Invitation to Transform

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Michelle LaGrave
September 15, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Building beloved community is, at its heart, about transformation. Reflecting upon cultural differences among the generations is one way we can think about welcoming pluralism into our lives and our communities.

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

Welcome to this place
where certainty transforms
to questions.

This place that takes what is
and imagines what can be.

Welcome to this space
where what was fixed begins to shift; where
rigidity embraces unfolding,
as we join in the dance
of trans-form-a-tion.

Welcome to this
moment of change,
where together, we
transfigure and transcend together.

– by the Rev. Dr. David Breeden

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

LOTS’ WIFE
by the Rev. Dr. Lynn Unger

Where will you go home?
These mountains cannot receive you,
and there is no cave or grave to be dug
for you in your old hills.

And still a current of air
keeps singing home … home
as if that meant something
you could go to, as if something
could finally stand still.

Turn then, and keep turning.
Faster, like a drill
through your old God’s promises,
like a potter’s wheel,
like a spindle, twisting

your tears into salt crystals,
into the face of this
wrecked land, into the distant,
perfect stars, which will not
take you up, but hold to you

like mirrors, flashing their
salty glare with each minute,
with each
magnificent
revolution.

Sermon

NOTE: This is an edited ai generated transcript.
Please forgive any omissions or errors that weren’t caught.

In our story this morning, Casey, a Gen-Zer or a Zoomer, listened and learned from Grandma, who was a silent generation person. They, that is Casey, learned some lessons about change over time, what to expect, and how best to cope with change. While we didn’t go into all the details in the children’s story this morning, we can imagine how rich and deep those conversations got between Casey and her grandmother.

This is often how we think about elders and wisdom. That wisdom is passed down from older generations to younger generations. And all that is true. It is so true and so important. We younger generations need to remember to ask questions, to ask for stories, to listen. Our elders need to remember to share their stories with us. And it’s not the only way that we learn wisdom. Wisdom can flow from any generation to any other. Sometimes older generations, like mine, can and do learn from younger generations.

There was a person named Audrey, not our Aubrey, I wanna be really clear about that. Nothing bad happened to our Aubrey. Audrey was a woman, a trans woman in Houston who I met right after she graduated from college when she was 21, right when she was beginning her process of transitioning. I only knew her for a year and a half or so before her life ended tragically, a consequence of the social and political climate in which trans and non-binary people currently live. She was a wonderful person. I loved her so much. She was just beginning her faith journey. She hoped to go to seminary and become a UU minister. She had been hired to be the General Assembly Young Adult Coordinator for GA 2023 so you may have heard of her from that context. She was amazing.

She restored my faith just at that cusp of churches emerging from the pandemic and trying to figure out what post-pandemic church was going to be like and what post-pandemic Unitarian Universalism was calling us to do. And she restored my faith in the future of our faith tradition. She had a wonderful way of invitational listening. She was a membership coordinator at the UU Church in Houston, Emerson, and she would sit people down in the comfy chairs, and I have this image that will stay with me forever, of her putting her head and her chin in her hand and just sitting and watching and listening and you could tell that she had her entire focus on the person that she was listening to and people opened up to her.

We learned so much about the church and what was going on in the church because everyone was telling Audrey. I also, Audrey was a Gen-Zer, a Zoomer, I also learned so much from Audrey about how social justice movements were being organized in college and by young adults in their 20s and how it was being done in such a better way than we had in the past, how it was so much more collaborative, how there was so much more shared leadership, and I have taken those lessons with me and carried them forward in my ministry.

She may have been only 21 or 22 and I her elder by 30 years but she had wisdom to share with me. All of this is really getting at the question of culture, especially the question of culture in churches.

So if you are new or visiting with us today, if this is not your church home or it’s not your church home yet, and maybe someday, you can also think about these things I’m saying about culture as working in your workplace or in your family or in the nonprofit organizations where you volunteer, all sorts of different settings. So this is for all of us, although I will focus on talking about church.

So, culture. Culture is a set of rules of behavior. That’s the simplest definition. A set of rules of behavior. Those rules of behavior might be unwritten. They might be written down somewhere. And there are a group of people that share those rules of behavior.

