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Rev. Dr. Leona Stucky-Abbott
February 22, 2026
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Infants begin to develop their brains in the context of a mothering matrix, which involves the important relationships of their early years. Internalized relational patterns gradually establish expectations and structures for how babies think. Their novice experiences also distort who mother is and why she exists. These distortions mirror the ways humans construct their relationships with the Divine.

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

Black History Moment: Elandria Williams

This morning we are called into worship by taking a moment for Black History by lifting up Elandria Williams. According to the Country Queer podcast Elandria Williams identified as a Black, southern Appalachian, disabled, gender-queer, pansexual, Unitarian Universalist.

They was one of the co-founders of Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism or BLUU They were a leader co-founding many different organizations and movements all with the goal of liberation. Before their death in 2020, Elandria served as a UUA co-Moderator following the Hiring Controversy.

Elandria led a short but powerful life in which their heart, activism, and tireless commitment to ant-racism and anti-oppression has profoundly changed Unitanan Universalist for the better. Here is their poem:

WE ARE WORTHY

We are worthy
Not because of what we produce
But because of who we are
We are divine bodies of light and darkness
You are not worthy because of what you offer
not because of what is in your mind,
not for the support you give others.
not for what you give at all
We are worthy and are whole just because
In this great turning, in this great pandemic,
in this radical readjustment and alignment
We are not disposable, we are needed
we are the very people that have withstood everything that has been thrown at us as a people
and as Maya Angelou would say
Still I Rise
We arise from the pain
We rise from the grief
We arise from the limits people place on us and
the limits we place on ourselves
We rise to be the children and the ancestors
We rise to be our true selves
Our true selves in relationship to our families
and communities
Recognizing our liberating and whole selves
Honoring them and others as we strive for
abundant communities, abundant lives, abundant
relationships, and abundant
values and
cultural manifestations
We are worthiness personified
I, you, and we are worthy and deserve a life
where we are not always fighting for our existence
Imagine what we could create if we were not always in the struggle
Imagine what we could envision if we could just be let to just go there
So tired of always having to resist, to fight, demanding, pushing
To everyone that has the courage, the power, the
ability to co-create what we want and need
while rooting in what we can’t lose and who we are
You are the visionary
You are the hope
You are our ancestors’ dreams
No, you might not ever end up on some list somewhere
But you are on a list in someone’s heart and mind
And if it’s in how you move in the world so people can see by example

You are the embodiment of what we need
Thanks to all that are the embodiment
The embodiment not of productivity but
the embodiment of radical love, care and sanctuary
It’s time
Embodiment time
Embodiment
Living ones values out loud
Let me everyday live my values out loud
Let us everyday live our values out loud
Embodying our values
Not the productivity quotient
Beyond productivity
Past productivity
True embodiment
Life

By Elandria Williams

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Reading

Psalms 139

O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me. Thou Knowest when I sit down and when I rise up; Thou discernest my thoughts from afar. Thou searchest out my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether. Thou dost beset me behind and before, and layest thy hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it.

Whither shall I go from thy Spirit! Or whither shall I flee from thy presence! If I ascend to heaven, thou art there! If I make my bed in Sheol, thou art there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there thy hand shall lead me and thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, “Let only darkness cover me, and the light about me be night,” even the darkness is not dark to thee, the night is bright as the day; for darkness is as light with thee.

For it was you who formed my inward parts; You knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you for l am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works, that I know very well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed. How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! I try to count them – they are more than the sand. I awake in the end – I am still with you.

Sermon

UNVEILING THE MOTHER BEHIND GOD

Thank you for letting me share with you again. I really appreciate the privilege.

It may be difficult for some of you to hear about the mothering matrix. As a therapist, I know how tender the mix of pain and love can be with our very human mothers. And yet, the crucible of healing is often found where hurt and hope meet. So take a deep breath and protect yourself if you need.

Talking about mothering does not mean that fathering is less important or less difficult. Historically, fathers were often cast as the expendable ones, sent into danger and away from daily care, Human history, for all genders, holds both joy and suffering-and plenty of it.

Focus on healing – there is no shortage of mother love or loving mothers and we treasure mothering relationships. They often are our best and most meaningful connections, Profound wisdom lives inside those years of loving each other.

GIVING GOD RELATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS

It was probably the Greeks, three or four hundred years before Christ, who can be “blamed” for hooking us into gendered dualism. They wanted to rank characteristics. Somehow the meme got started, and our early Christian fathers picked it right up. We already had Christ as the head of the Church and man as the head of woman. They also dictated that because woman was weaker, she should obey. Likely the Church Fathers didn’t appreciate women’s ways of thinking, so rational vs. emotional got thrown in. Above and below, namer and named, creator and creation, and all the rest of the valued opposites came along.

The intent was to show that, just as Christ is of higher value than the Church, man was then of higher value than those who obey him. And thus gendered dualism became a meme with serious staying power. After 2000 years you can find it, in various forms, in the newly released Heritage document. Remember the people who wrote Project 2025? They produced a new document, Building a Stronger America, with a segment on family.

So now we “know” who God is. He is the one on the esteemed side with Man, and Woman is on the demeaned side. It’s clear, right?

Today, a curve ball is headed right at the gendered dualism list.

Let’s ride that curve for a minute by asking where the Greeks found that idea – Where did people actually experience that dualism list in their daily lives? Did they? To really understand it, we need to become babies and experience life as it came to us from the time we were born.

D. W. Winnicott, a celebrated child psychiatrist and theorist, says that we first learned that reality could relate positively to human beings through feeding. As infants we felt hungry, and mother’s breast or a bottle came to us, helping us transform from a negative feeling state, hunger, to a positive one. Warm milk tasted good and sustained us. Of course, we did not have religious words like “transformation” but we gradually internalized a pattern of experience that became a hope and expectation: when we need something, with the right kind of seemingly magical help, we can get it. You know, the Rolling Stones –

“You can’t always get what you want, but if you try real hard, you might find, you get what you need.”

That’s the spirit we learned from day one.

We cry or fuss, and sure enough, somebody picks us up, brings our cheeks to her lips, rocks us, hugs and holds us, bounces us on her knee, changes our diaper, sings to us, distracts our attention to some better focus – someone figures it out for us and we feel better. And somewhere along the way we begin to understand that this magical reality-shapeshifter person is big while we are little; she is strong while we are weak; she seems rational while we feel emotional; she has wondrous knowledge while we know almost nothing; she is creator and we are creation; she seems to be everywhere at once, like she has our whole world in her hands; and we feel best of all when we are one with her.

In other words, mothers, fathers, and the significant others who assist-the mothering matrix – is our first God. (sometimes also our last God.) But her relationship to us lays the foundation for the falsely gendered opposites that have meemed their way into our conception of who God is and who we are.

Dr. Ahna Maria Rizzuto, who wrote The Psychological Birth of the Living God, claims that by age two and a half, toddlers who live in a Christian culture, even if their parents are atheists, will have a basic internal sense of God. These toddlers think of God as the one who lives in that big house on the street corner. And they know their God-character is really special. Toddlers’ internal God image is typically made up of aspects of their internalized significant others – like mom and dad.

So now we, as young’uns have an internal magical God with whom we can relate, who has some special powers put at our disposal if He likes us. Pretty cool.

In our “Owning Your Religious Past” class a few weeks ago, I remembered an old image of myself, age four, standing in the dark stairwell at night. Before I climbed the stairs I started praying out loud. I wanted that monster in the closet at the top of the stairs to hear that I had God with me. If Mommy or Daddy were with me – little fear. But alone, I only had God, and though I was still afraid with my God at my side, that was much better than no protection. And guess what: my prayers were answered. That monster did not show his face as I ran past the closet and took a flying leap into the bed.

The human imagination of who God might be is deeply embedded in the functions of the mothering matrix. That’s not surprising because the mothering matrix is our first experience of relationship, and a highly dependent, hard-to-describe relationship.

Psalm 139 illustrates quite well how an infant might feel in relationship to mother, but Psalm 139 gives those traits to God. That dearly treasured psalm feels potent to the four-year-old inside us. Plus it has a theological message with wide appeal. First, God is personally involved in the in-utero creation and development of all human beings. Secondly, God loved us personally, before we knew how to love. Therefore every life is sacred. No matter what circumstance we are born into, according to this theology, we have a starting point with God’s love.

Psalm 139’s theology seems quite beautiful in several ways – but falls short in others.

WHERE MOTHER DISAPPEARS

Mommies are not acknowledged for what mommies do. Mommies know when we sit down or rise up. Mommies have magical eyes behind their heads. Before a word is on our tiny tongues, mommies know it. Their knowledge is too wonderful for us, so high that we cannot attain it. Wherever we might try to go, there is mother and therefore we are safe. For it was mothers who formed our inward parts and “knit” them together in their wombs. How weighty for us are mothers’ thoughts. How vast the sum of them.

The credit for this wonderful saving relationship goes straight to God and, via God, is mirrored back to humanity as manly traits. Mother is wiped out of the picture. Her treasured traits seem to belong not I to her but to a male God. Though we consciously know better, we have a tendency to remove her.

Intrapsychically, a similar experience deprives us of full awareness of how mother is there for us day in and day out. Her most intensive caregiving, in our first few years, happens before we have memories. It is surprisingly difficult for us to fill those unremembered years with appreciation. And almost no one publicizes the incredible work of those years.

Perhaps because we don’t consciously remember those years, we don’t have a strong sense of mother being there for us. Our faith pictures of Deity fail to mirror back the reality of her existence and her deeds. She is disempowered by our God images, and – until the feminist movement in the 1970s – also disempowered in our wider world images. When images of women became more ubiquitous, the dissing of Mother began to shift. These tendencies to discredit mother’s work and blame mother for not being there still hold tremendous power in our unconscious minds, even when corrected in our conscious knowing.

With this faith traditions, believers and even nonbelievers have a difficult time finding clarity. What is real or not real in our beliefs about Mother and God? For a number of years, now, that question divides us. If God is the one who creates new life and “knits” together our pieces in mother’s womb, why should mother have any say about it? Her body is God’s tool.

On the other hand, those who comprehend what a woman goes through – when her body and chemistry and psyche make massive changes to create and nurture united cells into human form, and to birth a baby that is huge compared to what her body can reasonably deliver, and then to take on the challenge of caring for and loving, with a mother’s love, which usually involves significant sacrifice all through the growing years from infant into adulthood, and to love this new creation for the rest of her whole life – anyone who understands and lets go of the confusion about who does the creation work, a woman or God, would surely support a woman’s right to choose everything about her circumstances, including when she will nurture and birth a child.

GOD, MOTHER, AND FINAL HOPES

Another place where God and Mother twist into confusing roles is where the faithful count on God to do what mother has done for us in our infancy. We hope against hope that God will have the magical power that once, likely long ago, belonged to mother. On our deathbed, we want God’s mothering – Good enough mothering – that when, like an infant, we must again experience the primary dependence of helplessness-unto-death, we will be saved by a Mothering God who will create us anew, provide for our needs in an alternate home, mirror an identity to us, and love us enough to make life good.

That is who we want: a God who is a good-enough mother, but with supernatural powers that a mother could not have. What we want, and what we get? Who knows?

Our mothers were destined to become human beings in our eyes. Likely not all at once, but her ignorance, her willfulness against ours, her missteps, her exhaustion, her meanness, selfishness, inabilities, laziness, busyness – these were all heavy blasts against our illusion of her greatness as a need-satisfying person.

Gradually, we had to accept that she was just a human with as many imperfections as any other human, and maybe more, because historically she had to make herself real and powerful when much of her world was against her. No one would covet that role. All of her failures registered profoundly with us because she was our savior, the one who got us through, somehow.

Many times it wasn’t pretty. Many times she didn’t have a clue how to be helpful – or she didn’t care. All of that hurts because we weren’t big enough to know what to do. When we got into jams that she couldn’t transform, it really hurt. Much of the time, we experienced our troubles as her failure. Our pain is disproportionately experienced in relation to mother. Often as Mother’s fault.

GRADUATE STORY

I’ll give you a quick illustration and then close. We’re almost done.

In 1988 several friends and I were graduating with our doctoral degrees. Standing in line on this glorious day, waiting to process in, John (not his real name) said he “could just feel his mother sitting out there in the crowd, bearing with pride. She’s soaking up all the credit for everything I did to achieve this degree.” He said.

