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Rev. Michelle LaGrave
November 17, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
In times like these, what kind of soul work are we called to do? Can we, might we, repair our spirits?
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
LAY IT DOWN
by Joan Javier DuvallHere, here is where you can lay it down,
lay down all that you have carried,
the weight of the world that has rounded your back,
leaving you aching and exhausted.
Here, here is where healing begins,
where burdens are set down and alongside one another’s,
their magnitude does not seem as great.
Here is where the door is thrown open
and the light can lift away the shadows
and what was hidden can now be seen.
Here, here is where you can rest,
Where nothing is expected,
but that you bring all of who you are
Into the presence of the holy
and of this loving communityLet us worship together
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Sermon
NOTE: This is an edited ai generated transcript.
Please forgive any omissions or errors.
It has been quite the week and a half, hasn’t it? I feel like I did at the beginning of the pandemic, like what we are facing in the coming months is just too big, too unknown for me to fully comprehend, to fully grasp what is or is not about to happen. And I am left with one gigantic question. How do I lead you, my people, when I don’t know where we’re going.
I am no Moses nor am I Miriam. I’ve received no divine message or instruction for how to proceed and yet I feel like we are about to enter into the wilderness for an unknown amount of time, though hopefully not 40 years. How does one, how do we prepare for such a journey? What do we pack? What do we bring with us? There are so many many questions right now.
How do any of us lead when we don’t know where we’re going? We might have some ideas. I certainly had some ideas at the beginning of the pandemic, many of which never actually happened. And so from that lesson, I need to remember, we don’t really know for sure where we’re going.
And here is the only answer that I can give right now. We prepare. We pack as best as we can and then we proceed mindfully from one moment in time, from one movement to the next, with spirits full to overflowing. When I was in seminary, preparing to finally answer my call to the ministry and at our last weekly chapel service, the professor served the graduating class a communion of milk and honey. I think most of us thought we were about to enter the promised land, the land of milk and honey, our journeys to ministry at that point complete. None of us knew that we would eventually be leading our various faith traditions through a pandemic, nor through times like this.
As it turned out, we were entering, we were actually entering the wilderness, the Promised Land, a murky vision of milk and honey still far off. But before that service, that one filled with milk and honey and promises we were taught an invaluable lesson about ministry.
Now I’m going to share it with you now. Imagine a tea cup. Imagine your body as a tea cup. It can be fine flowers and gilded edges. It can be plain white. It can be sturdy. It can be any manifestation of a teacup you would like. Imagine a teacup with a saucer underneath and a silver spoon in the saucer. The teacup is your body, is your container, and your job is not to just fill it but to fill it to overflowing. And as a minister, as a leader, as a person in these times, what we do is we serve others, we minister to others by using that little silver spoon and serving from our saucer not from our cup from our saucer so our job then becomes to fill our cups our bodies to overflowing continually again and again and again as we continue serving and serving and serving with our spoon as our saucer begins to empty we refill our cup to overflowing to overflowing to overflowing and we serve and we serve and we serve from the saucer. We need to enter these times with spirits filled to overflowing.
We all need this lesson right now. We are all leaders. We all do engage in ministry of one sort or another, and we are all called to build beloved community.
Our theme this month from the Soul Matters program is repair. So this is a big admission for a minister to make, but I’m in need of some soul work right now. How about all of you? So how do we do this? How do we repair our very spirits? How do we fill our cups? How do we prepare for another unknown journey. How do we do these things in these times?
There are more lessons from seminary. Somehow going back to the beginning is filling me with some answers, some sense of potentiality that feels helpful at the moment and during seminary one of the things that we studied was a practice of ritual which Kinsey began to speak to you about a little bit earlier this morning. Practicing ritual, engaging with ritual is an embodied experience. It is a physical experience. It is a participatory experience. It is filled with repetition upon repetition upon repetition. Whether that be words or melodies or actions, we move deeper and deeper and deeper into the sense of things, the meaning of things, the meaning of language, of poetry, of music over and over again. And we pay attention to the sensations in our bodies. We feel the vibrations in our hearts, in our chests. We feel the vibrations of those around us. We feel the vibrations of the music near us.
