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Rev. Leona Stucky-Abbott
January 11, 2026
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
This sermon fosters understanding of erroneous Biblical expectations regarding God’s actions, of the human longing that informs people’s faith, of differences between polar perspectives and where they might coalesce, and of how UU principles may prompt action rather than remain just words. It tells stories that provoke, explore, and suggest.
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 we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.
Call to Worship
First Thessalonians 4:16-18
“For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words.”
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Reading
From AS I LAY DYING
by William FaulknerAddie, reflecting on her differences with her neighbor Cora, says: “One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed i was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.”
Sermon
Rev. Dr. Leona Stucky-Abbott is a Unitarian Universalist community minister and a member of our congregation. A mother and grandmother, she often says that lived experience has been her greatest teacher, shaping her theological and psychological insights. The Fog of Faith: Surviving My Impotent God is her memoir chronicling her first 23 years as a Mennonite – a compelling story of how life can irrevocably alter a faith journey.
Welcome. I’m so glad to be here speaking with you, as one of you. What a privilege. Thank you for sharing this time. Hopefully as an old and wise woman.
I’m a plain speaker. I tend to put things right out on the table, and that can unsettle some people. I don’t intend to be provocative for its own sake. While I’m a UU minister, I also carry 18 years of rural Kansas redneck in me and about 500 years of Mennonite coursing in my blood. That’s not an easy combo. Some sermons don’t require much self-care, but this one might. I trust you’ll be wise on your own behalf.
Preaching begins as a one-way conversation. The second half comes from you. I want to learn from you. I’ll be toasting your responses in Howson Hall with a cup of coffee after the service. Please share your thoughts and feelings. And if you’re watching online, feel free to respond digitally.
NOT JUST A MATTER OF WORDS
A couple of days before the Women’s March in January of 2017, I found myself protesting with thousands of others at Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC. Afterward – chilled to the bone – I ducked into a bar, ostensibly to warm up. Wine was elegantly priced. Beer would have to do.
The place filled quickly, and a young man – maybe in his early forties – took the seat beside me. We exchanged the usual small talk. I asked what brought him to DC.
He said he had pieced together a couple of extra days off and scraped the funds to attend the inauguration. He had to be there, he said. He had prayed for this day. He wasn’t going to miss the victory he believed would finally set things right. It was too important.
Perhaps my face betrayed my surprise, because he began to explain. He told me about his work back in Connecticut – how he picks up the bloody pieces after tragedy, how he must explain the inexplicable to families, how he must catch the culprits who rarely stay in custody long. The courts do little. The crimes go on and on. The cruelty continues.
He hears horrors every day – stories of what has happened and fears of what will – often from the very people who treat him as the enemy. “What the hell can I do?” he asked, shoulders sinking, voice wavering. He was sick of it all. I tried to take in, not just his words, but the whole of his experience.
He spoke of gruesome cases. He spoke of rage – rage at the “high and mighty liberals” who looked down on him. His body trembled when he described their children taunting him. But when he spoke of the promise of an authoritarian leader – someone who would uphold the law and demand obedience – his face lit up. For him, this was not rhetoric. Not slogans. This was real leadership.
Eventually, silence settled between us. We looked at each other, then down. I nodded in recognition of his predicaments. We both knew that in forty minutes, we had crossed a profound chasm. We shook hands, a gesture too small for the tenderness of that goodbye.
Later, I wondered if I had been too passive. Should I have said, “Let me tell you why I came to DC?”. But no. It was wiser to take in and hold. To let him touch my heart. I have often imagined his spirits soaring during the inauguration. And I still hope our meeting meant something to him. It did to me.
The Apostle Paul came to mind. You can guess I was once a seminary student (who else thinks of Paul at a bar?)
Paul, too, spoke of something that was not just words. He believed that Jesus’ resurrection was the final evidence that God’s power would radically transform life on earth. He proclaimed news that humble, hurting people longed to hear: that God would soon overturn the powers of the world and reveal ultimate justice. There would be care for ordinary human beings in this world after all.
Paul’s apocalyptic vision imagined God returning soon, within their lifetime, with unfathomable glory. The faithful rising to meet God in the sky. The dead lifted from their graves. Every cruel ruler destroyed. Every oppressive system dismantled. The world transformed.