Marilyn said, “My mother isn’t even here. As is typical for us, there’s always something more important in her life than celebrating me. She is now on a cruise to Europe with her friend. She tried to excuse it, saying the tickets were a much better price for these particular dates.”

And I added that my mom died many years ago. “I’m feeling a kind of emptiness.” I said. “If my mom were here, I’d feel twice as good about graduating. I can’t get the feeling she is sharing this with me. It all seems pretty empty.”

I don’t know. With doctoral graduates like that – what’s a mother to do?

I’m not dismissing our issues with our very human mothers. I know all too well the kind of hurt we carry in relation to them, and when we experience too much injury with our mothers, we are truly broken. And the other way around – when we feel too much injury with our children, we are broken. It takes a long time to heal, and we often need a helpful process for that to happen. These are tender concerns, often impacting our theologies.

Profound love and delight shared with mothers.

CLOSING: FREUDIAN SIPS

Usually we start with show and tell at the beginning, but I’m ending with it. My son gave me this coffee cup a number of years ago. We laughed together because, somehow, who knows how, it was so real for both of us. The front of the cup has a picture of Freud saying, “When you say one thing, but mean your mother.” On the back of the cup it says, “Freudian Sips.”

Needless to say, it’s my favorite coffee cup.

The last thought I’m offering, may be a few Freudian slips combined: Likely our historical Judeo-Christian God – or most any God – wouldn’t mean much without Mother, way out ahead, paving the way for Him.

And the people said, Amen.

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 expand the generational love we bring to one another and to our world.

SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 26 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link above to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

PODCASTS

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link above or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

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Bis Thorton
February 15, 2026
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Our world is full of so much greed, violence, and hatred. Many of us have begun to wonder: “Is love really enough?” Recently, the Texas UU Justice Ministry (TXUUJM) joined 30 partner organizations in a procession to the ICE family detention center outside of Dilley, Texas. Join TXUUJM Intern Minister Bis Thornton for a journey through the events of that day. Together we will explore what it means to hold love at the center of all things.

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

We are recognizing Black History Month, by learning about and lifting up the amazing Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Harper was a black woman born in 1825 to free parents. She used her life and her talents to work for the abolition of slavery, civil rights, education, and suffrage. She held dual affiliations with both Unitarians and the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. At a time when Christianity was being used to sanction slavery, Harper challenged Unitarians and other Christians to embody the libertarian message of Jesus.

She participated in the Underground Railroad, corresponded with John Brown, lectured across the United States and Canada about the evils of slavery. She wrote both poetry and fiction to help bring about those realities to the reader, as well as a message of liberation. After the abolition of slavery, she put her energy into suffrage, into universal education, and to civil rights.

Speaking to the National Women’s Rights Convention in New York, she said, we are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul. Harper is such a beautiful example of a person who used her talents and her value to work for liberation.

She not only spoke out against injustice, but she also painted a beautiful picture of the world we could have. Her poetry and fiction and short stories were both prolific and widely read, and she may have been the most read author, African-American author of the 19th century. But because she was both black and a woman, white supremacy and patriarchy did its best to bury her name after her death in 1911.

That’s until a few decades ago when her work was rediscovered. Her message has been found to be just as empowering today as it was in her time. Professor Melba Joyce Boyd said, Harper’s insight developed during an era rife with violent enforcement of racism, sexism, and classism constitutes a viable ideological framework for contemporary radical thought. She is an amazing Unitarian.

And you can learn more about her on your order of service. Here is a link to learn more about her. ///////////////////////////////

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Reading

From Terrence Dixon’s 1971 documentary titled, MEETING THE MAN, JAMES BALDWIN IN PARIS

“Love has never been a popular movement, and no one’s ever really wanted to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people. Otherwise, of course, you can despair. Walk down the street of any city any afternoon, and look around you. What you’ve got to remember is what you’re looking at is also you. Everyone you’re looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster. You could be that cop. And you have to decide in yourself not to be.”

– James Baldwin

Sermon

NOTE: This is an edited ai generated transcript.
Please forgive any omissions or errors.

It’s Tuesday night, and I am setting out my clothes for the next day. Tomorrow, I will get on a bus with many other people and travel to Dilly, Texas. Those detained inside have been demanding their release, shouting libertad, freedom.

We are coming to demand the same from the outside. I prepare my clothes. My shirt with the minister’s collar, a sweater, blazer, slacks, wool socks for my boots. We are planning to wear blue in solidarity with Liam Ramos, the little boy taken from Minnesota to Texas who was photographed wearing a blue rabbit hat. And every time I look at that now famous photo of him, I cry. He reminds me of my little brother, who sometimes goes by Mr. Cat.

He reminds me of the Palestinian children in photos who are lost or crying or scared, but who have signs of their joy nearby, a toy, a blanket, a shirt given to them by someone who wanted them to be safe. He reminds me of the children taken to Indian schools and the children who were born in internment camps, and he reminds me of the adults that those children grow into. I don’t own any blue clothing. I remember that my spouse Evan has a baby blue keffiyeh with a rainbow olive branches on it. I ask if I can wear it, and of course Evan says yes. I hang it up next to my outfit for tomorrow.

It’s Wednesday morning. It’s not yet dawn. I am greeting people as they arrive at the church to board the bus to Dilley. I ask everyone as they come up to me, are you coming on the bus with us today? People either say yes, or they say no, actually I’m going to carpool.

One woman says, no, but can you help me? I tell her I’m not sure, but she can come inside and have some breakfast and sit with us while we figure it out together.

A tiny fox trots around the church. I see people pointing at it and taking photos and smiling. People are excited for breakfast. A young man holding an iced coffee shakes my hand and we laugh about how cold his hands are.

I have a plastic rosary in my pocket. I call it my emergency rosary because I take it with me when I want a rosary that I’m not going to worry about because it’s not going to break.

The bus is late, but eventually it arrives. I say my morning prayers on the bus. I’m sitting at the front with Texas UUJM Minister Reverend Erin Walter because we are both wearing those minister’s collars. It’s important for visible religious leadership to be at the front of the bus because it often helps decrease harassment from law enforcement.

My morning prayers include words from the Gospel of Luke. I recite the words of the priest Zechariah to his son who will grow up to become John the Baptist, and I am saying them to the entire bus, to all the travelers, and to all the people inside of the detention center. You, my child, shall be called the prophet of the Most High, for you shall go before the Lord to prepare his way.

In my mind, there is love following behind us all, and we are making it possible for love to arrive. John the Baptist lived a strange and beautiful life, and he died a violent death at the hands of the state. I don’t want anyone to die.

We arrive at a place called Watermelon Park to hold a vigil and to hear stories. A man from the Carrizo Camacudo tribe addresses us. He says that this nation has broken treaties with indigenous people. and that it is breaking treaties with all of us now.

He charges us to change the narrative about this country, that no one is illegal on stolen land except those who are stealing it. He tells us about the world that this used to be, a world with clean water and clean air, a world with land that was beloved by all who walked upon it. I look around while he’s talking.

There are many people here who love each other and who love the land, or who are trying to learn how to love each other and to love the land. I love this flat, dry, scrubby Texas earth. I love the mesquite trees and the dusty ground and the yellow grass and the unbelievably enormous sky. I wonder what it will take to love it better.

I wonder what will make us remember this place as a place that grows watermelons instead of a place where the government holds people in cages.

A 13-year-old girl named Kendi speaks, and she is so small. When I was 13, I didn’t know how small I was. Now, whenever I see 13-year-olds, it’s all I can think about. Kendi was detained with her mother when she was just three years old.

She tells us how scared she is of dogs now. She believes that when she sees a dog, it should give her a feeling of joy, but instead she is incredibly frightened. Our relationship with dogs is so ancient. Humans and dogs have been friends for so long. I don’t want her to be scared of them either.

I look at the land and the sky and I think about dogs and I see so much breaking. Families are being broken apart and everyone is being broken away from who we are and what we are connected to. We are being broken away from other people and from the land and from the animals. We begin our walk from the park to the detention center. We pass by a prison on our way there. I feel my heart sink. My body is heavy.

The land and the people are being forced to hold all of these buildings that do nothing but house and cause and perpetuate violence. I wonder how many jobs there are in this area and how many of them are at the prison and the detention center. I wonder what it sounds like to some of the people in this town that we are begging for these places to be shut down.

I feel overwhelmed at the thought of what it will take to extricate everyone in this town from the violence they are being forced into, and I feel overwhelmed at the thought of what it will take to extricate everyone in this whole country from all of the violence we are all being forced into.

Many of us are trying to say no to the violence and do something else. I know it’s true here in Dili, too. Someone in front of me is carrying a huge white paper-mache sculpture of a bird. They’re holding the bird up on a stick like a sign.

I wish everyone were free. I wish the land were free. We walk for two miles, maybe three, and the whole way there I am praying that the cops and the ICE agents and everyone who operates these places will quit their jobs. I am praying that their hearts open up and they stop doing what they’re doing. I am praying so desperately that by the end of our walk, I am saying over and over again, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please.

When we reach the detention center, and I see the ICE and DPS agents standing outside of it, I am swept up in despair. Perhaps some part of me really wanted to find monsters, but what I see are human beings, which is worse.

I see precious children of the vast and loving universe who are choosing to do harm. I see people who had once been very small 13-year-olds too, and now they are this.

I feel I am seeing an active rejection of humanity so enormous that my heart and mind and spirit can hardly withstand it. I think of all the families trapped inside of the buildings behind them, and I wonder what these agents see.

In my mind, I see Kendi, who spoke at our vigil. In my mind, I see the photo of Liam Ramos in his blue hat, and I feel we are all so broken. There’s more to tell. If you read the news, You’ve heard the rest.

We came in peace and we were met with violence. I can tell you more about that sometime if you want. But I wanted to bring you along through time into our vigil and our procession because I don’t want those pieces to get lost.

Are you having a hard time lately? Me too. I’m not usually one to feel overwhelmed by the news, but lately I feel like I’ve got a huge heavy stone on top of me.

It’s one thing to know that our world is full of violence. And it’s one thing to step into the systems of that violence and try to stop it so that healing can come. And it is something else entirely to be bombarded with details of that violence in ways that push you into a state of fear and despair.

This feels like an awful Valentine’s Day sermon. Right? It’s the day after Valentine’s Day, and I wanted to come up here and tell you the good news about a love that overcomes obstacles and heals the impossible and reconfigures the world into a more beautiful place.

In a world like this one, trying to talk about love sometimes feels hopeless. It feels like I’m standing in front of the devil, and all I have to protect me is a little pink heart cut out of construction paper. I feel foolish. I feel small. But that is where love lives.

As Unitarian Universalists, we affirm that love is at the center of all things. At the center of all things is something so precious and so powerful and so ephemeral as a little pink heart cut out of construction paper or a little blue bunny hat. The gifts given to us by those who love us and want us to be safe.

The signs that tenderness exists even in suffering that is incomprehensible. There were moments that day where the world felt like it was broken. But I thought back to the words of the Comecrudo tribe speaker. I felt the audacious hope in his words for the people and land to be healed.

He painted a portrait of a beautiful world, and I wanted to live in it so badly that I believed in it. I believed we could love the world back to health. I believed we could love each other so deeply that we could come back together again. In my deep grief, I was also gripped by a kind of sacred foolishness, a belief in something impossible. I believed that love is enough because it is everything.

Before me, I saw human beings who had shaped themselves into tools of violence. When they deployed chemical weapons against peaceful demonstrators, I feared what this chemical would do to the people, and I feared what this chemical would do to the air and to the land as it sunk down into the earth.

But love was there too. I saw it in the defiance of the demonstrators. I saw it in the healers and medics who jumped into action to protect others.

I saw it in the way we gathered people into our bus to protect them and help flush their eyes. I saw it in the nurse on our bus who took charge of this task. I saw it in the way she touched frightened people with gentle calm and helped them breathe through their panic as the water flowed over their faces. When she asked for a towel and no one had one, I gave her the blue keffiyeh that my spouse had given me the night before.

As I watched the scarf catch the flowing chemical water and comfort an injured, frightened person, I felt I was watching this keffiyeh become one with all the others in Palestine and across the world who had protected, healed, and comforted someone in the fight for true liberation.