What we can do as individuals, as families, as a community, one of the things we can do is engage in ritual, to pay attention to those embodied experiences in a way that maybe we’re not always so mindful about and That is what we are and will continue to be doing during this service There is a lot of fear and anxiety out there right now As well as other emotions.
It is in the news. It’s all over social media. It is infecting our families, our communities, ourselves, causing conflict, division, polarization among friends, families, colleagues, congregations. People are revisiting questions they have been revisiting for some years now about how we maintain or build or create or repair relationships with people whose political views might be very different from our own, especially as we are entering in times, which are going to be extremely risky, if not actually life-threatening for many among us.
How do we do that? Yes. By filling our cups to overflowing, yes, from serving, for serving from the saucer, and also by considering generosity as a value. This is one that we newly embraced at our last General Assembly GA that we haven’t spoken about as such very much yet. Generosity of spirit. Generosity of serving from our saucers. Generosity to ourselves of filling our cups to overflowing in the first place so that we even have the ability to serve from our saucers.
In terms of our denomination, our association, the value that was chosen that we went with after many, many hours and years of listening to people was generosity. And there’s a little secret place in my heart The almost wishes, the word that we had gone with instead, was grace. So I’ll say that maybe we can think about generosity in terms of being generous and extending grace. We need to remember that what we are sensing and feeling from the world as a whole right now is not the fault of the person sitting next to me or my husband at home or my mom who’s sitting out in the pews with us right now, they should not be the targets of all those anxious feelings.
We need to really pay attention to our relationships and care for one another and realize that we all might be a little more grouchy than usual and extend grace when mistakes happen. We can be generous with grace.
But to tell you the truth, it’s kind of easy for me to be generous with grace with people that I know, with Micah and with my mom especially. There are some with whom it’s a little more challenging, with people who have very different views from my own, who may not see my life as a queer and disabled person, who is married to a trans person as worthy. So how do we do it in those circumstances?
I recently, at the end of October, went to a virtual ministers network conference. Our featured speaker was a Canadian, Dr Betty Vries. She is an expert in working with people, congregations and other organization who are experiencing conflict and polarization and how to work throught it. One of her favorite techniques is to use a mantra. The one that she favors is:
I am beautiful,
I am worthy,
I am a beloved child of God.
And then she turns that over to the other person. I am, she he they are, They are beautiful, they are worthy, they are a beloved child of God.
And when she’s about to enter a conflictual situation, in particular, she spends some time saying that mantra over and over and over and over and over again, until that space in her heart, in her body begins to shift even a little bit and she encourages she knows that that mantra I am beautiful I am worthy I am a beloved child of God is not going to work for everyone so she encourages people to create their own mantras they can be the Buddhist mantra of loving kindness, or it could be one that you make up yourself that helps you turn your spirit, repair your spirit, so that you can move into a place of greater generosity, into a place where you are able to extend grace.
These mantras, these repetitious mantras are one of the ways that we can fill our tea-cups. The why of filling our tea-cups, the theology of filling our tea-cups is one of generosity, of living out that spiritual value, of generosity of spirit, of generosity of grace in the world, in our communities, in our families, and in our relationships. But first, repair. Repair of ourselves. Repair of our own spirits. Repair is a way to prepare for what is coming in all of its unknowing.
So I’ll leave you with one final reminder that these spiritual practices are PRACTICES. None of us, even the most accomplished of clergy people is expert in them. We repeat them over and over and over again. PRACTICE them.
So I’m going to be vulnerable once again and share another story from seminary. This is a story that I had freely given to one of my best friends from seminary, Craig Nowak, who is also the my matron of honor at my wedding. Because I knew I wasn’t ready to share it with a congregation yet. So he’s been using the story for many years with me as the anonymous person in it. Today you’re gonna get to hear it and know that it’s me.
