Loving from the Margins
Sunday, March 2, 2025
Service Blurb: When we are invited to put love at the center, we may be curious to ask some follow-up questions. What was previously at the center of Unitarian Universalism? Or how do we articulate or travel the radius and circumnavigate the circle to understand the wider ecosystem of our spiritual and ethical commitments? To place love at the center, we must discuss the margins, the edge, and the boundaries of our love. In so doing, we may come to develop a practice for living and loving as Unitarian Universalists today.
This is the final part of a four part series. You can elements from the previous services here:
Opening Words — “Marginal Wisdom” by Rev. Leslie Takahashi
They teach us to read in black and white.
Truth is this—the rest false.
You are whole—or broken.
Who you love is acceptable—or not.
Life tells its truth in many hues.
We are taught to think in either/or.
To believe the teachings of Jesus—OR Buddha.
To believe in human potential—OR a power beyond a single will.
I am broken OR I am powerful.
Life embraces multiple truths, speaks of both, and of and.
We are taught to see in absolutes.
Good versus evil.
Male versus female,
Old versus young,
Gay versus straight.
Let us see the fractions, the spectrum, the margins.
Let us open our hearts to the complexity of our worlds.
Let us make our lives sanctuaries, to nurture our many identities.
The day is coming when all will know
That the rainbow world is more gorgeous than monochrome,
That a river of identities can ebb and flow over the static, stubborn rocks in its course,
That the margins hold the center.
Reflection by Sondra Bolte
Our current government seems to want to move a lot more people out to the margins. Many have been marginalized for many years, but this is exponential for the poor, people with disabilities and dark skin, not-born-here (unless they are white and wealthy), LGBTQ, the sick. Our government and its current machismo doesn’t want to help anyone who needs it. It is causing great pain right now.
So how does LOVE define our responsibility to the people at the margins? To recognize their humanity, at least, but more so, to help in all the ways we can. We need to step into the void created by current government. We also need to push back on our legislators the stop this isolationist greed. We need to do what we can to protect the vulnerable. We need to give money were we can.
Many of you will remember when Liz and Michael Greven moved to Kenya for Michael to lead the project to build a much needed hospital for the IU/Kenya partnership. Some of the cost of running the hospital was provided by USAID. It stopped abruptly last month and employees are working without pay and they are having trouble keeping the lights on to serve the sick. The US payment system was abolished and they are running out of hope. We need to put pressure on congress to reclaim our humanity and do our part in the world, as similar scenarios are happening everywhere.
My dear friend, Freda Neal, used to say there is only Love and Fear at the center. I think she had it right. We can be motivated by LOVE and do good, be connected…or we can be motivated by FEAR and do things that are not very helpful, and distract us from what we are here to do. I see LOVE as that stirring of life inside us that makes us DO SOMETHING. Mother Teresa said not all of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love.
It is up to each of us to discover what opens us to love. For me, it is trees, meditation, singing, dancing, being in community with loving people. The people and discussions here at UUCCI are a source to replenish and open my heart. When I leave, I can, (as we say), take that openness & light into the world. The great magic thing about LOVE is that it is boundless, endless. The more I give it away, the more I have to give.
As UU’s we collectively proclaim and strive to keep love in the center.
Individually and collectively, we must fill our buckets and take it to those in the margins.
Reading — “Love and Risk” by Robert Spirko
Love cannot promise us safety, but we cannot have safety without it…
So what do we do? How do we manage in the absence of guarantees? How do we balance the need for self-protection with what Love sometimes demands of us in terms of risk?
…We must live with no guarantees; we may be called to pay a high price for Love. All we can do is be prepared to love as the times require. By contrast, we do know the high cost of living without Love: shame, guilt, silence, death. Our leaders can help us understand this dual truth.
Ultimately, we need to practice risk. The more we practice, the better our skills and discernment become. We need to prepare for those moments when we have to take action, when the risks of not acting are greater than those of action. We need practice, especially, with institutional risk. Many among us might accept a level of personal risk in our Love work; are we also ready to accept institutional risks? That determination takes careful group discernment, but also collective boldness. We have sometimes sheltered our institutions behind individual risk taking. It is worth thinking about when those relations might be reversed…
By calling us into wider circles of community, Love empowers us to act; any action puts us at risk. The feedback spiral of Love, risk, and trust—of relationship and community-becomes the ground for the actions that are necessary for mutual liberation. These actions set the conditions for further change and growth, often regardless of their "success" or "failure." And while we know we will never fully arrive at a perfect Beloved Community, we call it into being whenever we accept risk and act in Love, stronger and stronger with each call.
Sermon — “Loving from the Margins” by Rev. Nic Cable
For the past few weeks, we have been taking a closer look at what it means to place love at the center of our lives. As Unitarian Universalists, we do not have a common creed or set of beliefs, but a series of shared values that guide us in our own moral and ethical journeys. Like many times over the past several hundred years that Unitarianism, Universalism, and now Unitarian Universalism has existed in the United States and beyond, we have found new language that can serve us for this time in our unfolding, living tradition. Last fall, we spent six weeks exploring our shared UU values: Justice, Equity, Transformation, Pluralism, Interdependence, and Generosity. This winter, we turned to focus on the center, to what holds all of these values and all of us together. And that we have said is Love.
