Love in the Breakdown
Sunday, February 23, 2025
Service Blurb: As a non-creedal tradition that values our diverse religious orientations, we are faced with the inevitable strain, conflict, and breakdown within our personal relationships, UUCCI community, and broader interfaith partnerships. How do we navigate love in the breakdown? What can love teach us in the face of challenge, uncertainty, and harm? We will explore these questions and more as we continue our 2025 Winter Sermon Series, "Love at the Center".
This is the third part of a four part series. You can read the previous services here:
Opening Words — “Small Kindnesses” by Danusha Laméris
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”
Reading — “No One Is Outside the Circle of Love” by Revs. Erika Hewitt and Susan Frederick-Gray
Nic: We know that hurt moves through the world, perpetrated by action, inaction, and indifference. Our values call us to live in the reality of the heartbreak of our world, remembering that:
Congregation: “No one is outside the circle of love.”
Missy: We who are Unitarian Universalist not only affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person; we also affirm the inherent wholeness of every being—despite apparent brokenness.
Congregation: “No one is outside the circle of love.”
Nic: We know that things break, or break down: promises, friendship, sobriety, hope, communication. This breaking happens because our human hearts and our very institutions are frail and imperfect. We make mistakes. Life is messy.
Congregation: “No one is outside the circle of love.”
Missy: With compassion as our guide, we seek the well-being of all people. We seek to dismantle systems of oppression that undermine our collective humanity. We believe that we’re here to guide one another toward Love.
Congregation: “No one is outside the circle of love.”
Nic: No matter how fractured we are or once were, we can make whole people of ourselves. We are whole at our core, because of the great, unnameable, sometimes inconceivable Love in which we live.
Congregation: “No one is outside the circle of love.”
Sermon — “Love in the Breakdown” by Rev. Nic Cable
2017 was a very significant year for many reasons. Obviously on a larger political level it was a year not dissimilar from this year, when like today there was a lot of uncertainty around the future of our nation in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. I remember a major act of love and resistance in response to that new political reality was shown almost exactly 8 years ago, when many of you organized or attended a Side with Love rally in downtown Columbus to show solidarity with BCSC students facing racial bullying.
Meanwhile, UUCCI was in the midst of its two-year ministerial search process, as was I, and yet we were still a couple months away from finding out whether we would be entering into a covenant of shared settled ministry. For both of us, this was a major milestone. It was the first time we were both in a full-time settled ministry search. Of course that wonderful search and call process was extended by you and accepted by me and together we’ve been on one beautiful, wild, resilient, and meaningful journey ever since. But before we started this chapter of ministry together in July 2017, there was another significant moment that occurred a couple weeks earlier in New Orleans. At the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association, which is an annual gathering each June, thousands of Unitarian Universalists gathered for five days to do everything from collective democracy, to offering practical workshops for lay leaders and religious professionals, and numerous opportunities for connection, worship, and organizing for the next year and years of our individual and interdependent expressions of our progressive values, dare I say agenda, for our respective and shared communities. Yes, General Assembly, for those who have not attended, is a whole other sort of experience. It can be a bit overwhelming with all the options of what you can do to fill your time, and yet it can also be deeply transformative for individuals who have only experienced Unitarian Universalism from a small corner of the world. As an aside, this year’s General Assembly will be in Baltimore, Maryland, and I highly encourage you to consider attending in person, or as a more cost effective option, virtually. I’d be happy to talk more about that if you are interested.
I digress. One of the transformative moments of the week was at the Service of the Living Tradition, which is sort of like an annual celebration and service that acknowledges religious professionals, who have crossed certain milestones in their credentialing process or those who are marking their retirement from ministry, and those who have died in the past year. It is my favorite moment each General Assembly, I think this will be my 19th GA this year, because it embodies this sense that it is a service marking our living tradition, that is both alive and transforming, and has been for hundreds of years. In 2017, I was being recognized with my colleagues who had recently achieved Fellowship as Unitarian Universalist ministers, which is similar to being board-certified. My ordination as Reverend by all of you, which is a rite reserved for the congregation alone to bestow, would still wait till November. It was a magical evening, and I sat right in front of two really noisy, I’m just kidding, two lovely people, Chris Kevitt and Cate Hyatt who were attending General Assembly together that year. It was a beautiful service and really marked that turn at the end of June toward July and the new chapter of life and ministry in Columbus, IN.
However, as significant as the Service of the Living Tradition was, the transformative moment in our collective Unitarian Universalist history was something that happened on the last night of the General Assembly. Around 9pm on Saturday night, while walking in the historic French Quarter of New Orleans, two UUA employees, James Curran and Tim Byrne, were violently assaulted and robbed, leaving one in critical condition with an acute brain injury. Just a day or so after being elected as the next UUA President, Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray, who now serves UU Bloomington down the road, was faced with one of her first acts in her new role—sending out a pastoral message to the entire Unitarian Universalist Association. The words of her message which can be read in its entirety on the UUA website inspired and shaped the words in our reading this morning. Part of what she wrote held the extreme tension and dissonance of the act of violence on the near heels of the General Assembly gathering, “I also want to acknowledge the sorrow, fear, anger, and heartbreak of seeing a loved one, a member of our community, violently attacked. I have experienced all of these emotions in the last few days, as have so many of the UUA staff and wider UU community. Throughout the General Assembly, we reflected on the narratives and wider systems of oppression that perpetuate both systemic and personal violence. This week, those reflections became personal and proximate.” Her use of the term proximate was intentional it referred to the keynote speaker that week, Bryan Stevenson who wrote Just Mercy and is founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. During his Ware lecture which brings a critical voice each year to speak before the General Assembly, he encouraged UUs to get proximate with those who are experiencing marginalization and injustice. It is a critical step in being a part of the larger work of justice that our society desperately needs.
