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Rev. Carrie Holley-Hurt
November 16, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
We are people who have beautifully joined ourselves to the work of building the Beloved Community, but what does that look like in a fractured world where some have more than they will ever need and some will never have enough? Rev. Carrie explores the role of solidarity in our work and in our lives.
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
Let me tell you why I come to church. I come to church and would, whether I was a preacher or not, because I fall below my own standards and need to be constantly brought back to them. I’m afraid of becoming selfish and indulgent, and my church, my church of the free spirit, brings me back to what I want to be. I could easily despair. Doubt and dismay could overwhelm me.
My church renews my courage and my hope. It is not enough that I should think about the world and its problems at the level of a newspaper report or magazine discussion. It could too soon become too low a level. I must have my conscience sharpened, sharpened until it goads me to the most thorough and responsible thinking of which I am capable. I must feel again the love I owe to others. I must not only hear about it, but feel it. In church, I do. I am brought toward my best in every way toward my best.
– A. Powell Davies.
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Reading
If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation, you may hate it or defy it. But in either case, you have denied its spiritual equality and its human reality. You have made it into a thing to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship and thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Sermon
NOTE: This is an edited ai generated transcript.
Please forgive any omissions or errors.
You may have noticed that on my forearm, I have this hormone neuropeptide, it’s oxytocin. I find it fascinating because it helps me to think about love.
Oxytocin plays many roles in our body and in our relationship. It’s released when we hug or when we’re intimate. It’s released when you stare into your dog’s eyes. It’s released in both of you when you stare into your dog’s eyes. It is about bonding and building trust. It even helps to lessen pain. It’s called the cuddle hormone, which is adorable.
But the best example of love for me is when it does its job at birth. Oxytocin is what causes contractions. Now, if you’ve ever experienced those, or have you ever seen someone experience those, you know that this is not feel-good times. This is not cuddle time. The role of oxytocin at that point is taking you into a place that you’re not sure you want to go, quite honestly. And that’s what love does. It pushes us to do things that we are scared to do. Love makes us brave. And because it bonds us, love makes us brave in community, which is exactly what Reverend Chris preached about last week. Bravery comes from community.
Love is powerful and it is actionable, and it is only right and good that we have now articulated it as what is at the center of our work and our faith. It’s the only thing that’s going to get us to beloved community, because it’s the only thing that’s going to make us brave enough to do that work, which is to love the hell out of this world, as Reverend Joanne Fontaine Crawford told us.
The hells of racism and sexism and ableism and all those other horrible isms, the hells of hunger and war and constant fear, the hells of disconnection and marginalization and incarceration.
If the beloved community is the mission of our church, then love must be what we rely on to do the work. And that’s good because love is powerful stuff. Love is what can meet this time of so much cruelty and so much violence. And honestly, it’s what keeps me coming back, even if I wasn’t preaching.
Just as A. Powell Davies told us:
The church is where I come to remind myself to be centered in love. It’s where I come to sharpen my own conscious and redouble my commitment to the collective liberation.
It’s beautiful because there’s so many wonderful things that we can do in community. And systems of supremacy have gotten us so messed up. Just as I can get motivated at what we can do together, I can also get really overwhelmed at the vast gulf that exists between where we are and where love calls us to be.
As we’ve heard over the last four or a few weeks, over 40 million Americans are on food assistance, a program that has recently been used as a cruel political tool, as if people don’t need to eat, as if food isn’t a basic human right, as if we aren’t all just spinning on the same blue planet with the same basic needs.
But instead of remembering that, that we do live on the same planet with the same needs, we have a system that allows people to go unhoused and unsheltered. 18 out of every 10,000 people in the U.S. go unhoused. And to add insult to injury in Texas, that can become a crime, and it has the full backing of the Supreme Court. We have the most medical debt. We have the highest maturnal mortality rate, we have the highest incarceration rate compared to other rich nations. I could go on and on, but y ‘all, y ‘all know this. You all know that the state of things is far from love. The gulf between where we are and love is huge. It’s huge.
