Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.
Carrie Holley-Hurt
March 17, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Things feel very bleak right now. There is so much violence, so much political corruption, and so much inequality that it can feel overwhelming. But our religion is not one of despair but hope and that hope is tied to our ability to imagine a more just and compassionate world for everyone. Utopian thinking is our superpower! Let’s explore our superpower and how we can tap into it even when we feel overwhelmed by the world’s pain.
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
HISTORY’S ROAD
by Clyde Grubbs and Marjorie Bowens-WheatleyThe road of history is long, full of both hope and disappointment. In times past, there have been wars and rumors of wars, violence and exploitation, hunger and homelessness, and destruction of this earth, your creation.
We have become a global village, with a growing realization of how fragile this earth is, and how interconnected we are to each other and to all creation.
We cannot continue to live in the old way. We must make a change, seek a new way. A way toward peace with justice and a healthy planet.
O Great Creative Spirit: You have given a vision of the good, and we yearn for a new way. But where are we to find the courage to begin this work? We know that a different tomorrow is possible, but how can we build it?
We think of the prophets, women and men, who voiced unpopular opinions, who made personal sacrifices, and sometimes lost their lives, for the sake of justice.
We think of Isaiah, who called out to let those who are held in captivity go free, to give solace to the poor and homeless. Let us be inspired by all who work to overcome misery, poverty, and exploitation.
We think of Harriet Tubman, who called out to people of good will to join her on an underground railroad, to lift a dehumanized people from the bondage of slavery to the promise of freedom, even when it meant challenging unjust laws. Let us be inspired by those who are outlaws for freedom.
We think of Gandhi, whose belief in “Soul Force” – the witness to Love’s Truth – helped to overthrow the oppression of an empire and gave witness to the way of nonviolent action. Let us be inspired to become witnesses for peace.
We think of Chief Seattle, who reminded us that we belong to the earth, not the earth to us. Let us be inspired by all those who work for the healing of creation, of Mother Earth and all her creatures.
Who are the prophets who inspire you? They may be well known, or known only to you, offering personal inspiration. courage, and hope.
May they join a great cloud of witnesses to a new way of life-the way of peace and justice, the way of justice lived according to the way of peace, the beloved community.
So may it be. Amen.
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Reading
V’AHAVTA
By Aurora Levins MoralesSay these words when you lie down and when you rise up,
when you go out and when you return. In times of mourning and in times of joy. Inscribe them on your doorposts, embroider them on your garments, tattoo them on your shoulders,
teach them to your children, your neighbors, your enemies, recite them in your sleep, here in the cruel shadow of empire:
Another world is possible.
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 backseat 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 [violence] 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.
Sermon
I went a long time sleeping-in on Sundays, not calculating annual pledges, or attending a congregational meeting. And then I became a UU
and all that changed.
And it’s good. I get to be a part of this beautiful community of like-hearted people.
I’m connected to amazing people all over the place doing good work And in this crazy mixed-up social-political landscape we have, I am way more hopeful than I was when I was on my own.
I’m so grateful,
But
But what makes us different than a social club?
I could find meaning and connection at a social club and probably sleep in on Sundays.
I want, and I think we should all expect, more from our religion than what a social club can offer
I believe that we have that
I’m a firm believer that we should allow our religion to do two things for us.
First, it should motivate us to do the important work of love. With beloved community at our core, this looks like working to get ourselves free and helping to remove barriers so others can be free too.
Secondly, our religion should hold us. Through tough and scary times, our religion should hold us. It should comfort us and renew us.
That is what our religion can do for us, but so often I think we can get out of balance. I know I often feel very motivated to act but very rarely allow this beautiful religion to comfort me.
And I need that – that comfort and that renewal – because y’all things are not great and often they are pretty overwhelming.
We have many tools in our religion that help us to feel both motivated and held, but the one I’m connecting to most right now is Utopian thinking.
But first let’s establish what that means and what I don’t mean.
I don’t mean … the utopian thinking that led to 19th-century communes. You know, those ones that pop up on the History Channel from time to time, occasionally led by Unitarians.
The ones that inevitably failed because of some scandal to do with sex or money or sex and money.
Yeah, thats not what I mean.
What I mean is the way of thinking that says “the way it is, isn’t the way it has to be.” And in fact, as Aurora Levins Morales wrote in our reading, “Another world is possible.”
A world that is more just, more compassionate, and more loving.
That world is possible. The way things are, isn’t the way things have to be.
This kind of thinking is at the very core of our religion.
And it makes sense, after all, we are a very contrarian people.
And we have been for our entire history.
Just think about it.
Early Unitarians in the 16th century said in a sea of Trinitarians, often at great risk to themselves, I don’t find that in my text.
Universalists said, I know hell is a really effective marketing tool but how could a loving god ever ….
At a time when the entire economy of the US was fueled by trafficking, imprisonment and forced labor of human beings, unitarian and universalist abolitionists said- it doesn’t have to be this way.