I felt connected. Beyond all hope or reason, surrounded by violence and panic and fear, I felt connected.

One day, we will all remember who we are. One day, the agents of violence will take off their helmets and lay down their guns, and they will run to unlock the cages they guard, and they will hang their heads in humility as all the prisoners run free. And there will be no more starvation, no more tear gas, no more typhus inside of concentration camps or measles inside of detention centers. There will be no more cages, no more broken treaties, no more children being taken and tortured. I believe it. Against all odds, I believe it.

Against all reason, I believe in pink construction, paper valentines, and blue bunny hats. I believe it is in our sacred nature to love one another. I believe that one day we will all finally remember it.

Please, God. May it 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

May we love the land and one another. May we remember who we are. May we hold love at the center of all things, and in doing so, free the world. May it be so.

SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 26 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link above to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

PODCASTS

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link above or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

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 Faulkner

Addie, 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.

SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 26 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link above to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

PODCASTS

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link above or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Carrie Holley-Hurt
June 29, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Join Rev. Carrie as she explores how our UU history and values help us meet the moment we find ourselves in.

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

SISTER OUTSIDER (excerpt)
by Audre Lorde

Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down, and suggest it’s personal. And the world won’t end. And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers and realize you don’t miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because I think Emma Goldman said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” And at last, you’ll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth, and that is not speaking.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Reading

LOVE AND ACTION (excerpt)
by Reverend Dr. Crystal Silva-McCormick.

To live out love and action, we must reject comfort and conformity. We must embrace the controversial and sacrificial way of Jesus. Love and action means refusing to rest until our neighbors, whether down the street or across the globe, have the same rights and opportunities as those with privilege. It demands that we speak hard truths about the systems that exploit and destroy. It requires us to disrupt, to step out of line, and to make people uncomfortable.

This kind of love goes beyond symbolic gestures, beyond yard signs and statements. It takes creativity, moral imagination, and the courage to challenge systems that depend on the suffering of others. We cannot truly practice love and action until we demand from others what we wish for ourselves and those we love. And that will cost us our comfort, resources, perhaps even our relationships. It may look like redirecting our money, pressuring lawmakers, or engaging in civil disobedience. These times and all times have called for this kind of love.

Sermon

NOTE: This is an edited ai generated transcript.
Please forgive any omissions or errors.

I believe that Jesus died for us.

Now before you leave or you start to write me a really nasty email, I’m gonna remind you that the sermon is about risk.

That I love you, that I am a trustworthy person, that this is not an elaborate bait or switch, the weirdest long game that there ever was.

And if none of that works for you, just hear me out first and then we’ll talk.

So yes, I believe that Jesus died for us.

And when I say that, I mean, I believe the man that historians believed walked the hills of Galilee 2,000 years ago, teaching to people of all genders died for us.

Not in a metaphysical way, not because you were born evil and needed to be freed by cosmic sacrifice.

NOPE, we’re not going to do that original sin trauma. OK, we’re good. No, that’s not for us. Thank you very much.

The reason I say it is because of what he modeled for us. His message was one of solidarity and compassion and love.

He said, “Blessed are the poor and the meek.”

He taught that the most important thing is to love our neighbor, and then he did this really cool thing by radically challenging us to expand who our neighbor is by the story of The Good Samaritan, a profound message of life affirming solidarity if ever there was one.

His message was an indictment of the empire and the systems of supremacy of his time because he had to speak against their cruelty and repression and violence. He spoke even though it was dangerous to speak. And I don’t believe that he did it because death was the goal, but rather that because there was no other option for him.

What he was experiencing, what he was witnessing compelled him to do it. His faith in his study of the Hebrew scriptures compelled him to speak. And in doing so, he demonstrated what it means to live for one another.
What it looks like to live into the fullness of our values.
What it looks like when we bow not to power, but live for one another.
What it looks like when we show up in love.

This is what I mean when I say he died for us.

And while Jesus is the original for both Unitarians and Universalists, he isn’t our only model.

We have Norbert Chapek, the Unitarian minister who gave us the Flower Communion, who was murdered in Dachau because his message of the beauty of diversity was so terrifying to the Nazis.

We have Reverend James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo, whose commitment to a more just world was seen as a threat by white supremacists who were so threatened that they had to kill them in Selma.

To center love in our actions, in our words, and in our choices, especially when there are powerful forces set against us, that’s inherent to our religion. That is the natural conclusion of our principles and our values because they don’t just live on paper, or at least they shouldn’t.

I know for me, when I am aligned with my values, When I am in solidarity with others, I am in awe of the purpose that I feel in my life. I’m in awe of the life that I’ve been given.

And to be in alignment with our values, it doesn’t always result in death. I just feel like I have to say that, OK? In fact, I would say most of the time it doesn’t, right? Which, you know, being killed by supremacy is a little heavy. So I’m going to give you some other examples of people who didn’t die.

We have Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, who spoke for women’s rights, who funded John Brown, who was seen as a heretic by fellow Unitarians. He risked so much, but he still spoke up.

We have Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a free black woman, who was a household name for abolition in the very dangerous time leading up to the Civil War.

We have Unitarian Minister Waitstill Sharp and Martha Sharp, who physically helped many people escape Nazi-occupied Europe.

These are just a few people in our religion who have put their values into action. And there are so, so many UUs that we will never know that showed up for abolition and suffrage and civil rights and gay rights and women’s rights and voting rights and disability rights that have and do and will continue to speak up for immigration and immigrants for bodily autonomy for everyone, for voting rights and all of the other things that we need to work for true liberation.

Many many people in this room right now I know have shown up and spoken up, centered love and fought for one another.

That’s our history.
That’s our theology.
And that’s what we do as a religious people.

And today, when we find ourselves in the middle of fascism, our call remains the same.

Yes, things are scary.

Some of us, mostly those of us who identify as white and straight and able-bodied, are experiencing a level of fear that is new and different.

Things are scary. And voices of resistance are needed just as much as they always have been under soul-crushing supremacy. Whether it was the Roman Empire of Jesus’ times or the fascism of our own. Actions of love are needed just as much as they ever have.

Unitarian Universalist theologian James Luther Adams, after having a really terrifying run with Nazis in Germany in the 1930s, left that experience with a core question. Does our liberal theology, our liberal church, have enough substance to defeat fascism? It is a pertinent question for us I think. Are our values enough? And are we willilng to live in them in a way that can stand up to Fascism? For me, that answer is yes.

The values that we hold as a religious people, justice, and equity, and interdependence, and pluralism, and generosity, and democracy are the solutions to authoritarianism, to manufactured wars, the dehumanization that is happening at all levels of government. Values and action bred out of love for ourselves and for one another are terrifying to systems of supremacy because they undermine their powers.

In bell hook’s book, All About Love, she writes,

“Fear is the primary force of holding structures of domination. It promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known. When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference of any kind will appeaar as a threat. When we choose love we choose to move against fear – against alienation and searation. The choice to love is a choice to connect – to find ourselves in the other.”

So when we hold these values, our values, and more importantly when we live them out in our actions like continuously calling out injustice and oppression. By refusing to participate in unjust laws – By finding fun little opportunities to resist wherever we can. When we do those things. And whatever else might come in the months and years ahead, We are living into our liberal religion with substance.

But it’s gonna take some work because, let’s be fair, centering love when times are relatively easy or good is easy. It’s much harder to do this when the stakes are so high and so we must speak as Audre Lorde instructs us. We also have to fall in love with our own vision of what we are creating, of this beloved community that we are creating.

But I think we’re also going to need some tools to do that. First, I think we have to attune ourselves to what is uncomfortable versus what is dangerous. For example, we, this church, have slowly started having more formal conversations and learning opportunities around what’s been happening in Gaza. The ongoing attack through bombing and snipers and starvation of Gazans over the last 629 days.

While I have personally been somewhat vocal, I have been hesitant to take this on because it seems scary. In fact, the rhetoric around what has been happening has been shaped in a way that scares people away from engaging with it in a meaningful way, especially when being against genocide and condemning the actions of a nation-state have been labeled (incorrectly) as anti-semitic.

But that’s just discomfort. I am uncomfortable with the idea that I will falsely be accused of being anti-semitic, that I will offend someone, that someone will say something mean or hurtful to me. That’s really uncomfortable, But it is not danger. I am not in any real danger.

An uncomfortable conversation, or an unfavorable opinion of me, that doesn’t harm me. The two million people living in the 141 square miles of Gaza, those people aren’t danger. That’s real danger. And so I must speak even when I’m afraid and even when my voice shakes and I have to remember that this discomfort is not the same as danger.

I have to put my hands on my heart and remind my body, this body that is so attuned to look for the proverbial tiger – that there is no tiger. This just feels like living into your values. This is what centering love can feel like when the stakes are high.

And then I speak Imperfectly but I do it. And when we do that the hope is that we raise the consciousness of those around us. And with great hope bring about real change. And then we must remember that we cannot isolate ourselves, that we cannot forget that we have one another, and never forget bell hooks told us that domination requires us to be in isolation.

And I feel pretty good about our chances because I believe that the most beautiful part of our religion is our ability to be with and for one another. Because we accomplish beautiful things together. None of us are alone unless we allow fear to keep us isolated. Staying together is one of our strengths. We show up for each other again and again.

As Reverend Julian Soto tells us, “All of us need all of us to make it.” Like the way that our social action team shows up for us and our values again and again.

I just want to take a brief moment to acknowledge the work that they have done. Thank you David Overton. Thank you Peggy Morton. Thank you Elizabeth Gray and Bob and Victoria Hendricks and Leo Collas and Jenny Fredericks and Melanie Cofield and Wendy Erisman and anyone I must have met and must have missed. And of course thank you all of you that have shown up and participated in social action.

I bet if we took time to identify ourselves, most of us would find ourselves raising our hand. And if that’s not you, that’s okay, ’cause there’s gonna be a lot of opportunities ahead. Don’t you worry about that.

And what a life-affirming way to live this one precious life we’ve been given, to be with and to be for one another, to live and to speak up and risk for one another. Isn’t that what we mean when we say “Our Struggle Becomes Our Salvation”.

The struggle we see in the life of Jesus, and in all of those that came before us, who have been guided by their values. All of those who have rejected personal comfort for the life-affirming work of solidarity. To center love in our actions and in our words and in our choices is inherent to our religion, especially when powerful forces are set against us. Being brave and answering love’s call to risk is the natural conclusion of our principles and values. Because they just don’t live on paper, they live in us. They live in our words and in our actions.

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 together, as our lives go back to their normal rhythm with all the distractions that that entails. May you feel connected. May you feel connected to your faith and to one another. And may you be held as equally as you are motivated. May you feel brave in answering love’s call to risk.

Go in love.

SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 25 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link above to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

PODCASTS

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link above or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Nancy Mohn Bernard
June 22, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

How centering love can help us build bridges during polarizing times.

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

He drew a circle that shut me out,
heretic, a rebel,
a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win.
We drew a circle that took him in.

– Edwin Markham

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Reading

From SACRED NATURE
By Karen Armstrong

The Golden Rule “Do not do to others what you would not have done to you.” was developed independently by all the great religious traditions. It seems deeply rooted in human morality. It requires us to look into our hearts, identify what causes us pain, and then refuse to inflict that on anybody else. What’s more, this benevolence cannot be confined to your own congenial group. It has to be applied to everybody without exception. Compassion is the essence of religion and morality, and it is essential to the survival of humanity. That we constantly fail to put it effectively into practice is perhaps not surprising in that as it runs counter to our engrained selfishness, insisting that we dethrone ourselves from the center of the world. It requires us to regard others as equal to ourselves, refuse to put ourselves into a privileged category, and deem the needs, desires, and ambitions of our fellow human beings to be as valuable as our own.

Sermon

NOTE: This is an edited ai generated transcript.
Please forgive any omissions or errors.

A couple of weeks ago I finished my UU internship whereas my fellow seminarians chose to complete internships within the congregation or in social justice contexts like Texas UUJM. I chose to do my internship within the context of pastoral care.

