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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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