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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.
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