Back to President Frederick-Gray’s pastoral letter, she writes, “As I have listened to Unitarian Universalists reflect on this situation, I have been moved by the connections made to Bryan Stevenson’s powerful message to us at General Assembly that ‘simply punishing the broken—walking away from them or hiding them from sight—only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity.’ May we hold the young adults who are accused of carrying out the robbery, Rashaad Piper (20), Nicholas Polgowski (18), DeJuan Paul (18), and Joshua Simmons (18), with the universal love that we hold Tim Byrne and James Curran. This is so very important. Many voices have lifted up hope for a process of restorative justice.” Both James and Tim wrote compelling testimonies to the Judge prior to sentencing. Quoted in a New York Post article from May the following year, James expressed, “Personally, I won’t feel any better if the folks who mugged me receive a long sentence.” Tim, who suffered the acute brain injury, requested leniency, asking instead for a “restorative justice” approach. Members of local UU communities in New Orleans showed up to express similar sentiments, wearing Side with Love shirts, and with signs expressing Black Lives Matter. When delivering her sentencing decision, Judge Camille Buras said, “I hope each and every one of you takes as much interest in your future well-being as the victims have, and as the community that appears in court and writes letters on your behalf has.” While not receiving the maximum sentence of 40 years, three of the young men received 15 years in prison, and the other received three.
Deep breath, friends. Why am I telling you this story? I share this story because I believe that in our deep dive this winter into the commitment and practice of placing love at the center of our lives, we will inevitably come to experience daily, even near constant, tension between the love we hold and feel deep within our hearts and in our communities of care, like this one, and some event or reality that threatens love's centrality and applicability in our lives. In other words, we need to acknowledge how we navigate love not only in theory, not only in good times, but also in practice, especially in what I call the breakdown. Love in the breakdown is about understanding that while there may be no limits to Love, there are limits to our capacity to hold it and center it in our lives. In that sense, it is a slight misnomer because love does not break down, but our ability to navigate situations and systems where love is absent or suppressed is what breaks down. The breakdown is due to the broken systems or the inevitable conflicts that emerge among people, or within families, communities, congregations, and in society at large. When we reach not the limits of love but the limits of our individual and collective navigation of love, we must return to our core shared values as Unitarian Universalists and allow them to recenter us and guide our way forward.
We know deep down that love is not broken, but that situations and systems in life and love can be. Take the central story of this sermon. A local UU in New Orleans, Leslie Runnels, was quoted in response to her activism around this case, “The systems have been working on young black men for a long time, and they’ve been funneled through the system. We want to break the system.” Our fellow UU in Louisiana is articulating that sometimes the brokenness of the system, is both paradoxical, in that it is working the way it was designed, but also that it requires being broken, a double negative, in order to create a new system, a new vision for the future. All four of the people in this case were involved in one system or another that increases the challenges they faced in their young lives. For example, DeJuan Paul and Joshua Simmons were homeless at the time of the robbery, living at a youth homeless shelter. They are just two of the millions of young people who experience homelessness each year. Rashaad Piper bounced around the foster care system since the age of eight until he eventually aged out of both the system and his difficult childhood. Finally, Nicholas Pogozelski was adopted and raised in Florida. At an early age he was diagnosed with a mental health disorder that included violent tendencies toward family members in the past. Like issues of homelessness, mental health challenges and a lack of services can be a major deterrent to people young and old in this country.
All of this is to say: the breakdown can come from so many angles expected and unexpected that we must prepare our hearts and communities with a love that is both large yet agile, ever-present yet flowing in ways that can help us in times of difficulty, when things, as they are wont to do, fall apart. As Unitarian Universalists, we are bound not by creed or a common set of beliefs, but by shared values and promises or covenants that we make with one another. And this is o what Tim and James, what newly elected Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray, what Leslie Runnels, and so many others were forced to contemplate in the aftermath of the events in New Orleans. Asking not what does our criminal justice system think should be done, but what do we feel should be done in light of our shared values and at that time principles of Unitarian Universalism. Little did we know, at that very General Assembly, the commitment was made to put together a study commission which led to our new shared values being articulated and of course placing love at the center which perhaps is where it has been all along.
May we be a people that navigate not only love, but the breakdown as well. May we gather not only in covenant, but when our covenants are tested or torn. May this be a community and ours be a society where the breakdowns are not disregarded or glossed over, but addressed with care and love, so that in the end the breaking will be less severe, less common, and the healing will be more lasting and complete. May love guide us and hold us in that journey. May we all be held and rest in that love, in both breakdown, and when we slowly but surely get back up together.
May it be so. Amen.