical culture. There was the ancient Israelites who had many cultures evolving over the thousands of years, and then the Greeks, and then the Romans, and that was after the Persians and a whole bunch of other people, all having very different ideas of sexuality and gender.
So this is my favorite New Testament Example, on which I did a paper that really irritated my very conservative professor. Someone wrote a scholarly paper on this.
In the New Testament, you may have heard of or read about women being required to cover their hair, because it’s unseemly to have your hair uncovered. Well, part of this had to do with some, to me, very bizarre idea about how sex works. That there was some kind of like suction pump action that happened between the man and the woman and that the place the semen resided was in the hair. So men kept their hair short so that they wouldn’t hold on to their semen and the suction pump thing would work and it would go into the women in their hair. And they had long hair, nice long hair to hold all that semen. And then if there’s a whole bunch of hair with a whole bunch of semen, you’ve got to cover it up because that is not okay to show in public, okay?
We are not talking about our modern ideas of sexuality when we try to go back to the Bible for our rules about it. Never mind that we have all sorts of translation issues with Hebrew and Aramaic. The Bible was not written in English. And despite my experience in a bookstore a couple of decades ago, in which I visited the religion section as I was very tickled to find a plastic-wrapped Bible with a sticker on it that said, “Autographed copy.”
We don’t actually have any English version autographed copies of the Bible. We’ve had to translate everything from Hebrew and Aramaic, and much of the time, not directly from Hebrew to English or Aramaic to English, but Hebrew or Aramaic through either Greek or Latin and then to English, sometimes through Greek and Latin before English. So, and as we talked about with that soundscape, the ideas of direction and color and sound meaning, It’s very, very different languages. We’re not comparing Italian and Spanish when we compare Hebrew and Aramaic with English.
And by the way, keep in mind how many of you understand Shakespearean English easily? Never mind Beowulf. We have to work at it, right? and that’s like a lot lot lot less time than we’re talking about with Hebrew to English.
So as we begin to re-imagine, as we begin to re-imagine, remember “God is running late”, the future is unwritten, the end is the beginning, Loosen, loosen, loosen. You do not have to carry the weight of the world in your muscles and bones. Let go, let go, let go.
Aramaic is rich in sound meaning. As we Imagine we can look at one word or one phrase at a time, whatever it is that you’re ready for, interested in, whatever tugs at your heart or your spirit.
I love thinking about “Balm of Gilead,” which is one of the songs in our teal hymn, though. And it talks about our sin-sick soul. So many of us have been conditioned to turn that inward that our own souls are sick with and full of sin. What if we simply turn that outward? What if the song is really talking about being sick of all the sin that is out there in the world? What if sin actually means something more like injustice or cruelty. Can we all agree that we might have sin-sick souls if we were to think in those terms? And I’m not telling you to do that. I’m giving you some examples of what I have done.
What about the love of Jesus? What did it mean for Jesus to love people? He was essentially the first liberation theologian. He was on the side of everyone who was marginalized or oppressed in some way, including women and children. What does that kind of love mean? He died to save us all. What does it mean to be saved? What is salvation? Can salvation happen here on earth? Maybe it’s not about the afterlife. How do we as a people save ourselves here on earth as we fight all that injustice and cruelty?
I also love the 23rd song that Bobby McFerrin wrote for his mother in which he changed some of the words in a very poetic way and also changed the gender of God and God all of a sudden feels like a nurturing comforting mother figure. So I encourage you as you hopefully go forward engaging this process of re-imagining on your own with those words and phrases that stick with you, that you want to work on or think differently about. I’ll leave you with a translation of, actually my own translation, of the 23rd Psalm, in which I refer to God as love. And you’ll get some sense of it not being quite poetic but having a little bit like the way that grass is talked about. It’s not just grass or not just meadow there’s a lot there’s a particular kind of grass
Love is my guide, I shall not lack.
Love makes me lie down in beautiful new fresh grass after rain.
Love leads me beside still waters with great care.
Love restores my soul.
Love leads me in well-worn paths of what is right and just for the sake of love’s name.
Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no misery, for love is with me.
The symbols of Love, they comfort me.
Love sets a table before me, across from those with whom I am in conflict.
Love revives my head with oil, My cup overflows.
Surely, goodness, sweetness, and constant, unconditional, never-ending, steadfast love shall follow me all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of Love for the length of days.
May it be so for each and every one of you.
Amen and blessed be.
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
God blesses you and keeps you
God’s face shines upon you and encompasses you with compassion
God’s face lifts up your burdens from upon you and gives to you peace
Go forth blessing all others as you yourselves have now been blessed.
Amen and Blessed Be.
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