Culture can be regional, national, generational, queer, deaf. There are lots of different cultures and subcultures. They can go with one’s ethnic heritage. They can go with one’s orientation or gender identity. Lots and lots of different cultures, including within the United States.

Churches, like families and schools and other groups, also have culture. We have a set of rules of behavior about how things are done, when they are done, et cetera, how meetings happen, how bylaws are written, all sorts of different things. So recognizing that church has a culture, a set of rules of behavior that people are expected to follow. What we’re going to try to do this morning is reconcile that, those sets of church cultural expectations, with what we learned last week, especially from Brené Brown’s video that I shared, about how her research showed that that opposite of belonging is fitting in.

So how do we encourage people to feel like they belong, help them feel like they belong, help ourselves feel like we belong, and also have these cultural rules and expectations, many of which are unwritten, like who sits where and in which pew. Dangerous for visitors, right? ‘Cause they don’t know where to sit. No clue whose pew is whose. And sometimes, I don’t know if this happens in Texas, but I did serve churches that were hundreds and hundreds of years old when I was in New England. And I had people whose family sat in the same pews for the last couple hundred years, honest.

So if we are to build beloved community where more and more people can feel like they belong, we also need to take care that we are not expecting all the different kinds of people that we want to feel welcome here, that we want to feel like they belong here, or not even just new people, but the people who are already here wanting to feel more like they really do belong here ’cause both are true. And then we have these expectations about how to “fit in” to the church culture that is already here. How do we do that? How do we weigh those different ways, W-E-I-G-H, those different ways, W-A-Y-S. I didn’t intend that to come out that way. (laughing) Of being.

So there is a toxin that is present in this church, and in all of our churches, about how there is one right way to do things, one right way to do church, or one right way to have the holiday family dinner, or one right way to cook the ham, that’s the classic example from one of those apocryphal stories.

So I’m going to share some more lighthearted examples. Okay, one of the other things I learned from Audrey, Zoomer, remember, is that when texting on your phone, it is rude to reply to someone by saying “okay”. How many of you knew or thought that that was true? Very, very few. Much more polite is to say K or KK. OK is rude, according to the Zoomers.

I grew up with rules about how to use the phone. Never call during the dinner hour. Rules have changed over time as technology and social norms have changed, whether we call at the dinner hour or not, whether it’s more polite to call because someone has trouble either physically manipulating a phone to text or is older and never learned how to text, whatever the reason, some people in some situations it might be more polite, more kind, to call as long as it’s not at dinner. For others, it’s much more polite to text. It’s quite rude to call someone on the phone. That includes my generation. It interrupts your life less with a text. You don’t have to actually stop what you’re doing. You can actually answer without doing the phone screening thing.

For Zoomers, yes, you still have to text, But you don’t say “okay”.

So we take this all into context are we texting with a zoomer. Maybe we don’t say okay. Maybe they are kind to us and say “Oh, you old gen-Xer, You don’t know that you’re being rude, so I’ll ignore it”.

In any case, there’s no one right way to use the phone anymore. There used to be one right way when I was a kid, but no longer.

Another example, Brent and I, we both come from New England, not Texas. We are both gen-Xers. We get each other. We have a different sense of humor. Light-hearted teasing means we actually love you, so if Brent makes fun of me in a light-hearted, not mean bullying kind of way, a light-hearted way, then that means he likes me.

He and I will also speak directly to each other and to all of you. As Brent says, because we’ve discussed this, he doesn’t know how to talk Southern. I don’t really either, because I’ve been here less time than he has. I’m learning.

Brent shared an example with me about how at home one day his wife said, (and I’m sharing this with his permission,) “Oh, gee, it looks like the trash is getting pretty full.” And then hours later, the trash still being there, she commented about the trash still being there. The light finally goes on in Brent’s head and he says, “Oh, when you said that the trash was getting full, what you really meant was ‘Brent, take out the trash?’ ” At which point she said, “Yes.”

So, if we want Brent or me, for that matter, to take out the trash, tell us to take out the trash. I’m being light-hearted about this. These are smaller ways in which we can miscommunicate, and they’re also more fun to use as examples. But our goal in all of this is really to understand each other, not to change each other.