Imagine it: despots gone. Oligarchs stripped of power. Bye-Bye! Every person long trapped in poverty suddenly free to live in peace. Life where love abounds. Death with no sting. However you picture it, Paul’s vision was astonishing. And for him, being a bit rambunctious and over-the-top, the way a Kansas Redneck might be, it was not metaphor. Not poetry. Not just words.
Of course, later interpreters tried to soften Paul’s claims – spiritualizing them, postponing them. But the longing behind Paul’s vision has not disappeared.
After World War I, soldiers returned home traumatized by trenches filled with rotting bodies – human and horses alike. They had been forced to shoot at people who looked and believed like they did. They came home saying, “This world is full of evil. God will not let this stand. The end must be near.” Perhaps that was easier than saying, “God, if he is there, let this happen.”
Biblical scholar, Walter Brueggemann, teaches that apocalyptic thought arises from people who have lived through too much hell on earth. It is the cry of those who long for decisive help. And he reminds us: if we have not yet experienced that kind of hell, we are no better than those who have.
William Faulkner’s character Addie Bundren, in As I Lay Dying, understood the need for visceral and real spiritual happenings. Addie, lying on her deathbed, reflects on her neighbor Cora’s desire to save her. Addie says: “One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.”
I have been reflecting on Addie’s thought for fifty years. I resisted it. I forgot it. It returned again and again. But now – at this moment in our history – I finally understand.
If we treat authoritarianism as just a matter of words…
If we treat money flowing to billionaires as just a matter of words…
If we treat a media unwilling to ask hard questions as just a matter of words…
If we treat bribery twisting foreign policy as just a matter of words…
If we treat the tackling, imprisoning, and renditioning of immigrants as just a matter of words…
If we treat corruption of the justice system as just a matter of words…
If we treat missiles fired into fishing boats and government agents shooting innocent victims as just a matter of words…
If we treat sending bombs and other resources that will be used to destroy a people and their homeland as just a matter of words…
If we treat breaking international law by violating the territory and resources of smaller nations, like Putin does against Ukraine, as just a matter of words…
Then we should not be surprised if our salvation turns out to be just words too.
Our Unitarian Universalist tradition rejected the idea that sin is inherited like a genetic trait. We became allergic to words like sin and salvation. But today, sin and salvation need not be abstractions because they are no longer just words.
Without democracy, oligarchy fills the vacuum. These are not just words. Those with power write laws that protect their power. Wealth concentrates. The poor, the unfree, the unheard multiply. The transfer of wealth accelerates – until the governed are governed no more, but ruled.
This now established sin, in our country, has been significantly aided by conservative Supreme Court decisions over the last fifteen years – decisions, like Citizens United, that opened the floodgates for money to buy legislation, later decisions removed caps on political spending, and finally in 2024 the conservative Supreme Court made bribery nearly impossible to prosecute unless a specific quid pro quo is spelled out in advance. Bribery is essentially legal now, another tool that escorts money and power to a select few.
These consequences are real. They are measurable. They devastate our democracy.
If I am wrong in what I have described, and you believe me, then – as Paul said of himself and his own followers – If we are wrong, we are, of all people, most to be pitied. So think hard about what you believe. It is dangerous to assume we know God. Dangerous even to assume God exists. Dangerous to think as Paul did, that God’s actions would save us. Dangerous to trust easy answers that remain just words.
But principles – principles are not doctrines. They are not screeds or creeds. They are not inherited. They are chosen. They are lived.
And our values – our Unitarian Universalist values – are not just a matter of words. They shape us. They guide us. They act in our actions, every day, when we are true to them.
- We believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person.
- Justice, equity, and compassion in human relations.
- Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth.
- A free and responsible search for truth and meaning.
- The right of conscience and the democratic process.
- The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.
- We respect the interdependent web of all existence.
Bribery is not in our lexicon. Cruelty is not in our lexicon. Authoritarianism is not in our lexicon. Our values make us capable of effective loving relationships – even when we fall short. They shape how we show up in the world. They are, quite simply, the way we roll.
They are not just words, if we live them.
Still, like humans everywhere, we live in the murky muddy miasma of daily choices and energy limitations. We can only do and understand so much. And sometimes we are surprised by the effect other people have on us and we on them.
I am surprised to hear myself sounding more and more like my policeman friend these days.
