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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 PattonIf 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 OliverYou 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.
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