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Rev. Carrie Holley-Hurt
August 3, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Pride was a riot ….and pride was a party. Pride is also liberation, self-actualization, and so, so much more. Let’s celebrate Pride in community as members of our congregation share the ways they experience pride in their own 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.
NOTE: This is an edited ai generated transcript.
Please forgive any omissions or errors.
Call to Worship
MY FIRST PRIDE
Bis ThorntonThe crisp desert sun is shining on us out of an infinite sky, and it’s my first pride because we didn’t have that where I grew up.
I’m sitting on a trailer being pulled by my friend’s truck. The trailer isn’t decorated or I should say it’s decorated by us and nothing else. It’s a simple thing made of old wood and black metal and we’re shouting and waving flags and holding each other. If we weren’t all wearing boots we would have splinters. I see my friend hanging one arm out of her big white pickup and all is right in the world.
We go down this big street in the middle of town and pass by all my favorite restaurants, and I’m holding all my favorite people, and it’s one million degrees, and I don’t care.
What I do care about is the way we’re starting to become surrounded by people with yellow signs who start shouting at us. They tell us we don’t have to submit to the bondage of sin. We could be free of the lifestyle that has trapped us. They say worse things than that.
A lot of them are smiling and I find it unsettling, but I feel safe in the rickety trailer because all of my friends are here. Finally someone starts shouting Bible verses at us I remember feeling surprised that it took so long, but I can’t remember which ones they were saying.
What I remember is the way one of my friends climbed on top of the white pickup They stand defiantly the wind in their eyelashes their heart as big as the sky which frames them in impossible bright blue.
The miracle, in the miracle way of trans voices, they shout and they sound like a golden trumpet, like the cry of the wind itself. In Christ there is no male or female. I had never heard anything like it.
When I remember that day, I hear the whipping of pride flags in the wind, the creaking of dry wood beneath our stomping feet and the proclamation ringing out from my friend on top of the pickup truck. I see the sky carrying it to our ancestors and our descendants. I feel defiance and triumph and love. This was my first pride.
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Reading
PRIDE IS A BECOMING
E CiszekSo I’ll share a little bit of my thoughts here as I stand in front of you in my late 30s and reflect on what Pride is for me at this juncture in my life.
Pride is a becoming. It is a journey and a destination. It is aspirational.
Sometimes, pride is a ‘Fake It Till You Make It’ kind of strategy. It’s the bricks I try to lay on the road ahead.
Pride is showing up to work. It’s standing at the podium of my classroom, and feeling the impact my visibility has on hundreds of students. I’m a professor.
Pride is remembering the teachers that showed up for me as a young person.
Pride is also wearing my unapologetically queer t-shirt to the gym.
Pride is volunteering in my children’s class and fielding questions From my son’s kindergarten classmates like: Are you a boy or a girl?
Pride is unlearning the miseducation of sex that is baked into heteronormativity and white supremacy culture.
Pride is learning and accepting that identity and desire and passion and attraction are fluid and relational – not static.
Pride is something I’m trying to embed in my anatomy.
Pride is something I carry in my bones.
Sermon
Rev. Carrie Holley-Hurt
So today we are in it for a real treat because I’m not going to be preaching. We’re going to have two wonderful members of our community, L.B. and Tomas, preach for us.
They’re going to share what pride means to them. L.B.
L.B. Lomeli
Good morning, all of you beautiful flowers. My name is L.B. Lomeli. I would like to start with a question I was asked at a pride event some years ago here in Austin.
What does pride mean to you? Feel free to chime in with your own beautiful responses? Freedom. Pride. Respect for yourself and others, that one’s beautiful. – Pride. – Yeah. Belonging, also beautiful.
My personal answer is honoring your inner monologue. A quote I read in Nikita Gill’s book The Girl and the Goddess Stories and Poems of Divine Wisdom in regards to the narrators bisexuality. “There is a secret sapling in me that I refuse to water and still it persists,” And still, it persists.
I have known my whole life I was queer, not necessarily in words that I understood how to express, but in that spirit of a sapling inside of me. And despite some denials I may have come along the way, I saw how everyone in my life had known. I saw this by how I was constantly questioned in ways that I had grown to resent, questioned about the letters in my name, questioned about the clothing that I put on my body, questioned about the makeup I choose to decorate my face, questioned about the choices I make regarding the hair given to this humanly body. I grew to resent that these questions needed to define my queerness when I know my queerness is simply just my existence.
Now though, I have been learning to let that little sapling grow. Come to find out when I stopped pruning it I got to see the flowers that could come with it. I got to see the strength it could stand with and with every flower and every leaf I like grow within me. I learned to care for myself when I learned to listen to myself that inner self, that inner monologue, I learned to grow for myself. I learned to honor myself.
I don’t need to explain those choices anymore. I know now everything I do is queer because I am queer. And I’m so thankful because with all this growth came an ecosystem, a community, a community I feed into, a community that feeds into me. I’m notorious for crying so please don’t be concerned. A community that is bright and colorful and strong, it stands so strong and resilient. I never thought this was going to be about falling in love with the intricacies of a flower. But what a wonderful way to be.
I leave you with the words of 1950s sapphic cabaret dancer Francis Fay. Gay, gay, is there another way?