I’m not going to try to get you all to stop speaking Southern. I’m going to try to learn how to understand it and figure out when to take out the trash. And you might do the same and put some effort into learning how to speak Connecticut or Maine or Massachusetts every once in a while. But to understand that we have different ways, that’s the most important piece. Not to change each other, not to force each other to “fit in” to a set of norms or expectations that aren’t crucial.

So remember that we do all of this within a hopefully relatively safe container of having healthy relations covenants and a healthy relations team which can provide us and support us when we do get into trouble with communicating with each other or understanding each other.

So that doesn’t mean anything goes, is what I’m trying to say. We do stay within the covenants and we also don’t try to force each other to fit in. And I know it’s hard.

So, the reason why I’m talking about all of this relates to this mission. In church, in this church especially, we are building the beloved community in here so that we can also do it out there. And in order to do so, we need to welcome in new ways of being and doing church. There is no one right way of doing church or much of anything. Maybe landing on the moon has one right way or something like that, but for the most part, most of our lives, multiple different ways are okay. There’s no one right way.

And we’ve been learning about this in lots of smaller ways. I recently talked with the seniors at the senior lunch about pronouns and how to use them correctly now that we understand that we have more than two genders and that gender is not binary.

We have added visual descriptions to who we are as worship leaders as we come up for each of our turns during the service. That is for a few different reasons, but including for people who have partial vision loss but not complete blindness, it helps them be able to find us later. You want to talk to the minister, knowing to look for bright pink can be really helpful if it’s someone that can see colors. So accessibility is part of this. We’re doing slides with better visibility. People with vision issues, have a better chance of reading the words to the hymns, we’re beginning to add more ASL to our services, lots of different ways that any one change might be kind of small, all together, they’re huge, they’re enormous. We’re doing it people, this past year together, we’ve been doing it.

We’re building a bigger and better, more open, more inclusive, more accessible, beloved community. And we are also doing it in bigger ways, both within this church and within the Unitarian Universalist Association.

Some of these bigger ways include some amazing work that just came out of a recent board retreat. We’re going to be working on some of the ways to dismantle white supremacy culture by changing the way that we do our monitoring reports, focusing more on qualitative reporting than quantitative reporting. We both here and in the UUA are working on changing our bylaws and policies using simpler language so that more people can understand, so that more people can understand how a congregational meeting is run, so that they can better participate, have a chance of participating.

Let’s face it, back in the day when we were super, super strict with Robert’s rules, you had to study it. You really had to study it. If you wanted to get up and make a change or do something effectively in a meeting, it took a lot of work and a lot of intelligence. Now we’re making it simpler so more people can participate in democratic systems and in church polity.

So remember, it’s not just here in church that we’re doing this. We’re also doing it at home, in our marriages, in our workplaces. Think about how two people get married from two different families of origin. You have to figure out all sorts of things, like whether to put the toothpaste cap on, which direction the toilet paper goes, how to spend your holidays.

Culture is little, little tiny things that are unwritten all over the place, as well as the big humongous things that can really break our relationships in half. So part of building this beloved community is about learning all of these, maybe not every single one, but learning a lot more of these different ways of being and doing so that all can belong.

And today we’re focusing on multigenerational culture. Church now has six adult generations. SIX. Six different adult cultures about the best or right way to do church. SIX.

We have the greatest generation who are the oldest members of our congregation in their upper 90s, but they’re still here.
We have the silent generation. Those are the folks who grew up during the depression and who fought in World War II, who tend to be pretty traditional and conservative when it comes to finances. They’re very much institutionalists.
We had the baby boomer generation who followed the few civil rights leaders who weren’t all that silent in the generation, like Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a silent generation exception, but was followed by lots and lots of baby boomers, right? Baby boomers who did all of this work around civil rights, and there was a lot of civil unrest, and then paradoxically, to my Gen X mind, went ahead and created the workaholic culture of the 80s, still working on that. Still working on understanding y ‘all. But I’m working on it.
Then we have Gen X who, unlike the free love that the baby boomers experienced, came of age during the AIDS epidemic and learned that sex was kind of like playing Russian roulette, and was a potential death sentence. That is formative on a young person’s outlook in the world, so maybe you can understand why we tend to be those cynical people. We’re also the middle child between the baby boomers and the millennials, which are two enormous generations on either side of us, and we often act like the middle child.
And then we have the millennials, who are people who grew up with a lot more technology than we did. They experienced 9 /11 when they were kids.
We have Gen Z, who are the Zoomers, who just came into adulthood the last several years and who are digital natives. They do not remember a time before smartphones existed, never mind black and white TVs.

