Joy and Justice, Amen

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Rev. Julicia Hermann de la Fuente
July 2, 2023
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

There are so many things vying for our attention and energy. How do we manage it all? How do we find joy and satisfaction? How do we fit our commitment to justice among the many other things that need doing? Let’s explore the possibility of sustainable and joyful liberation and transformation, in 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

By no means are we Unitarian Universalists perfect. We often fail as much as we succeed. Yet even when we have broken our vows a thousand times we return to this essential work of justice and liberation for all. We do the work best when we remember what the church is and what it is not.

Church is not a place to hide. It is not the place to get away from the world. It is not place shere we get to pretend that the lives we live and our particular situations are not terribly complex, often confusing, and sometimes depressing.

Church is the place where we stand with one another, look the world in the eye, attempt to see clearly, and gather strength to face what we see with courage and yes, with joy. Come, let us worship together.

– Rosemary McKnight

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

V’AHAVTA
by Aurora Levins Morales

Say these words
when you lie down and
when you rise up,
when you go out and
when you return,
in times of mourning and
times of joy.

Inscribe them on your doorposts,
embroider them on your garments,
tattoo them on your shoulder,
teach them to your children,
your neighbors,
your enemies.

Recite them in your streets.
Here, in the cruel shadow of empire.

Another world is possible.

Thus spoke the prophet Roque Dalton:
All together they have more death than we,
but all together, we have more life than they.
There is more bloody death in their hands
than we could ever wield, unless
we lay down our souls to become them,
and then we will lose everything.
So instead,

imagine winning. This is your
sacred task.
This is your power. Imagine
every detail of winning, the exact smell
of the summer streets
in which no one has been shot, the
muscles you have never
unclenched from worry, gone soft as
newborn skin,
the sparkling taste of food when we know
that no one on earth is hungry, that the
beggars are fed,
that the old man under the bridge and
the woman wrapping herself in thin sheets in the
back seat of a car,
and the children who suck on stones,
nest under a flock of roofs that keep
multiplying their shelter.
Lean with all your being towards that day
when the poor of the world shake down a
rain of good fortune out of the heavy clouds, and justice
rolls down like waters.

Defend the world in which we win as if
it were your child.
It is your child.
Defend it as if it were your lover.
It is your lover.

When you inhale and when you exhale
breathe the possibility of another world
into the 37.2 trillion cells of your body
until it shines with hope.
Then imagine more.

Imagine rape is unimaginable. Imagine
war is a scarcely credible rumor
That the crimes of our age, the
grotesque inhumanities of greed,
the sheer and astounding shamelessness
of it, the vast fortunes
made by stealing lives, the horrible
normalcy it came to have,
is unimaginable to our heirs, the
generations of the free.

Don’t waver. Don’t let despair sink its
sharp teeth
Into the throat with which you
sing. Escalate your dreams.
Make them burn
so fiercely that you can
follow them down
any dark alleyway of history and not
lose your way.
Make them burn clear as a starry
drinking gourd
Over the grim fog of exhaustion, and
keep walking.

Hold hands. Share water. Keep imagining.
So that we, and the children of our
children’s children may live

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