So when I was in seminary, seminary was hard. Hard in a very different way than things are hard right now. It is a 90 credit graduate degree program that takes at least three or more likely four years, it requires psychological evaluations, clinical experience, field experience, internships, a presentation of a portfolio of competencies, like a hundred or more pages long, you go before a fellowship committee and basically defend your preparation similar to doing a doctoral dissertation, similar to preparing for medical practice. Very different because it’s religious in some ways, but also some strong similarities.
So I was in my second year of seminary, which was in Boston, and I was serving as an interim director of religious education at one of the oldest congregations in the country. There’s a little bit of an argument about that, but we won’t get into that for the moment. Based on whether the congregation was formed in England or after arrival. So if you count England, it’s the oldest congregation in Boston. And I was serving as the Interim Director of Religious Education. Their first paid religious professional. There was a lot of work to be done. And I was also full-time in seminary. And I was also doing my hospital clinical experience in Connecticut. So I was literally traveling every three and a half days from Connecticut to Massachusetts and Massachusetts to Connecticut. I never knew where my shoes were. It was stressful.
And then this day, the Saturday came when we were having a workshop for the religious education folks to work through how they wanted their program to function and whose roles and responsibilities would be whose. And I was supposed to be bringing all the refreshments and the grocery store was crowded and busy and traffic was horrible and I was stressed to the max.
So I decided I needed to engage in one of my favorite spiritual practices of that time period in my life, which was singing meditation, which I did frequently in the car because nobody else could hear me. And I chose many different songs from our hymnals, songs that I had learned as a child. They varied all the time. I did it a lot in those two and a half hour rides from Connecticut to Massachusetts. But this day I decided to sing “Breathe in, Breathe Out.” Not the jaunty upbeat version that Brent has us do, the really slow meditative one and I was singing it and singing it and singing it over and over again it had probably been at least 20 minutes.
I had been singing it and I had started to be feel it settling into my soul into my spirit and all of a sudden this car cut me off and I yelled out a horrible swear And at first my reaction was, “Wow, I was just saying I breathe in peace, I breathe out love, and here I am swearing at this guy.” And then I started laughing hysterically because it was so ridiculous that that’s what I was saying and then that’s what I did in the disconnect. So in the end, so yes, it’s spiritual practice.
That’s where I’m going with this. We have to keep practicing over and over and over again. And yet, even though it didn’t work in the way it was supposed to work, it did work. It lifted my spirits because I thought that it was so funny. So with that note on practice, let us keep on practicing together so that we can keep on keeping on.
Amen and blessed be.
Reading
LECTIO DIVINA
Jamila Batchelder and Molly Housh GordonThe strength of water takes on many, many forms. Just as each of you has a unique and necessary strength that you bring to our community and to the work of love.
Take a moment now to drop down into the deep wellspring of your own spirit and bathe yourself in the strength that is the groundwater of your person.
Are you a roaring fall wearing rock away with sheer force of will.
Are you a tiny drop of water in a crevice, breaking it open slowly,
steadily?
Are you buoyant like a great salt lake, practiced at holding others aloft?
Are you tenacious, like the mountain stream, finding your way down and around every obstacle you face.
Are you still and calm, like the pond at daybreak, offering radiant peace by your shores?
Are you in touch with hidden depths pulling from a vast well?
Do you soothe like the steam rising from a cup of tea?
Do you dissolve away stubborn muck like water left in a pot to soak.
Do you soften and smooth the edges like a creeping fog?
Do you clear away distraction like a cleansing rain?
Do you roll with the ebb and flow like the ocean waves.Settle your minds upon the strength, the power that is yours. Draw that strength up and into your heart. Dry up into your soul. As we gather together the many waters of this community. We need each of your power, each of your resilience, each of your love to make us whole.
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
I know this rose will open,
I know my fear will burn away,
I know my soul will unfurl its wings,
I know this rose will open.
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