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Rev. Michelle LaGrave
February 23, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Rev. Michelle will reflect on this month’s theme of inclusivity and what this means for our mission of doing justice. So often we think about doing justice so that all will be included. But what might it look like to include all in doing justice?
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
WE GATHER TOGETHER
We arrive
as individuals as couples
as families
as neighbors
as friendsWe got here by walking by biking
by riding
by driving
by connectingWe bring with us
our joys and our sorrows
our laughter and our tears
our worries and our fears
our questions and our beliefs
our ethics and our valuesA ceramic mug of coffee sits on a table
next to an open laptop,
showing many people in Zoom cells.
Some of us
arrived early this morning
or joined us ten minutes ago
or encountered obstacles on their way
or will arrive just in time for the sermon
or will sign online later this week or even next monthWe
are sitting in pews
leaning on walkers or canes
stretching in the aisles
settling in wheelchairs
and relaxing in reclinersWe, members, friends, and visitors alike,
come from many paths
and join together as one congregation,
to lift up our highest ideals.We have gathered.
Now, let us worship.
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
First Reading
Micah 6: 6-8
Micah asks on behalf of the people: “With what shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
Micah answers on behalf of God: He has told you, O mortal, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?
Second Reading
History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With Courage, need not be lived again.Lift up your eyes upon,
– Maya Angelou
The day breaking for you.
Give birth again,
to the dream.
Sermon
NOTE: This is an edited ai generated transcript.
Please forgive any omissions or errors.
Micah was a prophet who lived in ancient Israel during the 8th century BCE. His hometown was a small village called Morsheth, not too far from Jerusalem, and he lives in a time of rapid change. Much like we are today.
Commerce was expanding, Trade was increasingly moving away from a barter system and toward a monetary system. Fraudulent weights and measures had become common. Land was being accumulated in large quantities by the hands of wealthy landowners and at the expense of small farmers. And the gap between rich and poor was increasing greatly and rapidly. The powerful dictated what they desired. Judges and other officials are taking bribes, people are lying, and the families, families are falling apart due to lack of trust in each other.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Micah lived during a time of rising power, wealth, and corruption. And so he went out into the marketplace and prophesied. During ancient times, people brought other people to court for breach of covenant and were heard by a judge. In Micah, as elsewhere in the Hebrew Scriptures, God brought the people of ancient Israel to court and indicted them for breach of covenant with the mountains, the hills, and the earth for witnesses, similar to the ways in which human courts worked. In God’s case they were out of covenant, out of right relationship with God. Of what were the people guilty of? Injustice. Injustice in the land was flourishing.
And so the people cried out as we still tend to do during a crisis, atheist or not, and ask, “What does God want from me? What do you want from me, world, universe? What do you want from us? How much would you take from us? Everything we have and more?” And Micah reminded the people that God has already told them what is good, What is required of them? And that is to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with their God.
Micah’s story is an age-old story and one we are in many ways reliving today, though now the threat of our own government comes from within and not from the Assyrian Empire. And Micah’s answer to the people is still a good one, a good lesson for us today. We are to do justice, love, kindness, and walk humbly, which in, you know, 3,000 years ago language meant remain in covenant, walk humbly, remain in covenant with the holy.
So today I’d like to talk just a little bit about why it is we do justice as Unitarian Universalists. At least enough to establish that doing justice is well within our living tradition. Micah is only one of many examples from the Hebrew scriptures, which are sacred to both Judaism and Christianity, of justice-seeking as a requirement of being in right relationship with the divine. Jesus’s ministry as well was a liberatory one and his teachings are foundational to Unitarianism and Universalism which both emerged out of Christianity.
Over time, our theological underpinnings have expanded as more and more people have joined us from more and more faith traditions and backgrounds, and as we have continued to grow in our spiritual and theological understandings. Today, justice is one of Unitarian Universalism’s shared values. We have covenanted with each other, congregation to congregation, to work to be diverse, multicultural, beloved communities where all thrive, to dismantle racism and all forms of systemic oppression, and to support the use of inclusive democratic processes within our congregations, our association, and society at large. That’s right in our bylaws, in our Unitarian Universalist Associations bylaws.
Finally, let us not forget that doing justice is right up there on our wall in this congregation’s mission statement. Together we nourish souls, transform lives and do justice to build the beloved community. So having established that we are indeed a justice-seeking, justice-building, justice-creating, justice-making people, let’s who it is that does or does not do all of this justice-making and how it gets done.
At times, I’m a little sad to say this, it seems that within Unitarian Universalism, and I imagine elsewhere, the loudest voices for justice are all about marches and protests and visiting legislators at the Capitol and sit-ins and die-ins and civil disobedience that results in arrest.
Do you know what all these have in common? Anyone want to guess? They require people to either be able-bodied or to put their disabled bodies on the line at a much higher, higher risk than is generally taken by non-disabled people. Yes, that includes even visiting legislators at the Capitol.
I tried to do this once. Earlier during my time here in Austin, I wanted to visit the Texas State Capitol. So, being physically disabled, I did my usual research into what I would need to know to visit a new place I had never been.
First, I found out that there was a special webpage called Capital Accessibility Services with all of the information that I would need. And right at the top of that page was an assurance that all capital, capital extension and capital visitor center facilities are accessible to persons with disabilities, as well as a link to an accessibility guide. Great, we’re off to a good start here.
