It's Us

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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.

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