And so for the past nine months I have been a chaplain resident with Seton Ascension. This experience can only be described as intense and I suspect it’s going to take me quite a while to process all the things that I have experienced during this time. In the role of chaplain I’ve been with people at their lowest and at their most vulnerable. I’ve been with the psychotic, the incarcerated, the dying, and the sick. I’ve looked suffering in the face and wrestled with the injustices of the world. I’ve been humbled again and again, humbled by the courage of others, humbled by my own ineptitude, and humbled by the mystery of life, in which there are no easy answers. Needless to say, I am not the same person that I was when I first started this position in August of 2024. My experience has been one of transformation.

Being a hospital and it’s one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done. I’ve sat with family members after suicides. I’ve comforted parents who have lost young children. And I’ve seen firsthand the damage caused by gunshot wounds, which, by the way, often take multiple surgeries before they can heal. There were times when I felt like quitting and times that I dreaded going to work. But what helped me get through these times and these low points, believe it or not, was our Unitarian Universalist theology. When I felt stretched to my limits, when I felt so burned out that I wanted to quit, I leaned into love.

Indeed, over this past year, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time reflecting on our article two revisions and I must say the changes have been a touchstone for me throughout my residency. Specifically I often found myself asking what it means to put love at the center both in terms of self-care and in terms of care for others for there were many times throughout the residency in which my ability to love was challenged by patients who are radically different from me and my beliefs. In other words, I’ve had many opportunities to put our theology to the test. And I’ve truly come to believe that centering love is the antidote that we need in today’s challenging world.

For the world in which we live is one of chaos. It’s a world that’s full of rapid changes. In the past five years alone, we have witnessed the advance of technology and AI, extreme geopolitical shifts, a fractured news media, and furthering climate change. And let’s not forget the recent pandemic. Ten years ago, it seemed as if we were moving towards a society that was progressive, open, and tolerant, and now we are seeing these reforms be upended. And those who are not cis-gendered, straight white men in general are being threatened. I’m not overstating things when I say that we live in a world that’s more polarized than ever.

It’s easy to get down about the state of the world, and yet my residency actually gave me hope. Gave me hope that there is power in the centering of love. When we center love, we are actually being subversive. Centering love is exactly what this administration does not want us to do. For when we put love at the center, we are able to build bridges, and building bridges is the only way that polarization will come to an end.

I’d like to begin with a story in which I was able to build such a bridge and put politics aside. During my first unit as CPE, Trump was elected president, and as a super lefty individual, I was angered by the outcome of that election. I was scared for all that his election implied, and I was scared for my friends and my family and my community. Almost immediately, I began to encounter patients with radically different political perspectives. One patient must have clocked me as being liberal the instant I walked through the door. I guess I looked very liberal. After introducing myself, the patient immediately returned his attention to Fox News, which was blaring loudly from his wall-mounted TV. He soon launched into a tirade about the messed-up state of America, explaining how Trump was going to fix all that was wrong. And as he spoke, he kept side-eyeing me as if daring me to challenge him.

And though I’m loath to admit it, I immediately felt the anger spark within. I knew he was trying to give a reaction out of me and to my chagrin it was working. Now I have no poker face at all and my face was actively growing warm and I’m sure turning super red in the moment. How could I possibly be expected to provide spiritual care to someone like this, especially when my emotions were written all over my face. I wanted to turn around and just march right out of the room. But instead I hit pause and I forced myself to take a deep breath or two. And then the many trainings that I had spent training took over the many hours I spent training. Instead of listening to his words, I tried a different tactic. I tried listening for his emotions and for his needs, a technique that I learned from the book Nonviolent Communication.

And suddenly I heard something very different from this man. I heard someone who was angry and I heard someone who felt forgotten, unheard, and unseen. In the instant I identified these emotions, a funny thing happened. My anger began to dissipate, and my heart began to feel with empathy. For I too have often felt unseen and unheard. I too know what it’s like to feel invisible, and how that can lead to anger.

When he finally took a pause from talking, I decided to do a perception check with him and asked about the feelings of anger and abandonment that I was hearing. Naming those emotions had this strange effect of silencing him, and to my surprise he suddenly grew tearful. Next thing I know, the conversation shifted, and he began to tell me about his loneliness and lack of support. He felt abandoned in the hospital, and he was scared for the outcomes of his health. We went on to have a deep and meaningful conversation. Our differences had disappeared. We were no longer conservative or liberal, but rather two human beings moving through life with all of its pain and beauty.

In this moment, I suddenly understood what it meant to put love at the center, at least in my specific pastoral care context. To center love is to look for the commonality, the humanity, and the vulnerabilities that we share with others. It means acknowledging that we are more alike than not, that we are interdependent, and it asks that we lead with this assumption. When we center love at the heart of our experiences and interactions, the other seven values, justice, equity, transformation, pluralism, interdependence, and generosity, they are the natural offshoots.

Indeed, I most often thought of archaeology during the first six months of residency, which I spent at Shoal Creek, the now closed psychiatric hospital for Seaton Ascension. It was there that I began to understand the Article Two revisions on a deeper level. It was at Shoal Creek that I learned how the aforementioned values are twined with the centering of love. It was at Shoal Creek that I witnessed firsthand the power of our theology in building bridges.

From the first day I walked through the doors, I fell in love with Shoal Creek. As a teaching hospital, it was staffed by doctors, residents, nurses, and social workers, all of whom were passionate about their jobs and strove to provide equitable and just care to a radically diverse group of people.

As mentioned, Shoal Creek was part of the Ascension Seed and System, which is Catholic and non-profit. And as such, Shoal Creek was charitable and did not turn away the uninsured. The resulting patient population was diverse from an array of backgrounds.

While many of the patients were experiencing homelessness, there were also wealthy private pay patients who didn’t want the stigma of a psychiatric hospitalization on their medical record. At a quick glance, it may seem unreasonable to expect these two populations to form a loving and supportive community. But being hospitalized, particularly in a psych ward, is the great equalizer, especially when half the people are wearing disposable blue paper pajamas.

Such hospitalizations strip away the trappings of society that mark our differences. With such trappings stripped away, the patients were able to see the humanity and the suffering in each other. And when one is able to share in the suffering of another, empathy occurs and a beautiful thing happens. Time and time again, despite their socioeconomic differences, I witnessed patients becoming friends and forming communities of care and support. The dispossessed and the wealthy, the young and the old, all found solace in each other’s company and wisdom. Despite the restrictions, despite the lockdowns, these patients somehow managed to discover something that eludes so many of us. At their lowest point, these patients saw themselves in the faces of their peers, a realization that led to empathy in the centering of love. They discovered that despite appearances, we are more alike than not. Everyone suffers. Everyone despairs. And everyone is in need of human connection.

Indeed, I heard again and again from patients there that there was something just magical about Shoal Creek. Now many of them had experienced multiple hospitalizations, and many of them had been to facilities much nicer than Shoal Creek. Shoal Creek indeed, some said, were the worst facilities by far. But nonetheless, it was still their favorite place. It was their favorite place because of the love and the care that they received from the staff. Such love and care allowed them to kind of relax a little bit and to connect and share done with each other.

The closing of Shoal Creek is arguably a social justice issue. They’re about to demolish the building itself sometime this summer, I believe. The psych population is one that is both marginalized and othered. Many psych patients are unemployed and therefore uninsured, and Shoal Creek is the only psychiatric hospital that would accept an unlimited number of uninsured patients. Unfortunately, this meant that the hospital operated at a significant and unsustainable budget and it has been forced to close its doors. Now much of this population will fall through the cracks. And while most hospitals do have a few available beds for the uninsured, most of those available beds can be counted on one hand.

The situation frustrates me. I know it’s unreasonable and unsustainable for systems to operate at such a deficit, and I’m grateful to see it in Ascension for allowing Shoal Creek to do so for so many years. But the truth is that the system is broken. We live in a capitalistic society that centers money and not love. We value the individual, and not the interdependent web of existence, of which we are all apart.

As many of our greatest minds have pointed out, we can judge a society by how its weakest members are treated. In this country, we choose to ignore our humanity when we choose to ignore the dispossessed. But when we center love, we become generous individuals. We are generous with our tolerance, generous with our judgments, and generous with our ability to see the commonality in humanity and others, even those who differ from us politically. It is generosity that truly fuels my care, and it is generosity that we need now more than ever in this world, for we must be generous with love and how we define it.

To truly put love at the center, we must find a way to build bridges, to focus not on our differences, but on our shared experiences of humanity. I saw suffering psychiatric patients do what many of us cannot, put politics aside, center love, and come together.

Now I won’t lie, placing love at the center is incredibly hard to do and I haven’t always been successful at this. When someone makes threatening or disparaging remarks towards the oppressed, my friends and family or my community, I get angry and not so nice words have been known to leave my mouth. And I wonder how are we supposed to love those who have no interest in trying to love us. How do we hear past the hateful rhetoric? Bridge-building sounds all well and nice, but how do we love those who are so determined to hate?

I admittedly don’t have all the answers to these questions, but I believe that a good starting point is Marshall B. Rosenberg’s book on Nonviolent Communication, which I mentioned at the beginning of this sermon. When we are faced with a vitriol of others, it can be helpful to try to listen to the emotions behind the words. So often people just want their emotions to be validated. So often they just want to be seen and to be heard.

To truly center love means approaching people with openness and curiosity, which admittedly is hard, especially when those very same people are doing their best to make us feel angry and defensive. But again, to do so is an act of subversion. It is choosing to not give in to the hate, for that is exactly what they want. When we give in to the hate and anger, we are feeding into a polarized culture, giving it sustenance. When we give in to the hate and anger, we allow the extreme rhetoric and hate to win.

Now, centering love and trying to find our shared humanity doesn’t mean that we agree with the haters. Indeed, once upon a time in this country, we knew how to have differences of opinion and still respect one another. We knew how to engage in discourse, to listen to one another even when we don’t share the same opinions. I am asking us to lean into our theology of centering love, because it’s the only way that we will be able to engage in such discourse again. I’m asking us to try and find the commonality to find a way to bridge this gap of polarization. For we must try, because digging into our differences is not working. It is only making the divisions wider and As these divisions grow finding a solution becomes an increasingly impossible task.

So as we leave here today I ask you to consider what putting love at the center looks like in your own lives. How can we hear past the anger, to build bridges and not walls. How do we lead by example and model the change that we hope to see?

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

BLESSINGS SHALL FOLLOW US
by Rev Dr. Rebecca A. Savage

As we end our time together today in spiritual community, may we depart this sacred space, knowing that blessings shall follow us all the days of our lives, if we live in and return to right relationships, if we extend grace and forgiveness to ourselves and others, if We behold mercy as a spiritual superpower, if we emanate the greater love that holds us close. May our lives radiate the blessings that we have been given, may kindness and compassion fall gently from us, and may there be peace in the world, and may it begin again with us.

Blessed be.

SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 25 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link above to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

PODCASTS

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link above or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

First UU’s Youth Group
April 6, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

ATTRACTION – The high school youth group will challenge us to consider the theme of attraction beyond the binary. Rejecting heteronormative expectations for relationships, whether you’re queer or not, is part of growing up UU.

Chalice Lighting

We light this chalice to celebrate Unitarian Universalism. We are the church of open minds, we are the church of helping hands, we are the church of loving hearts, we are the church of listening ears, and together we work for friendship and peace.

Call to Worship

A BLESSING FOR QUEER YOUTH OF FAITH
Cathy Rion Starr

Bless you, for who you are, right now, right here.

Bless you in your queerness, your gender fabulousness, your questioning, wondering, exploring, declaring. Bless you in the words you create and evolve and claim for yourself. May you relish your divinity as you dismantle binaries and create beautiful worlds of infinite possibilities. May those of us who are not queer respect you, learn from you, and show up for you as you need.

Bless you in your youth, your brilliance, your ideas, your curiosity, your incredible leadership right now (let alone what is to come). May you be fortified in the face of adultism and may you inhabit the fullness of your being. May those of us who are not youth respect you, learn from you, and show up for you as you need.

Bless you in your faith, your precious connection with the sacred, tradition, community, belief and action that guides your life and holds you through the storms and celebrations of life. May your faith sustain you when your faith tradition honors you and when it harms you. May those who hold faiths that judge you come to know how very sacred and perfect you are. May those of us from all sorts of faith traditions respect you, learn from you, and show up for you as you need.

May all of us – queer and straight, trans and cis, young – younger – old and elder, faithful and faith-allergic – bless you as your full, beautiful, queer, young, sacred self.