And we’re all adults with the things that shaped us, shaped our generational cohorts in terms of our outlooks on the world and our understandings of our relationships to institutions, whether we’re institutionalists or anti-institutionalists, all sorts of different things come into the mix of those multiple generational cultures. Six.

And that is not including all of the other ways in which we have an experienced culture, like our ethnicities, our social class, our education levels. That also comes into play. So this is a really complex mix of cultures is what I’m trying to say.

If you are a follower of social media, You may have noticed that there are some generational wars going on. Primarily between the baby boomers and the millennials. That’s where that phrase “okay boomer” comes from. But also between Gen Z and their elder siblings, the millennials. The most recent thing is tearing apart their method of decorating in what they call millennial gray, which the millennials say is a reaction to the baby boomers way too bright chaotic colors of their childhood, that they need something calmer like plain old gray.

There’s also (this is one of my favorites) a fight about how to make the bed. You all heard this one. So baby boomers, greatest generation, silent generation, all make the bed with a bottom sheet and a top sheet. And then maybe a blanket, comforter, whatever, on top of all that. If you’re a millennial or a zoomer, you’re most likely not using the top sheet. And this really upsets the boomers, really upsets them. Gen X could go either way. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. Being the middle child, we are often forgotten and somehow nobody’s making fun of us in social media ’cause they don’t remember we exist, but in any case. I’m being lighthearted and fun about it, and it’s also serious, right?

All these things come into play in our church life. If we can’t figure out how to use the phone, if we don’t know what the rules are for how to use the phone or email or text, how do we communicate with each other in church when we have so many ways of communicating. I think what we really need to do is learn about and understand each other and our various cultures that we come from. We need to be curious about each other, take away the pressure to fit in, the pressure to do church or whatever else it is, the way that it has always been done, which is a myth anyway, but still persists.

I promised you the offering plate story today. So I’m wrapping up and here’s the offering plate story. When I was a kid, I loved church. I grew up in a very liberal congregational UCC church. We had the choirs, the adult choirs, the kid choirs, the youth choirs, the handbell choirs. We had the robes, not just for the ministers, but all of the different choirs. We had gloves for the handbells. We did New England church. And we had “Holy, Holy, Holy”, and “Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee”. The big, huge, joyful organ music with these long processions and robes and pageantry.

And we were relatively low church compared to the Catholics, but I loved it, I loved it. And there were so many rules that went along with it, including (and you had to learn this before confirmation) how to pass the church offering plate correctly. None of this willy-nilly stuff that we do here. The usher hands it to you on the end of the row, you pass the plate all the way down to the end of your own pew without putting any money or envelopes or anything in it. That would be rude. It has to go all the way down, then the first person at the end of the pew puts their money in. As it comes back, that’s when you get to give your money to the church. And only then.

We can adjust and learn new ways like Brent is helping us learn today. You may have noticed during our candle lighting music that he had some new ways of using his voice. So he’s gonna demonstrate for us quickly, right? So here is the old traditional way of using one’s voice. (Brent sings “Spirit of Life”.) And here is the new modern weird, because we’re in Austin, way of using one’s voice as a vo-coder. (Brent sings using a vo-coder, the audience laughs) Someone yelled out that was awesome.

So our point being, We are a living tradition. Our traditions change. We don’t necessarily throw out the old ways. We’re still gonna sing “Spirit of Life,” the way that Brent sang it for us first. But we also welcome in other music. We welcome in other ways of being or doing church. We can adjust. We can learn new ways. We can grieve old losses, we can grow and remain a thriving, vital, if slightly different congregation or family or whatever. It’s all about us building Beloved Community everywhere we are and everywhere we may go.

May it always be so. Amen and 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

by Eric Williams

Blessed is the path on which you travel.
Blessed is the body that carries you upon it.
Blessed is your heart that has heard the call.
Blessed is your mind that discerns the way.
Blessed is the gift that you will receive by going.
Truly blessed is the gift that you will become on the Journey.

May you go forth in peace.
Amen and Blessed be.

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