And yet it’s that brave making love that calls us to do the work, calls us to narrow that gulf until it doesn’t exist anymore. That’s the beloved community.
Let’s ask us to stop participating in hierarchies that keep systems in place. And one way to do that is to unlearn our charity mindset and move to a solidarity mindset.
Charity mindset is how we’ve been taught to address unmet needs. Now meeting unmet needs is a really good thing. I would never say to stop doing that. But if we’re doing it with a charity mindset, the problem is that that mindset perpetuates the status quo. Because it is designed to exist within systems that perpetuate the problem without critically addressing the reasons those problems exist in the first place.
Matthew Desmond in his book, Poverty by America, writes:
When we don’t own property, or we can’t access credit, we become dependent on people who do and can, which in turn invites exploitation because, hey, it’s capitalism and in capitalism, a bad deal for you is a good deal for me.
This comes, has come into sharp relief this last few weeks as the nation has been talking about SNAP and how we have learned that the majority, three quarters of the people who receive SNAP, are in full-time employment.
Now, I don’t think that you should have to work to be worthy of food. You are worthy for food because you are living. But what the statistic tells us is that our system is about exploitation. That big corporations can hire people and become incomprehensibly rich, while the people whose labor is making them rich are struggling to meet their most basic human needs.
When we have a charity mindset, we don’t do that drilling down. We don’t look at the systems of exploitation, but rather we do what we’ve been taught to do, which is to put the focus on the individual. And they’re pitiful or tragic reasons that they are the way they are. We’ve taught to see them as the problem.
But if we unlearn this, if we take a solidarity approach, we look past the individual into the larger systems.
This is captured so beautifully by Bishop Desmond Tutu when he said there comes a point when you need to stop pulling people out of the river and you need to go upstream and find out why they are falling in in the first place.
Now it is a good point in the sermon to say. I am not saying to stop providing for people’s basic needs. We must go upstream and find out while people are falling into the river and we must challenge those systems and change those systems to stop the problem from even happening.
And in the meantime, we also need to keep pulling those people out of the river. Because people still need safety. People still need warm clothes, people still need to eat. Please continue to donate to the Capital Food Bank and your local free fridge and or your neighborhood buy nothing group. And if you’re someone that needs food, rely on your neighbors for it.
While we are working to tear down these systems so that beloved community can be built, we need to join with each other and take care of each other. This is mutual aid. This is us in solidarity. A shift to a solidarity mindset that says, I am not beholden to systems, I’m beholden to you.
And it breaks down those hierarchies and inequalities because solidarity operates on the same premise that we do, which is the inherent worth and dignity of all people.
A charity mindset is intertwined with systems of supremacy, which mean that it gives more weight to those that systems of supremacy say are most important, are deemed most worthy.
A solidarity mindset breaks those hierarchies down and says
Everybody should eat.
Everyone should have access to shelter.
Everybody should be safe.
It also says that those are most impacted are the ones that know best how to change those systems. A very powerful example of this are the 12 black women who created the reproductive justice framework back in 1994. They were fed up with how the issue of reproductive rights was framed. They said that black women in this country had never since 1619 had a real choice about when it came to and if and how they were going to bring children into this world.
With this shift, they gave us a deeper and more beautiful framework in which we could think about bodily autonomy and child bearing and child rearing. And up until then, reproductive rights have been framed mostly by financially secure, able-bodied, white women who assumed that everyone else had the same choice. They weren’t wrong, they were only operating in their narrow lens. But it ignored the systemic issues that made real choice for so many people impossible.
Moving from a charity mindset to a solidarity mindset is critical to the work of liberation because it gets more people involved. And when we get more people involved, we can have a fuller understanding of what we need to do to change. What we are growing towards.
Solidarity is centered in love, and it is the foundation of liberation. It is the foundation of the Beloved Community. And we get there by shifting. We get there by shifting away from seeing our work as charity to one of solidarity.