Bless you as YOU. Know that you are enough right now, right here; and you are ever evolving, growing, deepening as your imperfectly perfect self. May we bless all queer youth of faith, all queer youth, all queer and trans and questioning people, all youth on our collective journey towards liberation. May you be blessed with the glitter of joy, dances of liberation, bricks of safety, and the nourishment of radical love.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Reading

HUMANS’ CORE FUNCTION IS LOVE
from Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
By Adrienne Maree Brown

When we are engaged in acts of love, we humans are at our best and most resilient. The love in romance that makes us want to be better people, the love of children that makes us change our whole lives to meet their needs, the love of family that makes us drop everything to take care of them, the love of community that makes us work tirelessly with broken hearts.

Perhaps humans’ core function is love. Love leads us to observe in a much deeper way than any other emotion ….

If love were the central practice of a new generation of organizers and spiritual leaders, it would have a massive impact … If the goal was to increase the love, rather than winning or dominating a constant opponent, I think we could actually imagine liberation from constant oppression. We would suddenly be seeing everything we do, everyone we meet, not through the tactical eyes of war, but through eyes of love.

We would see that there’s no such thing as a blank canvas, an empty land or a new idea – but everywhere there is complex, ancient, fertile ground full of potential ….

We would understand that the strength of our movement is in the strength of our relationships, which could only be measured by their depth. Scaling up would mean going deeper, being more vulnerable and more empathetic ….

Homily

NOTE: This is an edited ai generated transcript.
Please forgive any omissions or errors.

Hi, my name is Phoenix. I’m 16 years old. The last time I was up here, we talked to you about mental health. Thankfully, today I will be talking about a lighter subject. Our youth group is very diverse. We have gays and bisexuals and our resident straight boy. So we wanted to talk about our experiences with romantic attraction. This is mine.

In sixth grade, my friend introduced me to the concept of pansexuality — attraction to all genders. I wasn’t sheltered from queerness. My mother had been open about her bisexuality my entire life and my best friend has lesbian moms. Despite this, my small brain had a hard time understanding that not everything was binary when it came to me.

I had a simple understanding of myself. I was smart, creative, kind, and a leader. As I got older, it got harder to keep this binary view of myself. I had one crush as a child and it was on a boy so I assumed I was straight. Then I was taught about the concept of pansexuality. I could like men and women at the same time and I didn’t have to pick one or the other. I realized that maybe not everything had to be yes, no, or all-of-the-above. Maybe I was more complex than that.

Seventh grade was quarantine. School was online. I never left the house and I spent most of my time isolated. So my relationship with that friend wasn’t my priority. All I wanted was to live and learn. But on the first day of 8th grade, the same friend who introduced me to the concept of queer people asked, “What’s your sexuality?” And again, I had an epiphany. I hadn’t had a crush on a boy since 4th grade. So maybe I didn’t like them. I answered, “Lesbian.” I had been struggling for months to explain my lack of attraction to men, but they gave me the last push I needed to understand that I just didn’t like men.

Even though it took me two years to realize I was gay after learning I could be, that was easy compared to realizing I’m aromantic and asexual, no or limited sexual and romantic attraction. I realized I was gay because of my attraction to fictional people. Princess Shuri from Black Panther was my lesbian awakening. But after I hadn’t had a crush on a real person for years, I researched and learned about a lack of sexual or romantic attraction to people.

In order to restate a probably overused metaphor; I never crave cake, but I would eat it if it was offered. I have dated people, but I didn’t have a crush on them. I hope to get married. I want to be close to someone, but I don’t get romantic feelings that often. I see relationships as a friendship plus, closer and more intimate, but not that much different.

I was able to understand that I wasn’t wrong for not getting crushes. I just didn’t work that way, and that was fine. It may not have been the norm, but it was still natural to not be attracted to people, get to all by making babies. Some of us have to go fight the lions for food.

Being a person with so many obscure labels, I’ve had to get good at explaining the definitions and how they interact. If I don’t get attracted to people, how am I gay? I understand where these questions come from, but it would be nice if more people could understand that I have thought about this. Sexuality is a human concept, so it works how I say it. It works so because I say so.

These words are just tools to describe my experience to other people easily. They change the exact definition for everyone. Why does it work like that? Like math, it just does. Some people may not understand being queer, so they are scared of queer people. If that’s you, I applaud you for making it this far. I understand it’s hard when you don’t understand something.

Not everyone experiences things as I do. People assume straight as the default for a reason. But just because something is different from the norm doesn’t mean they’re wrong for it. Gayness has been documented in over 1,500 animal species like lions, penguins, sheep, elephant, and our close cousin, the chimpanzee. Humans aren’t unique for that.

Over the years, my understanding of my sexuality changed from straight — to pan — to gay. I don’t get crushes, but I do like romantic relationships. Even after that, you may not understand why I’m gay or how I’m attracted to people, and I’m not asking you to. All I want is for people to accept who I am and move-on with their lives.

Thank you for listening. I hope my story has helped you understand yourself or someone else better.

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

The blessing of truth be upon us, the power of love directs us and sustains us, and may the peace of this community preserve our going out and our going out and our coming in, from this time forth, until we meet again.

SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 25 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link above to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

PODCASTS

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link above or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Kiya Heartwood
March 2, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

In these challenging times, Joy is one of our super powers. Learning to stay in the struggle with rest, community, and joy. That’s how we win.

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

Joy doesn’t betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a final act of insurrection.

– Rebecca Solnit

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Reading

God of Shadows, our fear of the unknown keeps us from moving at all. Help us not to know. Protect our minds when anxious thoughts about the future refuse to leave us alone.

Deepen our breath. Bring us into communities who can be trusted when they tell us we are safe. Comfort us when our minds become frenzied trying to determine what we cannot possibly know.

When questions of what is to come or who will stay with us haunt us, make us kind with our own self-talk, tender to our bodies, loving with all we do have control over. When no amount of courage can diminish fear’s power over us, remind us that we too have power as we rise to meet it, provide a way to peace, we will not fear the dark. Ase.

– Cole Arthur Riley

Sermon

NOTE: This is an edited ai generated transcript.
Please forgive any omissions or errors.

This sermon is called, “Joy is Resistance.” The phrase “Joy is the act of resistance” comes from a poem by Black Poet Toi Delacorte. It is a joy in resistance mantra that bears repeating.

Let me hear you say it. “Joy is Resistance!”

You got the you got the gist of this. Okay. What do I mean by joy, now I mean joy is everything about us that helps us thrive. Our laughter, our food, our favorite bad TV, watching bad TV or dancing cat memes, podcasts that spice up our lives, our outrageous outfits, board games, line dancing, hand-drumming, cool tattoos, playing Sufi music while we vacuum, singing loud or living louder.

Why? Joy is resistance.

Yes. We celebrate our choice in families, our beautiful friends, our fierce happiness in the face of insurmountable odds and crushing oppression. We go swimming or hiking and drink coffee or bubble tea, let the dog take you for a walk or nap with our cats. We go sunbathe in our rip Scooby-Doo t-shirt with our pet turtle.

We take our time. We just be. Joy is a priority. It makes the whole world better. Those of us who have been activists most of our lives, those of us who come from marginal groups, a lot of us here you know what

I’m talking about you’ve got to build for distance. Change takes time – fighting takes time – and we can’t burn out we’ve got to stay alive the entirety of everything for everyone the whole world gets better.

Let me hear you say it – Joy is resistance. We don’t just survive – we Revel, Revel in our dreams, our sexualities, revel in changing our minds, learning new things, and reviving old things, fixin’ things.

Yeah, we innovate, we recreate, we do do-overs, find a way out of no-way, find a way out of no-way, that’s what we do. We’ve done it our whole lives, they’ve done it for more than 2000 years. That’s how we make change. That’s how we make the world a fit place to live for our kids.

That’s how we do it. Let’s do it find a way out of no-way. We are those people. We explore our gender expressions – our communities – our shared power structures. We are fierce and kind. We are here for everyone all of us. Nobody is left out. Nobody is expendable.

So we study our ancestors. They were scrappy, they were stubborn, they were resilient, they were underestimated. We stand in a long line of beautiful brave humans and we all matter.

We all matter. Let me say it one more time in a presbyterian kind of way. We all matter. Every single one of us. So we can learn to ask for help. We can learn to ask for help. Sometimes we need help. And help when and if we are asked. You get me? Okay. Don’t quit. Rest.

Because joy is resistance. Can I get a witness?

It is a gloom and doom, mega depression, cocktail nightly, with dire predictions at every turn. But friends, let me speak the gospel of change to you.

The future is unwritten. The future is unwritten. “The future is unwritten.” That comes from “The Clash”, by the way, Joe Strimmer (1952 – 2002).

Though those of you who are theists may think there is a master plan and that God’s got it, but at best I subscribe to a more universalist approach in that we are wonderfully made. Yeah, and we can change the stuff we want to change. There’s a lot of stuff I want to change, how about you?

We are resilient, persistent, and focused. We come from a long line of activist, stubborn, civil rights warriors, suffragettes who believed a woman could be president even before women could vote.

We are too blessed. We come from strong and sturdy stubborn people who knew they could make a world they wanted who believed The future is unwritten. If you don’t know any other clash lyrics. This is a good one.

Let’s take a moment and call our ancestors. Who do we need to emulate right now? John Lewis, Alice Paul, Medgar Evers, Shirley Jackson Lee. Pete Seeger. Molly Ivins, Woody Guthrie, “This land is your land and my land” and it’s its own land and the ones who were here before us and those who will be after.

Friends we stand on holy ground in a world that needs us to be ourselves. Call out their names. Who are you calling? Who are you calling? Call them out. Call them out. (Names called out from the audience.) Theodore Parker.

Amen my people.

We need to get a grip. Our one sacred planet needs us now. We must stand up for justice now.

The future is unwritten. The future is unwritten. That means we can write it. We can write it. We can R-I-G-H-T it.

Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, who wrote a book in 1920 called “I Thou.” He contrasted the relationship we have with everything in our capitalistic society as an “I it” relationship. Is it kind of user relationship? That’s kind of what we have right now. We think about how to market to people and we don’t treat them as three-dimensional beings with hearts and minds. We think of them as people who can do our laundry. That kind of thing. That’s what I’m talking about.

Ourselves and what we use relating to the planet other people and everything as if it was all put here for exploitation. In my opinion that is how we have gotten in this mess we are currently in.

We have used ourselves into the climate crisis and the clock is ticking down. Damage has been done but we are still here. We are resilient and creative and the future is unwritten.

It is time to adopt a new philosophy, an “I thou” philosophy, approach to each other, to other beings, four-legged, winged, green, the entire holy sacred gift that being alive brings.

The future is unwritten.

Now is our time. We are here. We have each other. Risk some stubborn optimism friends, tenacity, Grit, hard work, joy, rest, lives built for the distance.

I want us to try and get past our despair because we’re in the middle of it. And it’s awful. It is awful. And I am not doing that kind of, you know, focusing or thing where everything is just fine, because it’s not. But that doesn’t mean that we aren’t built for this time. We are.

And we have enough friendship, and we have enough talent, and we have enough energy, and we can handle this. I don’t care how old you are. I don’t care what’s going on with you, it’s time.

Martha P. Johnson, she threw that brick. We’re going to put the T back in LGBT, right the hell now. You hear me?

So remember the joyous resistance – Don’t quit – Rest – Have fun, parties, dance, and cake. Cake – Tacos. Keep it going keep it going – Ice cream. What’s your favorite? Nice. Nice. Alright.

We know how to do this. We’re built for this. We’ve had plenty of people representing for us and now it’s our turn.

Alright. We’re reaching our goals. We’re gonna diplomacy, organizing, leadership, we’re going to get arrested when we need to. Y’all get me out of jail. I’m very claustrophobic.

We’re going to speak up and we’re going to love and we’re going to love and we’re going to love because the future is unwritten.

The future is unwritten and joy is resistance.

Amen.

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

Remember the way of the wind
And breathe and blow
Remember the way of the fire
Sparkle, Glitter and glow
Remember the way of the water
And ebb and flow
Remember the way of the earth
And grow.

SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 25 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link above to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

PODCASTS

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link above or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Carrie Holley-Hurt
January 26, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

We are a people who value transformation but so often, we tie ourselves to the fixed state of “good.” Join Rev. Carrie as she explores transformation and how it plays into our goal of a more just, loving, and compassionate world.

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

I SIDE WITH THE PEOPLE
by Reverend Drew Patton

If they ever ask you which side are you on,
tell them plainly,
I sighed with the people.
With the precious ones, all,
the integral, the soft and the fierce,
irreplaceable, the beloved,
if only by garden trees
who were born who breathe and survive.
Say I sighed with
those who keep watch beneath
the bright screaming arc of bombs,
With those who hide in dark doorways
or who through the moonlight flee,
with those who stay and fight
and with those who keep kept up all night
by hunger and grief and terror and rage
by desperate unruly hope.
Who are good and green at the root
who are more than the worst that they’ve done,
who do their best to love
and still pass on the hurt in themselves
that they hate.
But what when takes sides against each other,
the people, against even themselves,
side with whatever is human in them,
what is fragile and feeling and flesh.
Side with the truth of our stories.
Side with the fact of our pain.
Side with defiant insistence on freedom.
Side there again and again.
Side there today and tomorrow.
Side there the rest of your life.
Side there together until we belong each one to every other.
If ever they ask you
which side are you on
say it doesn’t work like that.
Tell them you side with the people
and abide where the people are at.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Reading

THE WILD GEESE
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours,
and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile, the world goes on.
Meanwhile, the sun
and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile, the wild geese
high in the clean blue air
are heading home again.

Whoever you are,
No matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you
like the wild geese,
harsh and exciting,
over and over
announcing your place in the family of things.

Sermon

NOTE: This is an edited ai generated transcript.
Please forgive any omissions or errors.

So, during the Texas legislative session of 2021, probably in March, I found myself suited up and in an overflow room, waiting to testify against one of the many, many bills that day that we’re attacking the LGBTQIA plus community. I was perfecting my testimony, making sure it was respectful and even full of logical arguments.

And across the aisle was a large group of mostly young queer people who were sitting together and chatting. I was feeling so uncomfortable for them. I was thinking, “Y ‘all, be serious. they’re not going to take us seriously if you are not serious.” And then, theres a huge explosion of laughter from that side of the room and I turned kind of in exaperation. But, very quicky two things are revealed to me.

The first is that the person testifying at that moment was someone from a religious organization who was using God’s name to dehumanize and support a dehumanizing bill.
The second was that laughter was coming from the group because Rev. Johnston, who with great mercy and great love pulled their attention away from all that hate and onto her so she could fill them with love.

And that’s when it hit me. All this time I thought it was important for me to be “good enough,” to look presentable, to sound presentable, to play the part so that I could, what, beg for justice? But why was I trying to appeal to the egos of those in power who were causing harm when the people who needed love, attention, care, and solidarity were the people in that room having to fight for their humanity.

This was a major breaking point in my life. You see I spent so much of my life and so much of my energy trying to be good. Be a good girl, sweet, don’t bother anyone, be a good little born-again Christian, couldn’t have anyone going to hell on my watch. Be a good worker, a good student, a good friend, a good partner, a good mother, you get it. I pretzeled, and I pretzeled myself into being what I was told was good by all the powers that be.

Y ‘all, I am a recovering civ, having poured out all of my energy in an attempt to be affirmed in my goodness to those powers. And I don’t think I’m the only one. Because systems of supremacy, like white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, for example, spends a lot of energy trying to rob us and others of our humanity. And it often does so by wielding good like a weapon.

Even those who carry the most privilege in the supremacy system, y ‘all aren’t free. And if you don’t believe me, you cis-men, tomorrow go out in a dress. I guarantee you your male privilege will drop just like that.

Privilege and freedom, Those aren’t the same. And so the system does its best to keep us, all of us, pretzeling to stay in bounds of good. And this pretzeling takes us right out of our humanity. I can only conclude that’s because true liberation starts with the liberation of self.

There is so much liberation in seeing the humanity in ourselves, to embrace who we really are, our whole messy wholeness, to allow ourselves to be colored outside of the lines of what supremacy culture allows.

When we honor the humanity in ourselves, we honor the humanity in others. It’s much harder to other someone or demonize someone when we are working to see their full humanity. We stop judging them against impossible and dehumanizing standards and start allowing grace and compassion to come into our relationships.

Being good by squeezing ourselves in the acceptable boxes of supremacy thinking is incompatible with liberation because it’s incompatible with our humanity. Being good is also a fixed position. You attain it and then you got to stay there, which means growing is out of the question. And often you have to use all your energy just to stay in defense of growth.

This past summer at General Assembly, a time when When UUs from all over the place come together to decide on the direction of our faith, we had the opportunity to vote on the business resolution titled “Embracing Transgender Non-Binary Intersex and Gender Diverse People as a Fundamental Expression of Our UU Religious Values.” Now, spoiler, it passed. Which is great news. But during that debate, Some people spoke against the resolution using what has been a widely debunked report called the CAS report – No surprise.

But my reaction to that wasn’t very generous. Very affirmed in my own goodness actually as a social justice warrior I had all sorts of thoughts and opinions about those UUs. And then I had a conversation with my wise friend and yours, Biz, who said, “They’re trying to rationally justify their disgust through something that they think holds authority, like the CAS report. Instead of just being like, whoa, I am reacting to another human being with disgust. Is that okay with me?”

Now I do not think that anyone who cited that report did so because they were trying to hurt people. Though, let me be clear – they did. No, I think they were desperately trying to protect themselves – to protect their identity as a good person. And as much as it pains me, this realization led me to see all the times that I had done the same.

When I feel uncomfortable, instead of saying, “I’m uncomfortable, let me sit with this. Does this align with my values? What’s going on?” Instead, I often interpret it as danger.

And when you interpret something as danger, it leads to a fight response. I have to defend myself or whether I have to protect my good person status and the fight response makes a lot of sense because discomfort is actually dangerous.

It’s dangerous to those ideas and thoughts we hold that are not aligned with our core self, that are not aligned with our core values are not aligned with what we are working towards, which is the beloved community.

So that fight you feel when you are uncomfortable, it’s legitimate, but it’s not helpful.

To fight our discomfort is to keep us stuck. It is to hold tight to the image we are trying to project, which keeps us cut off from growth. Therapist Iris McKellen Garrett writes,

“The more tightly we cling to our identity as a good person, the more skilled we become at rationalizing our behavior. And the less available we are to examining the ways we cause harm.

Holding tightly to your identity as good will undermine your growth because it doesn’t make room for this discomfort. And I don’t want my growth undermined. There is too much harm in this world. There is too much suffering happening right now for me to stay static. I don’t want to stop the necessary growth and transformation that is needed in order for me to do my part.

And as a people who are committed to the building the beloved community, I don’t want us to pretzel ourselves either. I don’t want us to cut off ourselves from humanity. I don’t want us to appeal to the powers that be begging for scraps of our humanity, for morsels of justice. They’re never going to give it, not in any real and tangible way, and certainly not in any way that leads us to the beloved community.

Now, I didn’t write this down, but let me be clear, this does not mean you’ll need to not go to the legislature this session. Show up. Show up in your full humanity for others, full humanity.

I want a bigger, more connected life for myself and for everyone. Being good requires a level of control that just doesn’t allow that. Looking back, I can see all the ways that I tried to control every situation and attempt to control how people perceive me and that’s just plain exhausting. If we want to work for equity and inclusion but we haven’t liberated ourselves from good, we can get stuck on learning the rules for the rules sake. Like learning what is racist and ableist and sexist language and moving it out of our vocabulary, but just kind of ending there.

Writers Sadie Smith says,

“I’m always happy when people use the right words around me and others. But it is nothing compared to decent wages, decent housing, health care, and human rights.”

Yes, We should try to make sure not to cause harm or further harm with our language, but it is just a part of the bigger landscape of what we are trying to do in a liberating space, which means we have to act, and to act is to risk.

UU ethicist Sharon Welch wrote a book called “The Feminist Ethic of Risk.” And she wrote that the work we are called to do or the work that we call ourself to do requires risk. She writes,

“What improbable task with what unpredictable results shall we undertake today in trading an ethic of control for an ethic of risk? And in living out that ethos, we can neither undo the past nor control the future, but we can learn from the past, and we can live creatively and responsibly and compassionately in the present.”

Living creatively and responsibly and compassionately are the building blocks of liberation, Are the building blocks of the beloved community in our religion provides us a foundation for that kind of risk.

One of the new values is transformation Which is pretty cool because First UU has been on it for a while. Exhibit A. In Article to the transformation value reads,

“We adapt to the changing world. We covenant to collectively transform growth spiritually and ethically. Openness to change is fundamental to our Unitarian Universalist heritage. Never complete and never perfect.”

To me this says that our religion encourages us in our humanity, encourage us in our growth and in our change to continuously learn so that we might do better over and over again, to discard old beliefs as we gain deeper understanding of the world and of one another, for the liberation of ourselves and for the liberation of others.

But what I love most is how this value acknowledges what this looks like when we show up in our full humanity. Never complete, never perfect.

I don’t know about y ‘all but that’s a pretty powerful path for me. So if we’re going to do away with good, What are we gonna do? We strive to be in our humanity To embrace this whole messiness that is being human and to do it with creativity, Responsibility and as much compassion as we can. We strive to stop pretzeling ourselves into some ideal that was written by supremacy culture to keep us small and manageable. I don’t want to be small, and I certainly do not want to be manageable to dehumanizing systems like white supremacy and patriarchy. Do you?

We also strive to see the humanity in others, and to be so tuned in to their humanity If it is under attack, even when we don’t have stakes in the game, we stand in solidarity and push back against that dehumanizing way that they are being attacked. Because we remember that we are beholden to one another and not systems.

And like Bishop Budde this week, We speak truth to those systems of power as many times as necessary. We also get good at repair. We get good at coming back when we have caused harm and asking for forgiveness.

Not to make sure that we’re okay, everybody’s Okay but it is an actual concern for the person that was harmed. And we strive to hold our values so closely while allowing for growth, allowing for the evolution of thought and opinion we need as we move throughout this life and throughout building the beloved community. And in this way we strive to be like our living tradition, constantly changing and evolving, growing through risk, through relationship, and through repair.

This is going to be imperative during this legislative session, and I think it goes without saying at least the next four years.

Lewis Fisher, a universalist theologian around a century ago wrote these words.

“Universalists are often asked to tell where they stand. The only true answer to give to this question is that we do not stand at all. We move. We do not stand still, nor do we defend any immovable position. We grow, as all living things forever must do.”

So, let’s hold on to our humanity. Let’s get normal. Normalize learning from our discomfort. Let us be good with one another. Let us be relentlessly fighting for one another. And let’s get comfortable with the never complete and never perfect part of it all. Because we are no longer begging for scraps of justice. We are demanding liberation.

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 you leave the sacred time of being with one another, may you leave knowing that you are held. May you leave feeling grounded. May you leave feeling loved, Knowing that you are not alone, not today or ever. Go in peace.

SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 25 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link above to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

PODCASTS

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link above or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Bis Thornton
December 29, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

As 2024 enters its final few days, many of us are thinking about endings. How do we keep loving when loving is what makes saying goodbye so hard? And how can we stay focused on joy in the present when we fear the suffering the future holds? Join guest preacher Bis Thornton on a journey into the Gospel of John to see what its stories can tell us about love and loss in our lives today.

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

YOU CONTAIN THE HOLY
by Gwen Matthews

Whomever you are, Wherever you are from, whomever you love, whatever it is you have done, you are welcome here. You are welcome to this time, this space, this moment that we carve out of often busy and chaotic weeks. You are welcome to this time for collective breaths, for words, for music, for lighting candles, and for us to simply exist here together.

The essence that is you, that spark of life, is in your body, is of your body, and it is you are divine. In other words, you contain the holy within you right now.

And now, I invite you to take a breath as we enter into this time of worship in body, mind, and spirit.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Reading

WHILE EVERYTHING ELSE WAS FALLING APART
Ada Limón

In the Union Square subway station nearly fifteen
years ago now, the L train came clanking by
where someone had fat-Sharpied a black heart
on the yellow pillar you leaned on during a bleak day,
(brittle and no notes from anyone you crushed upon).
Above ground, the spring sun was the saddest one,
(doing work but also none). What were you wearing?
Something hopeful to show the world you hoped?
A tall man was learning from a vendor how to pronounce
churro. High in the sticky clouds of time, he kept
repeating churro while eating a churro. How to say
this made you want to live? No hand to hold
still hear it was: Someone giving someone comfort
and someone memorizing hard how to ask for it again.