The fight for universal suffrage – it doesn’t have to be this way
Those fighting Jim Crow said – it doesn’t have to be this way.
Those fighting for queer rights- it doesn’t have to be this way
When we speak of the Beloved community, we tap into that core, we are practicing Utopian thinking.
The beloved community –
when no one is starving or being murdered in Gaza,
no one is getting cut up by razor wire at the border,
no trans kid is being murdered.
No boys are having to bear the cost of anti-blackness and ableism,
No one unhoused.
No one abused.
No one neglected.
No one abandoned.
That is Utopian thinking
And it is a beautiful thing that is the core of our religion.
And certainly many would tell us we are absurd or naive
but I would just say to those people ….
Try being a Unitarian Universalist in Texans
It is not naive to believe that how things are is not how it has to be.
Rutger Bregman a Dutch historian said:
“I’ve always believed in the power of utopian thinking. Every milestone of civilization – the end of slavery, (the creation of) democracy, (the attainment of) equal rights – these were all utopian fantasies once until they happened. That’s why I think that history is actually the most subversive discipline of all the social sciences because history shows us that things can be different. They don’t have to be this way. We can change them.”
“We can change them” this is heart of our religion and it does so much for us!
It allows us a different way of looking at time, at our purpose, and our actions by placing them in the larger scheme of things.
For example. When it comes to the Beloved Community, we know that we are mostly planting seeds for a forest we will never see. But when we do that work of building the beloved community, we are bringing some of that utopia into the here and the now.
When we go down to witness what is happening at the border, When we use our sacred spaces as a sanctuary for asylum seekers
When we make our churches open and loving spaces for people who are targeted for oppression and marginalization.
When we show up to places of power and tell them “another world is possible”
We are bringing that Utopian thinking down into the lives of those being harmed in the here and now.
It is powerful stuff!
And it is core to who we are as people in a liberating faith.
But in order to utilize this beautiful, life-giving aspect of our faith, we have to make it a spiritual practice.
First, we do this by spending time in the community envisioning what is possible.
What would it actually look like if we treated everyone as if they had inherent dignity and worthiness? If we lived, worked, spoke, like everyone and everything is interconnected.
Learning from one another opens us up to the diversity of lived experience and needs, allowing us, in community, to envision a much deeper and richer future. We can envision a reality that expands past our individual needs.
Secondly, we nourish our vision so that we counteract the pervasive messages of the status quo that says “that how things are is just the nature of things.”
Bregman says
“There’s nothing inherent about our current political, economic and social realities; people made these systems and can make them anew. To envision something novel, read more history and less news. “There’s nothing as anti-utopian as the product that we call the news,”
He says that when we allow ourselves to get caught up in the “sensationalistic daily news cycle” it “can constrict your ability to see the world as anything but dangerous, violent and mean.”
So as we nourish our vision, by being intentional about where we are placing our focus. What are we doing to combat those pervasive messages of sameness?
What art are we interacting with? Are we making?
Art opens us up to possibilities and different way of seeing and experiencing the world.
Are we reading poetry?
Are we letting Amanda Gordan, Mary Oliver, Maya Angelo mirror our humanity while inspiring us to hope.
Are we writing our own poetry.
Our we taking our pain, our hope, our vision for the future and turning it into art on the page?
What music are you allowing to flow into and out of you?
Who are we spending our time with or listening to ?
Nothing will help to pull me out of my Hobbesian notion of human nature being only nasty, brutish, and short faster than a 5-year-old asking me what my third favorite dinosaur is. Or the way high schoolers use their voices to speak up for one another and protest injustice.
Are we doom-scrolling or are we intentionally being awakened to the beauty, joy, and love in the people and creatures all around us?
We will not nurture utopian thinking by living on a constant diet of the status quo. Seeing it as a spiritual practice, means we are intentional and disciplined about what we are focusing our energy on.
And finally, we let Utopian thinking nourish us!
So often I think that we UUs feel as if we are suppose to just do it. Just go fight the good fight.
And while, yes, please do that.
We have to let it do more. We have to let it nourish us.
Because if we are only fighting the good fight without replenishing ourselves we are vulnerable to burnout.
To apathy.
We have to let it nourish us!
Let it nourish us in the ways that it anchors our hope.
Let it nourish us in the way it anchors us to the past, present, and the future.
The whole arc of the moral universe.
In this it will help us to stop seeing every election and every bill as the next apocalypse because we can see the full expanse of the work.
We can see the ways our actions are connected to the larger web that holds us all.
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
And now as we go to leave this place, may you feel the warmth of this beautiful community.
May you feel motivated, supported, and held by this beautiful religion. May you hold yourself and others with love and compassion
Just as you are held.
Let it comfort us, strengthen us, and give us energy for this beautiful work we are called to do and this precious life we are given.
May it remind us that we are a people not of despair but of hope.
May it always be so
Most sermons during the past 24 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link above to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link above or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776