But to do it, we must believe that change is possible. We must stop accepting defeatist attitudes that tell us stupid things like the poor will always be with us. I hate that saying so much. Rather, we must believe that another world is possible and work like it is. And we have to examine the way that we are contributing to exploitation. Poverty benefits most of us.
Matthew Desmond writes:
The duality of American life can make it difficult for some of us who benefit from the current arrangement to remember that the poor are exploited laborers, exploited consumers, and exploited borrowers precisely because we are not. After all, how do we get filthy rich corporations that can pass down low, low prices if that’s not the arrangement?
But these things are sneaky, because we are not usually having a nationwide conversation about SNAP, because we usually are not looking at images of genocide in the Congo, a genocide that is directly related to the cobalt in our phones and in our electric cars.
And we don’t have to feel shame about that. We do not have to get defensive about that. Shame is a massive impediment to our growth. But if you’re feeling uncomfortable, believe me, I feel uncomfortable too. But you know what? That’s okay. Love’s goddess.
Like our living tradition, we are allowed to grow and change. We are allowed to unlearn and do better going forward.
This afternoon, we have the opportunity to learn about the boycott, divest, and sanction movement that allows us to stand in solidarity with Palestinians who are being crushed under the weight of apartheid. I hope you’ll join me. It’s actionable, just like love. When we center solidarity, we have to tear down the false walls between us and them.
And it’s a very human thing to build those walls in the first place. Just try to say, you know, we’re not like them. That would never happen to me. I would never be in that situation because, you know, just never could.
How many have you all done that thing where you hear about someone’s horrible tragedy and you almost immediately start asking questions to try to distance yourself from them? I’ve done it. I’m very guilty of it. Like, what piece of information am I going to receive that’s going to allow me to feel safe from what they’re experiencing?
It’s such a human thing to do. Many of us have never learned to be comfortable with other people’s pain or suffering. And many of us have taught rugged individualism. And so we rush to distance ourselves from the other person. It’s completely understandable. We’re trying to conjure up a sense of security. But y ‘all, it’s an illusion. There is no difference from the person with the tragedy than me. There is no difference.
In 1886, Tolstoy wrote: We imagine that their suffering are one thing and our life another.
The truth is that we are part of the web of existence, that our lives, whether lived in comfort or a war zone or under a highway, are all woven together, which means that our lives and our liberations are completely interlocked. There is nothing. There is nothing that separates me from the person holding a sign on the side of the road. There is nothing that separates me from the person going bankrupt or going hungry or unhoused or running from bombs. There is nothing, but maybe, therefore the luck of the draw, go I, that separates me from another human being on this planet.
We shift into a solidarity mindset when we break down those false walls that separate us.
When those walls start to break, we can act. We act with the convention that things can be different. We believe people and we start to act on what they are telling us. We begin to live in community with all sorts of people, relying on them.
We work hard to break our addiction to individualism and start to see what we do as mutual aid, breathing into our bones that it is okay and right and absolutely necessary to ask for help. In a healthy community, we ask and we ask for help and we give help. Because we are all spinning on the same blue planet with the same basic needs. We give and we receive.
Next Sunday, at 2:00, we’re going to do what we can to figure out how to work more in solidarity. We’re going to do some asset mapping so that we can be a part of building the beloved community in a more actionable way. It’s going to be revolutionary work, and only the coolest revolutionary people will be there.
Can’t wait to see you all.
Y’all love is not being centered in our world. Cruelty is, supremacy is, and the gulf between the beloved community and where we are right now, it is huge.
We know this, but that powerful, brave-making love calls us. It calls us out of our comfort. It calls us out of our fear, and it calls us into the work. It calls us into solidarity. It points us to one another. It bonds us and builds trust and puts us together so that we can build something more beautiful.
May we let her in.
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 we leave the sacred time of holding and being in community, I want to leave you with a blessing of sorts from adrian marie brown.
You aren’t the first,
You won’t be the last,
and you are not alone.Go in love.
Thank you.
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