Sermon

NOTE: This is an edited ai generated transcript.
Please forgive any omissions or errors.

Good morning again. And I’m still this, and it’s still wonderful to see you. We’re heading for the end of the year, and I think We’re all heading towards a lot of endings, and we are experiencing them at the same time as we’re heading towards other ones.

Here in the congregation, we just got hit pretty hard together. And we are at the end of Kinsey’s time with us. Ends are all around us in the world too. However, we may feel about it in the particularities, we are all facing the end of our current presidential administration. I also know a lot of people who are experiencing the end of their old physical capacity, the end of a loved one’s life, the end of their own. Many of us are watching our friends move out of state, maybe even out of the country. There are a lot of endings right now for many of us, all around us, and it’s true that those endings may come with some new beginnings, but they’re still endings. And that’s what I want to spend some time with today.

If you’ve heard me preach before, this probably will not surprise you, but I’m here in the pulpit today to tell you some stories. First, I’m going to start with something from one of the sacred texts that’s nearest to my heart, which is the Bible. Specifically, I want to tell you a story from the end of the Gospel of John, which is one of the four versions of the life of Jesus Christ that you can find in your typical Christian Bible.

Before I start, I want to say that I feel a little bad telling a story from this part of Jesus’ life because it was just his birthday. He’s still a baby. So glad that got a laugh. I got to be real with y ‘all. Thank you. He’s still a baby, and I’m up here like, Okay, it’s time to talk about how he died and then some other stuff happened and it sucked and it was really sad That seems crummy. I Love Christmas and I really love celebrating his birthday. So how could I do this to him? How could I jump to the end? That’s crummy of me.

I Wondered about this a lot. I chose this sermon weeks ago to preach it and it was hounding me It felt like it was calling out to me to tell it to y ‘all today. And I think the answer to that question is this, I’m worried and I’m scared and I’m sad. I think about the coming months and the coming years and I feel dread. I look at new things and I feel like I can already see the terrible end that they’re hurtling towards, or in other words, Even new things these days throw me towards an anticipatory grief. That’s the dread that I feel, and maybe you feel a little bit of that too. And if we’re stuck here together, I figure why won’t we get together in the sanctuary that we love and move towards that feeling and take off our shoes and see what holy things we might find there.

The other thing I want to say is this. This is like an unnecessary, I feel like caveat, but I’ll say it anyway. I’m not asking you to believe anything in particular about this story. I’m also not asking you to know anything in particular about this story. I just want to tell it to you as I know it, and I hope you’ll enjoy the telling.

So let’s try sitting down, inside of the story, and feeling around. Feel free to close your eyes If it helps, sometimes when I’m at church, I close my eyes throughout the entire sermon. It helps me concentrate. So please feel free to do that if it helps you.

And if you’re gonna be inside of this story, you might be wondering who you are. For now, imagine this. Jesus is your teacher and you love him very much. You are his disciple, you learn from him. He has been teaching you freedom and love. And so you follow him because he has given you this gift and you want to learn more and maybe even make the world into a place where everyone finds the freedom and the love that you did. So he travels around teaching and wherever he goes, you go and you’ve left your life as a fisherman behind to come join him.

He is not a stained glass window or an idea in a book. He is a man who lives in the world. He has eyes and a smile and hair that he keeps in a particular way. You’ve watched him eat bread. You saw him trip on a rock, one time. One time. Yes, just the one. You’ve heard his voice belting out over a crowd or speaking softly at a table. You’ve had the same sand on your legs and stood beneath the same oppressive sunbeam He’s maybe one of the strangest people you’ve ever met in your life He has a funny way of speaking that’s very distinctive and it’s so distinctive in fact that you can imitate it Sometimes before he says something really important. He says truly truly I say to you You know you imagine Being with your friends and imitating this when you’re imitating him you’re like remember that time truly truly I’d say to you You know this man You’ve built your life around him and around your friends who also follow him everywhere He goes.

And one day this man that you knew and loved died. It seemed like he knew he was gonna go You looked at him one day, and he seemed to be a sailor, standing on the deck of a ship that you couldn’t board, facing away from you and towards the sea, towards the horizon. And he didn’t pass away gently. He died by a violence so present and so unspeakable that you can hardly bear to think of it at all. It was an act of violence by the state that surrounds you at every moment, and yet somehow you always slipped out of its fingers until you didn’t. And it cut down your friend, your strange, lovely, wise, funny friend.

And then you saw him again after he died, and you thought that maybe he was visiting you to say goodbye the way that ghosts sometimes do. But then your friend saw him too, and he told you to tell each other that you had seen him. And then he appeared before one of you with all of his wounds on display. And when you reached for him, your arms didn’t swing through the air, they met his familiar frame, his warm body, that body that you know because you know him. You can’t believe what’s happening, he’s back. But he still has that look like he’s going away that you had assumed was about his death He looks at you sometimes now that he’s back and he sees you so hard. It’s like he’s holding you with his eyes and Then he turns away and there’s that look again and he becomes distant And after a while none of you see him for longer and longer periods of time and you can’t bear to lose him again but somehow you know it’s ending and he has to go.

So one day you’re out with your friends on a boat fishing like the old days. The water is sloshing up against the boat. You feel the gentle rocking and the wet nets against your palms. Your outer clothes are folded in the boat so that you don’t get them wet And so the sunbeams are hitting you directly, you feel their heat. The old familiar sensations of your life. You used to do this before you knew Jesus, but it’s different now. You’ve been changed. A hero can never go home again, and fishing doesn’t feel like it used to. But still, you have to eat. And you do love your friends. You are always good at fishing, so you might as well fish together.

Here’s a reveal. You are someone specific in this story. Maybe you wanna know who you are? I do, I feel like I’m asking it constantly. Well, you could be anyone in this story, but for now, you are a disciple whose name is Peter. You’re in the boat with six other people. You’re in the boat with six of your friends. You’re in the boat with Thomas, who demanded to see Jesus’ wounds when he returned from his death. And you’re in the boat with Nathaniel, who initially laughed when he heard where Jesus was from, saying, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” But he agreed to find out. And you’re also with the sons of Zebedee and two other disciples. And one of the disciples in the boat is a man who the gospel never names. It only calls him the beloved disciple.

So you’re Peter and you’re with your friends and you’re all throwing your nets over the side of the boat and you aren’t catching a thing. The day turns into night and there’s still no fish. Maybe fishing is too different now. Maybe everything’s too different. How do you get into the flow when you know that your dead friend is back but he’s fading like the light of this wasted day and Soon he’ll be going somewhere that you can’t go. The dark oppresses you, like those sunbeams you shared with him, but this time he isn’t here.

Dawn starts breaking over the hills. On the shore, someone shouts at you, “Children, you haven’t caught anything, have you?” One of you, maybe a little mad, shouts back, “No, we haven’t.” And the stranger on the shore says, “Try the right side of the boat.” So since nothing’s going right anyway, and you might as well listen to a stranger who is maybe making fun of you, you all throw your nets over the right side of the boat. And you can’t believe it. A flurry of splashes, the sea is boiling over in just one spot. Your net is too heavy to lift into the boat. Your day was not wasted at all. The net is full of fish. And before your heart is completely sure, you hear the beloved disciple begin to speak and his confidence lights you on fire as he says “It’s him.”

In a burst of confused energy you put all your clothes back on and you throw yourself into the sea splashing wildly as you scramble for the shore while everyone else pulls the net into the boat. You don’t care about the fish, this is the end. You know it is and in your heart you’re so happy and you’re so scared. You can’t wait for the boat to reach him. You can’t waste the time. You have to throw yourself towards him instead. And as you swim, you can see him. Each time your head comes back up into the air, something sparkles on the beach. He’s lit a fire. Scrambling onto the shore, you see him smiling at you and your ridiculous behavior and your clothes completely soaked, and he’s so radiant like the dawn, maybe more like sunset. You realize he’s already cooked some fish, and he’s already got some bread. He’s always feeding you, and you love him more than you can stand, and you hate it a little bit, because loving him is what’s going to make this next part hurt so bad.

He has always seemed to know what you were thinking, and this time it’s no different. While everyone is on shore with you. Jesus says to you, “Do you love me more than these?” And he gestures at all of your friends and without hesitation or stopping to wonder what he might have meant by that, you blurt out, “Yes, you know I love you.” And he seems to think that’s a little funny. And he says, “Feed my lamps.” He waits a while sitting quietly by the crackling fire, the crackling fire. And then he turns to you again and says, “Do you love me?” With less shock, you respond in a more measured tone. “Yes, you know that I love you.” He nods and says, “Tend to my shoe.”

You’re trying to enjoy the dawn, which has turned into the day. You’re staring at him, trying to make sure you remember for the rest of your life what he looks like right now. And then he turns to you and he says, “Do you love me?” You’re wounded. You can’t believe it. Of course, of course, you’re already mourning. You already know how this is going to go. You jumped into the sea for him. You shared everything with him and he’s still asking you this? You look him in the eye heart quaking and you say “My friend, you know everything You know that I love you.”

He seems satisfied in his mysterious way and he says “Feed my sheep” and then as you wonder how you’re going to find the strength to feed his sheep when he leaves, he says, “truly, truly, I say to you,” and your heart snaps to attention, you’re ready for this. He says, “when you were new, you would dress yourself and go where you wanted. When you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you, and you will go where you do not want to go.”

You know that he’s describing your aging and your death. And as you’ve been staring at him, trying to memorize every line of his face and movement of his hands, because you know he’s leaving, he has been holding the shape of your death close to his heart, like a child, like a lamb, carrying it to and fro until the time comes to set it down and let it walk on its own.

He has been mourning you too, you are both creatures with endings and you love him more than anything and you love your friends who love him and love you and love each other. Your death is coming behind you and one day you will die and you will love him the whole time and you will light fires on the shore and when your friends reach you, you will have already started cooking them breakfast.

You turn and see the beloved disciple. Sometimes he looks so fragile to you and you say to Jesus, “What about him? What about that guy?” The beloved disciple? He seems like the wind might take him away. He seems like sometimes he stares far away too, like he and Jesus are two travelers going the same place.

Jesus looks at the beloved disciple and then he looks back at you and he smiles at you and he says, “If it is my will that he remain until I come back, what is it to you? What do you care? You follow me.” And that’s the last thing he ever says to you. And you die before you see him again.

What does it mean to see the end before it comes and somehow withstand it. How can we see the end and stay without buckling under the grief and fleeing? How can we survive when things around us end?

I want to tell you all about my grandmothers. Just before my maternal grandmother died, I spoke to her on the phone. I knew it was the end. I hated that I was on the phone instead of beside her, but those were the cards that we were dealt. She didn’t ask me, “Do you love me?” But everything I said, I felt like I was telling her over and over again, “I love you. I love you. I love you. You know that I love you.” I was so scared I would forget to tell her something I was grateful for, but I knew that she already knew. We loved each other. It didn’t matter if I forgot to say something. We both knew.

Before my paternal grandmother died, I visited her in the hospital. There was a lot of difficulty between us, but when we saw each other, it didn’t go away, but it changed. It was the end. I remember When I came into her hospital room and stood next to her bed, and she opened her eyes and saw me for the first time in six or seven years. The first thing she said to me was, “Am I dead?” That’s how surprised she was to see me.

In life, she loved to go on adventures. And after she died, I had a dream. We were on vacation together by the sea. The water was so beautiful I begged her to come swimming with me, and eventually she did, but the waves got choppy and I got scared. As I swam back to shore she was swimming out into the sea and we passed each other, and for one moment we locked eyes. I wondered if I should tell her to come back, but I didn’t. When she swam out into the sea never to return, a traveler going somewhere I couldn’t follow. Maybe like Peter, she jumped into the sea with all her clothes on, just went towards someone she loved, someone who taught her freedom long ago.