Tomas Medina
Good morning My name is Tomas Medina and You know what I’ve never introduced myself up here. So I feel a little nervous about this part and I was hoping I’ll be wouldn’t so that I wouldn’t feel the need to do it but I am a middle-aged Latin man with a shaved or bald head and I’m wearing a too tight t-shirt that says resist in the colors of the trans flag and I’m going to speak on the transforming power of pride.
When I think of the power of pride The first image that comes to mind is the trans women of color who took part in the Stonewall Riots, one of their earliest though not the first queer resistance movements. I feel like I owe my very existence as a gay man to these early brave resistors. I’m not only filled with gratitude to these ancestors, I’m filled with pride to be part of their legacy, part of their family,
But, I wasn’t always proud. I was raised Catholic, and when I was a kid, I very much wanted to grow up to be a saint. Every day, I prayed that God would give me stigmata. I wanted to wake up with bloody palms from the nails of the cross. But as I got older, instead of bloody palms, I became attracted to other boys. So I changed my prayers. I prayed that if I couldn’t be a saint, maybe, just maybe, I could be not gay. I thought who I was was a sin and that I was broken.
But then when I was 17, I went to my first gay disco and life began to change for the better. I came out to my best friend, who then came out to me. I met other gay, lesbian, and trans folks. I joined a support group at my college. I began slowly to feel more comfortable in my own skin. When I came out to my parents that same year, they sent me to a therapist.
That therapist, truly useless, told me that to deal with my homosexuality, I should have avoid looking at other young men wearing shorts on my college campus. And I was 17. I mean, come on.
After a few sessions, I’d had enough and I quit. I told my parents if they had a problem with my being gay, they should see a therapist.
As I began to take pride in who I was, something else shifted. I started celebrating and making space for others who live out their full authentic selves. And not just members of the queer community, but anyone who says loudly and vulnerably, “I am who I am. And if you don’t like it, you can just eff off.”
I’ll admit sometimes I envy those people, but more than envy. I feel off. I’m moved. I’m inspired by their willingness to show up fully, proudly and sometimes imperfectly their pride fuels my pride. Over time I’ve come to realize that pride isn’t just about pride in ourselves. It’s also about pride in our communities.
When I was 24, my parents took me and my niece, who had just turned 15, to Spain. It was all of our first time in Europe. What most impressed me during that trip was our visit to the Prado Museum in Madrid. We saw masterpieces of the Spanish Renaissance, Valesquez, Goya, El Greco. I remember thinking, “Why have I never heard of these artists before?”
In that moment, something shifted in me. For the first time, I felt pride in my Latino heritage. Up to that point, I often wished I’d come from a family like the ones I saw on TV – white, suburban, upper middle class.
But, standing in that museum surrounded by brilliance and beauty from my own culture, I began to feel something new. I belonged to something worth celebrating. And now I take pride in being part of the Latino community and in being part of many communities, the queer community, the greater UU community, and this church.
Having pride in myself and others and my community is a lifelong journey. Every day, some part of me still wonders if I’m doing this “being human” thing all wrong. Am I working the wrong job, living in the wrong city, being a bad friend, the list goes on. But I know I’m not alone. I know there are others who carry these same doubts, maybe even some of the same people who inspire me. And yet, we go on.
Even with our doubts, we keep showing up. We live our most authentic lives the best we can. For me, pride isn’t about having it all figured out. It’s about choosing to live out-loud anyway.
And all of this, this journey, this defiance, this celebration feels especially urgent today. It’s a time when queer and trans lives are under renewed attack. When books are banned, rights are rolled back, and identities are politicized.
Living out-loud isn’t just personal. It’s political. It’s resistance. It’s our pride, our Part one, deeply rooted pride that gives us strength to resist, to keep going even when the world would rather we shrink or disappear.
Now more than ever, pride means choosing to be visible, choosing to be vulnerable, and choosing to show up for ourselves and for each other. That, to me, is the transforming power of pride.
Rev. Carrie Holley-Hurt
I feel super blessed. Thank you, thank you. Which is a good thing because I’m going to give you all a blessing now. Actually, Sol and I are going to give you a blessing.
Today is our glitter blessing, and today is the day that we remember as Reverend Chris wrote, “Pride is not just about rainbows and parades, though those things are wonderful. It is an unapologetic declaration that not only is who I am not sinful or unnatural or any of the many other claims that would deny my very soul, who I am is a beautiful expression of God’s creativity and love that refuses to be defiled or denied.” And so, we offer this glitter blessing, a recognition of the sacred beauty inherent in every single person in this room and online.
Glitter is resilient and tenacious, if you’ve ever found it in your carpet. Glitter shines bright when it sits by the sun, and it can pierce the dreariest of spaces.
This glitter that we share with each other today is a reminder of each of us, the beauty of our sacred imperfection, our ever-changing selves, and our glorious plurality.
As the music plays, I’d like you to come up. Sol and I will be on either side of the stage here, and you can tell us where you like your glitter.
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
Our benediction today in part comes from our congregant Sparkle.
Pride means an opportunity to live my life to the fullest. Pride means an opportunity for others to live their life to the fullest. Pride means an opportunity to squeeze that last ounce of joy out of this relatively short time that we are blessed to live on this planet. May we all queer or straight endeavor to squeeze that last ounce of joy out of this life.
Amen and Blessed be.
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