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Bear W. Qolezcua
January 31, 2021
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
If you knew that your next meal was your last, what would you choose to eat? Imagine, instead, that we would sit around the long table of humanity and feast on the finest, most filling meal our souls could crave.
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.
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Learn more about Beloved Community at this link. – The King Center
Call to Worship
…My friends have been parents to me, siblings, and even children to me in a way. They have been all the pieces of me that were missing, denied, painful to experience, or hoped for but not yet seen through. We love each other because we recognise that we each need it, there is no ‘deserve’, only an honouring of humanity within each other. We have fulfilled one another’s needs and hopes, we have shown up for each other, journeyed together, been through heartache and grief and joy and love and peace and loss and fear together. There is no need for common blood between us, nor should there be. Blood is not a cement that binds people together. MY family is bound inextricably through the finest threads that, when brought together, make the strongest ties. MY family chose me as much as I chose them and I never had to earn it, fear it, or hide myself from it. They are welcome at my table. Their love fills the scattered dishes and we are all filled by them…
Meditation Reading
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 of 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 with 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. Someplace where we can be free.
-Starhawk
Sermon
One of my favourite Christian texts in the Bible is found in the book of 1 Corinthians 13: 1-8 (more or less). So, these verses they say “If I could speak any and every language of humanity and beyond but there is no love within me? Then anything I would say is nothing but noise, noise, noise.” The clanging of cymbals, the bashing of drums is how the Bible explains it.
“I could give away everything I own, sell it, give it to the poor. Give all my food to the hungry, my clothing to the naked. I could give up my very life for someone else. But if I do it with no love, if that place is not found within me. Then it means nothing. Love is patient, Love is kind. It has no jealousy, it is not arrogant. It has no ego and it does not inflate itself.
Love is not shameful. It is not selfish. It is not rude. Love does not demand that it gets its own way. It does not lash out. And it is absolutely not unapproachable.
Love doesn’t celebrate cruelty. It doesn’t celebrate injustice, or pain, or heartache. But only ever rejoices in true equity, in mercy, in goodness, humanity, and truth.
Every mystical gift, every power under the stars within this vast universe, every insight, or fact, or piece of wisdom that has ever been or ever will be will someday end. But love will endure far beyond. Songs will fade, stories will cease, and every good deed ever done will fall.
Even when all I am and all I have ever known is lost to history forever, three things will remain: Faith, Hope, and Love. And the most important, the most powerful, the most enduring, the greatest of these is love.”
A friend of mine put a post out that asked a sillyish quick question, that asked one of those “give me the first word off your head” just to engage the community he had built up there. He asked “if you knew your next meal was your last. What would you eat?”
I was in one of those moods where I chose to sit with the question and really consider it. I chewed on it until it had no flavour left and then I stuck it behind my ear for later. I wanted to think about the impact a last meal could make.
I’m pretty sure no one ever meant for those quick little questions to be anything remotely close to philosophical or theological. There I was, waxing toward the poetic and the philosophical and the theological. And I’m sure my friend was just absolutely thrilled to bits.
So, a feast of love. Taking in this never-ending source of power and goodness always leaves me both open to more love and also completely filled by it, so much that my own then pours out from me and into all the ones around me.
I cannot imagine a more generous gift we can give to one another than that.
I wrote about my illness in my early 20s that on good days I enjoyed things like chicken with lemon and garlic, or chili, or brisket, brussels sprouts, pumpkin, asparagus, beans, salads made from celery greens and fresh cucumbers. The food had very little to do with what was nourishing me, what was keeping me full and energetic enough to stick with it. To not just want to give up.
In those times, with my little extended families (and I had several), as I drifted in and out of consciousness or had to excuse myself… after a while everybody just kind of learned to leave me be and then pick up once I was back with them like nothing stopped. It became familiar. They knew what to watch for. To check on me.
They were patient, they were kind, they were not selfish. They did not want their own way. They were, in my life, the embodiment of love.
Uncomfortable and fearsome as those parts of my life were. They did teach me something. I don’t care what’s on my plate in the end. I don’t care and yet, I do. I do care.
What is served at the table for my feast of love matters the most of anything I will ever have. So far in this life I have learned to appreciate so much that has crossed my spiritual and physical plate. Things that had always brought comfort or, as I would learn, would bring it. But it was more where it came from and what came alongside it that fed me.
At my last meal, I would make sure I was completely surrounded by the people who have filled my heart so much more than I have ever needed to fill my belly. My feast took a long time in my life to be recognised and to share. And there have been times that I stepped away from the table because I couldn’t handle what was being served. But that meal comes from living a life full to the brim with the sweetest treats anyone could ever taste. The people I gathered to me.
The communities I am a part of.
The family I have created for myself.
They would be my honoured guests and they would be the last thing I would ever need in this lifetime.
Find your feast my Beloved, Beloved Community. Find your feast. If it is here in this community, good. Find it, enjoy it, and share it. If it is in some other group of souls, good. Find it, enjoy it, and share it. Wherever your table is set. Wherever you find yourself seated. Wherever that dinner bell is rung, go. Go to it! Celebrate it as much as you can, with as many people as you can, as fully and richly and deeply as you can. That table is set for YOU and it is yours to take in all that has been poured out there. Fill your cup to the brim. Let it overflow with the goodness, the peace, and the comfort, the contentment, the hope, and the communal sharing of all that is good and all that isn’t as good in this life. Joy and sorrow do exist together. But they are better shared.
If there comes a time, and I truly hope there is, that you find that your table is so full you cannot contain what is on it… Don’t close anyone out. Don’t build higher walls, build a longer table. More seats, more people, more love. Let it flow. Celebrate your feast of love. Let it be the food that carries you through when you feel so hungry for something more. Let it be what fuels you through this life.
Bon apétit.
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