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Rev. Erin Walter
December 1, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Sexism and misogyny harm people of all genders and can affect our communities in subtle, even unnoticed ways. How can we make a spiritual practice of rooting out those prejudices in our world and ourselves? Rev. Erin Walter updates her UU Women’s Federation award-winning sermon “From Eve to Hillary.” The sermon was featured at the 2017 General Assembly in New Orleans. Today’s updated version still resonates for post-election 2024 and for this moment.
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 are not on call for the pain of the world. I know you feel every hit of the hammer beating plowshares into swords and people into plowshares. And every time you fail to step between the blow and its target, the injustice is sewn into your bones too. And so when the hammer rises, you must rise with it, raising your voice, your eyes, your awareness, your body, whatever part of you that can, given as an offering.
You cannot stay this way forever. Sown to this cacophony of blows every movement of yours a follow until your body is owned by the drumbeat of the raising of weapons, until your days string together in a stuttering heartbreak of rage, and you can’t catch your breath.
But that is what you promised to those who don’t get to choose whether or to show up for the fight. You promised that you would hold nothing back, I know, except you cannot be on call for the pain of the world.
It is not work that can be done without sleep. When we said that people are too sacred to be beaten into plowshares or swords we met you. We need you for the fight and we need you for all the things that are less and more than fighting.
We need you to be ready to listen in the soft way earth listens to rain in the hours before dawn, to be tender, to cradle precious things, to hold the smell of dew in your hair, to hum the songs that flowers will rise up through the earth to hear.
I need you to stay in love with the world.
– Rev. Liz James
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Reading
The lore of the conniving shrew, the cunning wench, the lying Jezabel, this embodiment of untrustworthiness in female form has been carefully crafted over history and is genius in its simplicity. Gut the credibility, remove the voice.
And in a country such as ours with stronger Judeo-Christian ties than any other westernized nation, it is particularly compelling. Eve, giving Adam the apple, is a powerful illustration of the cultural casting of a woman caught in her penchant for treachery, complete with a faith-based other worldliness that makes it irrefutable by design.
This caustic trope has been reliably reincarnated in the Salem witch, the woman’s suffragist, the second-wave feminist, the modern-day gold digger, all in an attack on veracity that deliberately seeks to cast doubt on a woman’s intentions and actions and succeeds in nullifying her words before she can even speak them.
– Katie Masa Kennedy
Sermon
NOTE: This is an edited ai generated transcript.
Please forgive any omissions or errors.
The sermon that I get asked to preach the most was called “From Eve to Hillary.” And I wrote it in 2016, it won the UU Women’s Federation Sermon Award, and I preached it at General Assembly in New Orleans. And of course, I wrote it at a time when I hoped that my daughter and I might celebrate our first woman president. So when people started asking for it again this year, I said, “Okay, and I’ll see what I can update for this time we’re in.”
I have to tell you, I didn’t really need to update it very much, (audience laughs) which is, I have a lot of feelings about. I call it “From Eve to us” now because the call is for us. We are not outside the work. So here we go.
When I was in seminary, people were always suggesting books to me as though seminarians have time for extra books. More than once, it was “Reading the Bible Again for the First Time” by Marcus Borg. And I told these kind book recommenders, take away the word again, and that’s me. As someone who grew up humanist, Unitarian Universalist, in this congregation, where my whole memory of Jesus has to do with a sermon that one of my colleagues gave called “How Jesus is Like the Lone Ranger” and I’ve reached out to him and I want to know what he said. He doesn’t quite remember and neither do I, but I invite us all to do our own research and maybe figure out what that might have been.
But I was reading the Bible for the first time when I was in seminary and I am not proud of this. I want to be very clear. For those of us who grew up UU, and I hope for those of you who are growing up UU now, it’s important that we have literacy in sacred texts, especially if like myself in my primary role as the Executive Director of the State Justice Network for UUs, we are to minister with and work with people of diverse faith backgrounds and cultural backgrounds.
The Bible is very important to a lot of the people that we work with, even if it’s not what I was particularly raised with. And when we go, in particular, on our immigration border witness trips, I’m always so moved that some of the only things that people bring with them on these long, long journeys is the Bible and their faith.