After my maternal grandmother died, I saw her in a dream too. I was standing inside of her house and looking out the window. In life, she loved to host holiday meals, and she was an incredible cook. And in my dream, as I looked out the window, I saw a long table glowing with golden light, and all along it were seated countless people, and my grandmother was walking up and down it, serving everyone something to eat. When I think of Jesus on the shore waiting for the disciples, a fire already lit, I think of her.

Endings recur and echo into one another. They are unique and common all at once. I too am a traveler and someday I will go where my loved ones cannot follow. Before I go, I hope I too will light a fire and feed them breakfast. Because of my love for my grandmothers, I carry something of them with me into my life. And perhaps I will carry something of them too into my death. Perhaps it can’t be helped as humans living on this earth death is something we have in common. Endings are something we have in common.

Walking into this story I have searched for what is holy. I’d love to hear what you might have found there but I’ll tell you what I did. The sea. Dark and infinite. Life bubbles up in one location or another. A ship sails across it and on the shore a fire. The sea is more vast than any of us. Surrounding us, creating us, calling us up into the air into existence, calling us down into the darkness again. We emerge and we dissolve and everything that we love, ebbs and flows and the waves of the sea, but the sea never goes away.

And so the endings come and come and come. And I will try not to be hurt when the voice rises up from the depths to ask me again and again, “Do you love me?” All I have to do is tell the truth. Thank you.

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

BLESSING FOR THE BROKEN-HEARTED
by Jan Richardson

“There is no remedy for love, but to love more.”
Let us agree for now that we will not say the breaking makes us stronger
or that it is better to have this pain than to have done without this love.
Let us promise we will not tell ourselves time will heal the wound
when every day our waking opens it anew.

Perhaps for now it can be enough to simply marvel at the mystery
of how a heart so broken can go on beating,
as if it were made for precisely this.
As if it knows the only cure for love is more of it,
as if it sees the heart’s sole remedy for breaking is to love still,
as if it trusts that its own persistent pulse
is the rhythm of a blessing we cannot begin to fathom,
but will save us nonetheless.

Amen, Thank you. Blessed be.

SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 24 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link above to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Florence Caplow and Rev. Chris Jimmerson
July 14, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

How do we take care of ourselves in tough times, whether those tough times are personal or societal? How do we continue to show up for what we believe in when it is so easy to lose heart? In this service, our guest speaker Rev. Florence Caplow will share stories and practices from the Buddhist tradition for resilience and renewal in tough times.

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.

Reading

When the The Vietnamese refugee boats met with storms or pirates if everyone panicked, all would be lost. But if even one person on the boat remained calm and centered, it was enough. It showed the way for everyone to survive. I am inviting you to go deeper, to learn and to practice so that you become someone who has a great capacity for being solid, calm, and without fear. Because our society needs people like you who have these qualities. And your children, our children, need people like you in order to go on, in order to become solid and calm and without fear.

– Thich Nhat Hanh

Sermon

(NOTE: This is an ai generated transcript. Please forgive any errors.)

Almost all of the people I know, It seems, are talking about this particular moment in our history and whether its challenges are unprecedented or not. On hiking trails and cafes, on a phone with each other, we are talking about this. Maybe you are too. Maybe you’re feeling dread or fear or confusion. How could this be happening? I know that you in Texas have weathered literally just this week both extraordinary heat and an unprecedented hurricane that caused massive power outages in your state that are continuing. And then there is the looming hurricane in our country, this upcoming election with all its uncertainties and even terrors. I personally am of the view that both climate change and what is happening politically, not just here, but around the world is indeed unprecedented.

For quite a while now, my own personal spiritual vow is to help in whatever way I can when the storms that seem to be on the way break over our heads.

How, how do we live in this time, engaged, brave, and like the person in the boat that Thich Nhat Hanh wrote about, tall enough somehow to help everyone around us survive. This is not about turning away or turning inward, but about each of us building our own capacity, both for societal challenges and for the challenges in our own lives, in our own communities, our own personal hurricanes.

Today, I’d like to offer some possible ways, simple ways, as both a UU minister and a Buddhist teacher. And although these ways are informed by my Buddhist training, you do not have to be any kind of Buddhist to engage in them.

Many centuries ago, a Zen student in China asked their teacher, “What is the fundamental teaching?”

And the teacher replied, “An appropriate response.”

What is the appropriate response right now in these strange and scary times? Well, I can’t tell you. It’s really for you to find out. But I don’t think it is turning away or tuning out with the latest Netflix series, although that can be a helpful break, nor do I think it is drowning in fear or anger. I think at times like these spiritual practices are essential so that we can engage.

Now, I don’t really believe in giving advice, because honestly, who actually follows advice. But I’m going to break my own rule this morning and offer a little advice. Five spiritual practices for tough times. As you listen, see which one where maybe several of them really speaks to you. Even one of them could make a difference. Or consider what is already a spiritual practice for you, perhaps one you hadn’t even thought of as a spiritual practice.

The five spiritual practices I’d like to share this morning, very simple practices, are: pausing, appreciating, not knowing, staying together, and feeling your feet, with a little bonus practice at the end.

So first, and I think most importantly, find a way, or ways, to pause, to slow down, to rest, to feed your spirit. Many of us, maybe all of us, are moving so fast and so frantically, either in an attempt to survive economically or to address the wrongs around us, that spiritual practices become an afterthought or luxury. And the more we panic, speaking for myself, the more it may seem like we simply don’t have the time for spiritual practices.

Please don’t think of them as an afterthought. Think of them whatever they are or could be for you as a foundation, as essential in these times as drinking enough water. Maybe some of you feel like you’re running a And in a marathon, although honestly, I have never participated in a marathon, but this is what I hear you need to be sure to get enough water and pace yourself. Same with mountaineering, which I have done. Rest breaks are absolutely essential. When you get up into the high elevations for mountaineering, you actually have to rest with every step.

And I’m more than half convinced that there are people out there who are trying to get us to never rest, never stop surfing of the net so that we won’t stop and think what is happening. Sometimes those of us who are Activists feel that we can’t rest, that the problems are so dire, we need to be doing whatever we can 24 /7. For you, us in that category, or anyone who overworks, I want to offer these provocative words by the late Trappist monk and writer, Thomas Merton.

There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist (that’s us) most easily sickens activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. It kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

Or as the Black activist and founder of NAP Ministry, Trisha Hershey writes,

“Consider rest a radical act. Walk in the woods, cuddle with your loved one, or a dog, or a cat. Drink a cup of tea, Go to church on Sunday, go on retreat. Take a moment to breathe with awareness, just right now. Take in an in-breath, in an out-breath. And know that you are not turning away from the troubles of the world. You are strengthening yourself for the journey and the struggle.”

It’s said that Gandhi used to meditate for an hour a day but one day there was a big political action coming up and his followers said today is so busy that we won’t be meditating, right? Gandhi said today is so busy we will be meditating for two hours.

Maybe you’re saying to yourself I can’t meditate. That’s just not my thing and certainly not for two hours. I am here to tell you that there is such a thing as homeopathic meditation. Even a moment of presence goes a very long way. Even a breath can be a moment of Sabbath and pause. It doesn’t take any special equipment. You always have it with you. It’s always available, even one breath.

So my first piece of advice to summarize, find a way, find ways to slow down and be present, whatever you call it. I promise you that your adrenal glands will thank you if no one else does. and probably others will thank you as well.

Advice number two, Appreciating. The harder and uglier things get, the more important this simple practice becomes. Yes, you have a right to some happiness, even when things are falling apart. The intentional practice of gratitude, of gratefulness, of appreciation, has been shown scientifically to increase baseline happiness, reduce pain and depression, lower stress, and improve sleep.

Think about it, if we had a drug that did that with no side effects, it would be a runaway bestseller. And there are a thousand ways to practice this, or as Rumi said, to kneel and kiss the ground. But like most practices, it does not have to be elaborate. Two of the easiest practices are Sabering and Awe.

Sabering is to fully experience small pleasures and comforts like your morning coffee with tea or how it feels to get into bed after a long day to really notice and experience those things. And awe is our response to something vast or amazing, something seen, heard, or experienced. Awe can also arise from witnessing human kindness or greatness or courage.

I am currently visiting a little town in the Roaring Fork Valley of western Colorado where I served as a minister a number of years ago, and all around me are mountain landscapes that easily evoke awe. And last night, I went to a performance at the Aspen Music Festival. And I heard a British cellist, Stephen Isserlis, play a long, long, long lost Haydn concerto for cello. As soon as he started to play, The grace of his playing, his ease brought me into intense presence, and his very obvious bliss and joy in the music as he played was contagious. I experienced bliss too and awe.

But appreciation doesn’t need to be so special. One of my favorite quotes is from the Reverend Howard Thurman, the founder of the first intentionally interracial church in America, the church for the fellowship of all peoples in San Francisco. And this is from his Thanksgiving prayer, which starts with these words.

Today, I make my sacrament of Thanksgiving. I begin with the simple things of my days, fresh air to breathe, cool water to drink, the taste, the food, the protection of houses and clothes, the comforts of home. For all these, I make an act of Thanksgiving this day.

Advice number three, and this may seem strange to a bunch of UUs, but is it the heart of Zen and very helpful in hard times? Practice not knowing. What do I mean by that? Well, most of the time, we are so sure we know, and it certainly seems like a lot of people online or on the news programs know something as well. But our thoughts and their thoughts about the world and where it’s going can literally, literally drive us crazy, but they are just thoughts. And when we realize this, we can act with greater peace.

Thich Nhat Hanh used to tell his students to ask themselves always, “Am I sure, for instance, perhaps like you, I am sometimes filled with dread about our collective future?”

But the reality is, I don’t know the future. And no one does, not even the wisest pundit writing in the most prestigious publication, apologies to any pundits in the sanctuary. I can ask myself, am I sure, and then still act for what I believe in without being certain of the outcome? Give it to try. Practice.

And this really comes from my UU tradition. Remember to stay together. Remember that you are not alone. What brought me to UU ministry was witnessing and being a beneficiary of the tremendous care and love even for strangers that can be expressed in a UU congregation. What actually brought me to UU ministry was stumbling into a congregation in Flagstaff, Arizona, sad and unwell and being embraced almost before they knew my name.

Come to think of it, I experienced awe when that happened too. There is so much power and encouragement that comes from showing up for each other, Acting for the world standing in a picket line or marching for justice not alone, but together This is one of the many reasons that I think Progressive faith communities will matter all the more in the coming years Despite what the pundits say. We need each other. We can’t do this alone.

I want to share a poem that has been important to me since my teen years, written by the great Zen beat poet Gary Snyder in 1959.

FOR THE CHILDREN

the rising hills, the slopes,
the statistics
lie before us,
the steep climb
of everything going up
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century,
or the one beyond that,
they say
our valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests,
one word to you,
to you and your children.

Stay together.
Learn the flowers. Go light.

Stay together. Learn the flowers. Go light.

Number five, the simplest of all. Pay attention to your feet. Pay attention to them right now. See how they are beneath you in contact with the floor connected to the earth. We spend so much time up in our heads. Meanwhile, our humble feet are supporting us all the time. To feel your feet is to feel your foundation, to quite literally ground yourself. Whether you’re standing in a grocery line, having an argument with your partner, or facing a line of oncoming police in a direct action, feeling your feet will bring you into your body, and in contact with the earth, which is always there, always supporting you, and which receives us all in the end.

And on a lighter note, a little bonus advice. I promised you a bonus, from the great satirist Kurt Vonnegut. His last words of advice, who knows if anyone listened, to an audience in 2007. “And how should we behave during this apocalypse? We should be unusually kind to one another, certainly. But we should also stop being so serious. Jokes help a lot. And get a dog if you don’t already have one.”

So if one of these spiritual practices spoke to you, I invite you to bring it more fully into your life.

And just to review, here are some simple spiritual practices for these tough times.

• Pause
• Appreciate
• Practice not knowing
• Stay together
• Feel your feet
• And don’t forget to laugh now and again.

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

You are not alone. You have generations of ancestors at your back. You have the blessings of interdependence and community. You have the great trees of the forest and steadfast allies. You have the turning of the seasons and the renewal of life as your music. You have the vast sky of emptiness to hold all things graciously. Now it is time to step forward, bringing your equanimity and courage, wisdom and compassion to the world,

– Janet Cornfield

SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 24 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link above to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

PODCASTS

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link above or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776