Then, with further reading, I discovered that it was actually a considerable distance to walk from the parking garage to the building where I wanted to go and an even farther walk from that garage to the only accessible entrance to that building which was actually on the other farther side from the garage. In other words I’d have to walk all the way around the outside of the building to get inside without using any stairs or very many stairs.
Then I thought, well, I can rent a motorized scooter for the day. Most recently, I often use a rollator, but I have often used motorized scooters at large events and in large stores, though I don’t actually own one myself. No problem, I thought. There are rental places which will deliver a scooter to my destination. I don’t even have to figure out how to transport it there myself.
And then I read, motorized scooters are not allowed on the capital grounds. Okay, now that’s out too. So how am I supposed to get into the capital?
So, I kept reading. A wheelchair was the last option. To get it, I would have to walk from the parking garage to the visitor center, which was in the opposite direction of the Capitol building itself, get the wheelchair, and then wheel myself back past the parking garage and all the way around the Capitol building and to the other side to go in the accessible entrance. There was no way. I don’t have the arm strength for that. That’s why we have motorized scooters in addition to wheelchairs.
And then I realized that the only possible way I or anyone with limited leg mobility and arm strength could go to the Capitol was to be pushed in a wheelchair by someone else. My spouse Micah was unable to take me on that particular day and it was too late at night to call by that time and make arrangements with anyone else. Besides I wondered who could I ask? Who would be willing? I mean it’s a pretty big ask to call someone and ask them to spend the entire day with you pushing you around in a wheelchair. And what do people who don’t have anyone in their life who could help them do? And what about all the people who can only use a motorized scooter? There is no circumstance under which they could make a visit to the Capitol. Despite the website’s promises, this was not and is not accessibility.
I share this story, not, NOT, to get you all fired up and headed down to the capital to demand change on my or any disabled person’s behalf, but to give a glimpse into just a very little slice of only one person’s disabled life on only one evening trying to plan only one outing. There are many, many more stories out there with different or worse or better experiences than mine.
And there are many, many more of my own stories that I could share, but I chose this one because in it I was attempting to do justice while being disabled. People who are disabled need to be more than the subjects of doing justice. We need to also be full participants in justice-making.
The point I want to make today is that there are as many ways of doing justice as there are of being human. So, so many people are living in even greater than usual risk in this country today. Primarily people who are undocumented and people who are transgender and also people who are BIPOC, LGBTQ plus and disabled, as well as anyone who has a uterus and is able to get pregnant. We are living in a time of rising fascism and we are gonna need as many people as possible doing justice.
So it’s time to put away any of the old ideas about what it means to do justice the right way, or the best way, or the only way. We need lots of different kinds of justice-making, and we need justice-making and justice-doing to be as accessible as possible.
Some common justice-making actions are already pretty accessible to a lot, if not all people. Things like writing letters or making phone calls. There was a great example of a letter from one of our congregants, Denise Pierce, going around lately. In it, she called for a company, in a very positive way, to increase the accessibility of their website. She explained that she loved the company, really wanted to shop there, and why she wanted to shop there and then said that she would need them to make it more accessible for her in order for it to work.
There are lots of different ways, new or different ways that we can think about making justice-making more accessible. People can help with digital security or giving rides or digital communication or preparing food for justice organizers and events, and many, many other ways. We need to start thinking outside of the box.
Remember, we don’t have to make the entirety of any action or event fully accessible to everyone. That would be near impossible. But we can make different components of justice actions or events accessible in various ways for various needs so that more and more people are able to engage in a piece of the work. It is a duty, an imperative, doing justice in these times.
Here are just a few tips we can help make this happen just to get started.
• The first thing we need to do is accept that no one can fully know what it is like to live in another person’s body or to live another person’s life. Each of us has the right to determine the level of personal risk we are willing to undertake or not in any justice-making, justice-doing we take on and no one else has the right to make judgments about whether or not someone else should have taken more or less personal risk bodily or otherwise and this goes for everyone not just disabled folks.
• The second thing we need to do is to take care of our spiritual and emotional selves. We are facing tactics that are intentionally meant to overwhelm us or shut us down or cause us to freeze. We have a responsibility, a moral duty, to deal with the overwhelm so we can get unstuck and get moving in whatever ways we can and in whatever ways we do best. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Give each other as much of a chance as possible to get unstuck and get unfrozen and get moving. We need as many of us to join the resistance as is possible. Every person and every action counts. No fake fights about our justice-making or anything else that might serve as a diversion from the moral, ethical, theological and spiritual imperative to do justice.
• The third thing we need to do is pay attention to inclusion in any of the social justice actions or events we are planning. If someone can’t march or sit or stand or hear or see or walk or whatever else it is very well, what can they do? If someone is in a greater risk category because they are undocumented or black or queer or all of the above or some combination of the above, what might they need to better or more fully participate? We might not know, and if we don’t know, let’s make the effort to find out.
So to recap, These are my three getting-started tips.
- Number one, we each get to assess our own level of personal risk, no second guessing by anyone else.
- Number two, we need to take care of ourselves and each other so we can, if possible, get unstuck and live up to our responsibility to do justice.
- And number three, pay attention to inclusion in any social justice events or actions we are planning.
By keeping love at the center, we can continue to widen the circle of concern farther and farther. And by including more and more people in the work of justice-making, we can do more justice.
As Maya Angelou says, “Let us give birth once again to the dream.”
May it be so. 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
In all of the ways that our bodies and our minds work, both literal and metaphorical, I say to you, go now 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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