Now, it is in all great religious traditions that we argue with our sacred texts, and that is very UU, so let’s go. We’re gonna start in Genesis chapter 3 of the People’s Bible.
God said, “You shall not eat the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it or you will die.” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die, for God knows that when you eat it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired and to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. And she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened.
God tells Eve she will die. Does she? No. No. Many of us grew up with that message, and you’ll hear some language in here from 2016, which we may have also heard this year, but that Eve ruined paradise for everyone. It was her fault that humans had to spend our lives atoning and trying to make paradise great again.
But Unitarian Universalism encourages us to question, to not just accept one story or to recognize that there may be beauty and untruth in the same story. So here are my questions. Just who is lying in this part of the Genesis story? Whose motives should arouse suspicion? The woman who chooses knowingly to seek wisdom and face good and evil? The animal who is maligned through the ages, but if you read the actual text told Eve the truth about her choices or the fear-mongering entity in power who makes a bold but hollow threat to the people to hang on to that power.
How different 2 ,000 years of Judeo-Christian history including our own UU history this is where we come from It might be if Eve were respected, admired for her choices, her willingness to seek knowledge, to take risks.
And it’s not too late to change the story and to tackle the intersectional oppressions that we see in our world which include sexism and misogyny here in this story. Another world is possible and in fact it has been written.
In the Women’s Bible commentary scholar Susan Niddich says Genesis 3 has been misunderstood. Eve is the protagonist – not her husband. This is an important point Niddich says as is the realization that to be the curious one. The seeker of knowledge, the tester of limits, is to be quintessentially human.
I read that and thought, “Wow, Eve would have made a pretty great Unitarian Universalist, or at least the curious kind that I want to be, that I aspire to be.”
In 2016, when I first wrote this, the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations of which we are a part, had just had its first female president, the Reverend Dr. Sophia Betancourt, appointed along with two men. Then we elected our first female UUA president. Let’s see, the Reverend Susan Frederick Gray followed. Now the Reverend Dr. Betancourt is our UUA president again, by election for a full term. She is the first woman of color elected to lead our faith. It was my honor to co-lead, worship, and sing with Reverend Sophia back in October at our UU The Vote service at your sibling congregation in Plano.
This is a crucial era for women, gender queer people, people of color in our movement and in our nation. The Reverend Ashley Horan who used to lead Side with Love and is now one of the vice presidents of the denomination said in her Berry Street lecture at that General Assembly in 2017, “Everything is falling apart.” This is still true. We still see it in glaring attacks on immigrants, trans and queer people, people of color, people seeking abortion care. And in the election at the time between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, we saw it in hate that was indiscriminately directed at women. The Reverend Susan Frederick Gray reported directly from Charlottesville, and she said that in between Nazi chants were peppered homophobic and sexist rants. We see that still today.
On the day before election day this year, I drove my daughter to high school. She and her best friend, assigned female at birth, in the carpool with me. And as we drove up, there were two guys who’ve been doing this for years, but predominantly since the first election that, when this was written, holding up big, hateful signs about all kinds of things. It was a grab-back of all the hateful things. And one of them was wearing a shirt that said, “Your body, my choice.”
I appreciate – I was thinking about it while they were singing Time after Time, like something’s just time, after time, after time. But I appreciate the reading that Zak gave us from Katie Massa Kennedy taking that historical view. As awful as it is, it’s a little bit of a piece of hope to me to also remember that we are not the first to be fighting and working for equality. And we didn’t invent it, I didn’t wake up to it. It’s been in our texts For centuries, it’s a lot of work to do and this idea that when you cast women or anyone in a marginalized group automatically as less trustworthy and you remove the voice then that next step is where we are now Removing the choice. “Your body, my choice.” Absolutely not.
But there are so many things the common you knew. You heard some of the list from Zak. But also in 2016 we added “Nasty Woman” to the list. Do you remember that one? We added, “Nevertheless, she persisted.” Do you remember that moment? Mitch McConnell saying to Elizabeth Warren, reading from Coretta Scott King in the Senate, McConnell said, “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.” Like this was a bad thing.