What happened to the law? I keep saying. Why don’t the courts do something that matters? How can we clean up crimes and cruelty when it seems to flow out in so many directions at once? Why do we become the enemy of the people we are trying to support? I can appreciate my policeman’s frustrations and his self-defeating mantras that seem to reflect reality. I feel them too.
Perhaps we are trapped in Paul’s predicament, where we simply misunderstand. Do we have a God? If so, what does that God do? Paul thought he knew, and for Paul, what he knew was not just a matter of words. We’ve waited 2000 years, and we wonder, what did Paul really know?
I admire Paul’s get-up-and-go spirit, his restlessness, and his way of putting out there what he thought was salvation for his whole world. His self-awareness made him openly admit that he couldn’t do the good he wanted but often did the opposite. He wasn’t one to fool himself. He didn’t want to be the one ‘most to be pitied.’ He was trying to track reality, a spirituality that would be reality. He didn’t want just a matter of words.
His assessment of his world is not that different from our own. We know our oligarchs will not create the world we need. We know we have the fight of our lives on our plate right now. Wouldn’t ultimate assistance be great? But we might have learned the lesson that Paul represents, not the lesson he tried to preach.
We know the struggle and the pace. We have many ways to approach it, and we can invent many more. One suggestion that comes to my mind is simply to gather all the phone numbers of our senators and representatives, our school board members, our state leaders, our city council members, mayors, and our national and international leaders.
Get those numbers and add them to your phone’s favorites list. Calling is said to be the most effective way to contact political leaders. It doesn’t matter what party they belong to or whether you resonate with their vision. Simply call and make yourself known. Not just your words, but make them deal with your whole self, the yearnings of your heart, your unswerving principles that must be honored. You can do that.
And one more thing. Try extending yourself to some people who are not saying the same things you say. Listen until you hear the true yearning of their hearts, and try a little tenderness. Listen until you hear more than just their words. Try it. You can do that too.
And another thing. Seek out the group support that is readily available here and beyond.
Sometimes it helps to do everything we know to do and something we have not yet dared to try. Think about it and do something that fits you. You likely already do.
So now we come back to Addie. She is lying there in that old trailer, longing to get back to her kinfolk, her home. To be buried in the ground she trod upon as a child. Her rough and tumble family don’t know how to make happen what they know should happen. They try, and they are trying, but every effort is weighed down, distress, dysfunction, and the general depravity of the human endeavor coalesce against Addie’s soul’s yearning. She is spent. She doesn’t have words, but her mind veers toward her neighbor Cora, who so wants to save her, to get her to pray, to relieve herself of her burdens and turn them over to God. Surely then happiness would follow her beyond the grave into the arms of God.
But Addie knows herself the way Paul knew himself when he said the Good that I would do, I do not do. Sin is not just words to her. Real life tore her from her ideals over and over again. She lived the anguish of the murky, muddy everyday. No longer in possession of the hopes that might have animated her younger self, she knows she is lost and is dying. Words cannot save her. What she needs from God now, is more than just words. A lot more. Perhaps she could be lifted up to the heavens, as Paul thought, or healed on the spot – not just words.
Perhaps for her, like for Paul, God won’t do what must be done. What then? What then? Perhaps that experience of ineptitude, abandonment and death does not shock her the way it shocked Mark’s Jesus when he cried out on the cross, “My God, My God Why have you forsaken me?”. Perhaps Addie knew it all along. Salvation must not be just a matter of words, or death is an ultimate sting, is the final victor. As she lay dying, salvation needed to be More. In the teeth of death, Addie had the little life that was left to her, and she knew that something needed to be more than just words. A spiritual journey is life’s journey and that is a dangerous thing. It was for Paul, for Mark’s Jesus, and for Addie. Is it for us? Does the knowing kill the yearning inside us?
We live in tension. The knowing that often hits through news cycles wants to quell yearning. The yearning hits solidly against any truthful knowing that opposes it. It hits and it bounces off. What a dilemma – this being human.
The yearning in Addie’s heart, as she lay dying, that yearning for more than just words, may live, recognized or not, in our own hearts. The yearning and the knowing. May we hold in our hearts, Addie’s yearning and knowing, and our own yearning and knowing, and try a little tenderness.
Thank you so very much.
And the people say. Amen. 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
May we go forth from this place with these people and try a little tenderness with ourselves and others who have different answers but live in the same predicament.
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