I know, I think we all know, what black women have to put up with under the characterization of being an angry black woman. We don’t know personally some of us, but we hear and I hope we’re listening. At the time, Black Lives Matter and Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism was an emerging movement and we were having to contend with who we listened to and how the tropes and dismissals nullify a woman’s words before she can even speak them, Kennedy says.
So the losing of your voice yourself because of sex or gender and expression goes directly against our UU principles. The inherent worth and dignity of every person, our values centered in Love. And the reason I’m bringing this up to you now, is because with the rise of extremeism in our politics and relition. Often times UUs want to say we’re not a religion, not really church. I beg you I beg you to claim it, to claim your role as a person of faith, to understand Unitarian Universalism as a religion that comes from somewhere and has a role to play, a very serious role to play, encountering those narratives, and helping us come together. Thank you.
It’s really important. I don’t want to talk about this. Like I would rather talk about, and sometimes we can, about how dancing feeds your spirit or any number of other topics. But it is so important that we understand that this work is ours to do. It matters that it comes from a faith place. It matters that people of all genders are involved in this work. And it’s not intellectual, Right, there is the there you can research all you want, but you know that it’s true and That it has real real life Implications shamefully unequal pay and poor conditions for women in the workplace and for all people doing so-called women’s work a United States where trans women are murdered at record rates Particularly almost all of them women of color, the loss of our reproductive rights, and the rise of this extreme Christian nationalism.
So what are we going to do? What are we going to make our spiritual practices here, whatever your gender identity? I’m asking you to think about that today, because who you are may mean that what you’re going to do about it is a little different than the person sitting next to you. And it can feel really overwhelming, this big history that we have to tackle. So I invite us to start small. I’m going to start with what are the stories that we tell. And I’ll give you an example from my house from 2016.
When my daughter, Ace, then seven, asked on a drive to school with her brother, then three, in the car, how many girl presidents have we had. I choked on a lump in my throat to say her and her brother to her and her brother none. In 230 years, none.
I wish though here’s where I want to claim a role in the story. I wish that I had taken a moment though to educate her about Shirley Chisholm who in 1972 became the first Black candidate for a major party’s nomination in the US, I wish I told her about the rest of the world, about the more than 20 female heads of state or government leading countries right now. At the time, I let that America first propaganda that I abhor. The we’re so great keep me in that narrow place when I could have given her a truer answer, that there our female leaders all around the world.
So I invite us to choose knowledge and think about ways we can answer questions that inspire our kids and ourselves with the truth to do better.
I invite you also to look at the behavior in our churches. It’s not just the presidential election that has me bringing this up to you. We are in search for a co-minister. This is a chance for all of us to pay attention to our subtle biases. Not just about gender, about race, or culture, about people’s religious expression. If you felt uncomfortable today when I said God in prayer, or if you felt uncomfortable when I might have just called God a liar. You So how do you handle it when someone says something uncomfortable and do you give them more leeway if they’re a man or if they’re older or if they’re straight or cis-gender? So as our congregation seeks and goes through this process of leadership search, I ask you to think about these kind of things too.
Once, in another congregation I served, we were having a committee meeting. We were on a tight deadline and a woman spoke up. She said, “I raised this issue we’re working on months ago because I knew we needed time to get it done,” and no one responded to my email. The committee only acted when a man brought it up a few months later. She said, “I’ve dealt with this at my job, too. I’m frustrated. I’m dealing with it here at my church. No one wants to listen to older women, she said. She said, it’s only getting worse as I get older.
I’ve talked to you about the spiritual practice of reading your email. I invite you to think about it from a lens of whose emails am I reading and who am I responding to? Ageism is a part of the intersections as well. We love this woman. None of us meant to hurt her. We promised we would do better. And I tell that story to you as part of my promise to her.
So One of the things I also think about though is how sexism and misogyny affect men. I’m the mother of a son and how I raise him and the man that he grows up to be or the person that he grows up to be is a responsibility I take very seriously, especially in this age of mass shootings and so much more. So I want all the men in the room And all the people who do not identify as women, to know that you’re very much on my heart every time I think about this sermon, as it was when I wrote it and certainly still today. People of all genders need healing from sexism and misogyny. Just as people of all races, their souls are harmed in the insidious work of racism in the world, in different ways but make no mistake.
So I want to close by sharing a story with you. Again from 2016, one of your sibling, UUs at Wildflower Church in South Austin, Kurt Cadena Mitchell, I asked him to share his feelings because I knew he was a proud male feminist. He was our board vice chair and a young adult leader in the community, later the chief of staff for the city of Austin, now a seminarian at a Quaker Seminary, last I checked. In his photo, direct photo in the church directory, it said, “Women’s rights are human rights,” on Kurt’s shirt. I emailed to ask him why that shirt, why that message back in 2016. And his long reply that I wasn’t expecting, brought me to tears, and I’ll share it with you with his permission.
He said, “I’ve been thinking about why a woman’s nomination for president makes me tear up and catch my breath and wipe away happy tears in a different way. Growing up one of the biggest things that frequently made me feel out of place, a misfit, or less valuable, was around concepts of masculinity. What it meant to be a man or a boy. I didn’t usually fit that picture. I played house, dolls, dress up. I used my Star Wars action figures to set up a toy school or a hospital or a convent of nuns. I didn’t like contact sports. I preferred the company of my aunts, grandmother, and other female relatives. I knew from the media, school, and society what a little boy should be like. I wasn’t exactly that picture.
In a hometown that was majority Latino, I had ample examples of people who looked like me in positions of power. That is not to say that racism didn’t manifest in ugly ways. It did. But I had strong counter-messages that my culture, race, and heritage were something to be proud of. Being gay was more isolating. My biggest anxieties and feelings of being less than worthy were rooted in not fitting the standard of masculinity, regardless of whether the messages sent explicitly or implicitly. So when I see a woman nominated for president in one of the two major parties, I get emotional.
Now I see an example that you don’t need to be a man with all the meaning attached to that word, to be a badass, get it done, kick butt, and take names, trailblazer, who put herself in the spotlight despite the ridicule, animosity, and violence. Was Hillary Clinton my first example of this? No. Of course not. Absolutely not. My first examples were my mother, who stood up to police. My grandmother, who fought as hard as she could for her family’s future. My aunts, who never let a man define their life or their future. My female cousins, who are living proof of courage, resilience, and hard work. It doesn’t surprise me that focus on the negative of a historic presidential campaign. It was never my race that made me consider taking my own life. But it was the messages the world sent that masculinity was better than femininity. Being feminine was less valuable. And if you were feminine, you were worthless. If you were feminine, you were worthless.
This sermon was never about any particular candidate. That’s not what we do here at church. What we do here is we seek our wholeness together. We seek the truth that all of us are fully loved, fully human, beautiful, strong, needed, belonging in this world exactly the way we are. And I consider it our call as Unitarian Universalists to root out that deadly, deadly message that would tell us otherwise. Kurt is not the only one and if you’re someone who is felt that way in this room and this is emotional for you I Love you and we can talk after the service.
I Want to say we’ve come a long way since 2016 But we’ve lost some fights. I see you Elizabeth and I see all of you who’ve worked so hard for the rights that we have and what we’ve lost and we had our vice president Harris as a female presidential candidate have to spell out to people that not all women are aspiring to be humble. I’m not sometimes, sometimes it’s good to be Well, just like any other human being,
I reserve the right to live a full range of emotion and expression. So we have work to do. And I ask you just to sit with what your own work might be and how it might intersect with some other work we might have to do together. Where there might be little things every day, maybe it’s at home. I know that a lot of us who are doing the work of justice and equity are still living a very binary existence at home, some of us. So what we could do at home, in the workplace, in the church, to root out and get back to the original, original meaning of the story, that Eve is a shero, not a villain, and to understand people of all genders as protagonists in our collective liberation story. Maybe 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
Spirit of life and love, thank you for this community where we have the opportunity to come together each week outside of the hustle and bustle, into sacred silence and song, and into a place that calls us to our highest and best selves. May we go out into the world ready to hear the songs that bring the flowers from the earth, ready to fall in love as hard as it is sometimes, as real as the struggle to fall in love with the world all over again and share that love joyfully everywhere it is needed. Blessed be.
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