Let me share the words as they are written in Article II of the bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations: “Love is the power that holds us together and is at the center of our shared values. We are accountable to one another for doing the work of living our shared values through the spiritual discipline of Love.” That’s the language, the invitation, to possibility we hold with one another. That the power of love can hold us together and remind us of the shared values that we are called to live and promote in the world.
For our last Sunday of this sermon series, I want to talk about a very important aspect, well, actually two, that we have not explicitly discussed thus far. I mentioned one of them in the language from the UUA bylaws. It is not about love’s purpose, but about love’s location in our lives and communities, namely that love is at the center of our shared values. Love is at the center. I think this location is really important and not just because it is a metaphor to life up its importance. Like clearly, the center, or core, the heart, or middle, all of these are good ways to convey that love is or should be important to us as Unitarian Universalists. And I think I wouldn’t get much push back on that. Love seems like a good enough idea, force, value, energy, or aspiration, as any to place at the center of our lives and values. But I want us to spend some time thinking a little more deeply on the implications of such a location. As I mentioned in the sermon description for today, one question we might think to ask with this new language is “What was previously at the center of Unitarian Universalism?” It’s a good question. Perhaps one answer is that it has always been at the center, but I am guessing re-writing history would not be a good look for us. Rather, there are some great contenders over time that one could argue were at the center at one point or another.
Throughout our Unitarian and Universalist history, and I say that because the two U’s only came together 64 years ago in 1961, over the last several hundred years there were various debates and changes that unfolded throughout Christianity, because yes, indeed, Unitarian Universalism emerged through the trunk of Christianity, the limb of protestantism, and the branch of liberal denominationalism, although we call it an Association, throughout our long history, we have valued certain ideas, beliefs, commitments over others. One of these debates was on the divinity of Jesus. Unitarians ultimately saw Jesus as a prophet and no more the son of God than any of us are as children of God. In this sense, Jesus was not so much decentered as a result, but humanity was rather collectively centered. In time Unitarians especially emphasized a different trinity which took the center position, namely that of freedom, reason, and tolerance. These values each expanded the circle of community and possibility to create space for more ideas and people in our interdependent web of existence. One of the results of centering freedom, reason, and tolerance is that it also began to emphasize the centrality of the individual, I would say in some respects over and above the community. In other words, by placing the individual human in the center of the circle, we in effect push community beyond the center toward ever expanding circles of concern. This might not sound too bad. Of course, each of us is in the center of our own lives. And of course we are each in relationship to a wider circle or concentric circles of concern. But what can happen over time through this supremacy or at least primacy of the individual over the community is that the individual can become idle and stagnant. Thinking about it, there is only one point that is the center and an innumerable set of locations throughout the circle itself.
I think it is important that we come to realize that individuality can only take us so far in this life, and that freedom, reason, and tolerance are noble values, but perhaps not enough for the times in which we are living. This is where the centering of love may aid us with these current challenges we face. Love at the center holds our shared values for this chapter of our living tradition. For example, freedom is given more nuance by our value of interdependence, which honors our individuality and our collectivity; interdependence honors the one and the many. Pluralism likewise expands tolerance of other ideas, peoples, and cultures to a wider sense of embrace of the sacred diversity of all existence. This is part of the work we are doing within our UUCCI community, on the interfaith campus, and in the wider community. Another impact of placing love at the center over individuality, is that it raises what I think is a fundamental question we must consider: if we place love at the center, where does that leave the individual? Can both love and the individual be centered at the same time? My answer is ultimately no. The centering of love requires the decentering of the individual and invites us to travel the radius of the circle toward the margin or boundary of what we have drawn as our circle of concern. In this sense the center of love, calls on us to nurture what I spoke to in January, namely a deeper commitment to resilience, courage, and of course love itself.
One way we can foster more resilience and courage in the name of love, is through increasing our relationship and capacity to risk. In our reading this morning, Dr. Robert Spirko reflects on the relationship between love and risk. For those unfamiliar with who this is, Spirko was the co-chair of the Article II study commission which was the group charged by the UUA general assembly to guide the process of renewing Article II of the UUA bylaws, which includes what led to the new shared values with love at the center. For years, he engaged with thousands of Unitarian Universalists who reflected on our values and commitments as UUs. And from both his own lived experience and the feedback from these conversations love and risk were both needing to be involved somewhere in this new articulation of Unitarian Universalism. His reading begins with this admission, “Love cannot promise us safety, but we cannot have safety without it…” Spirko understands this first hand as he was in the sanctuary on July 27, 2008, when an armed gunman came into the Tennessee Valley UU Church and opened fire on a community that he felt was “too supportive of LGBTQ people and was ‘too liberal.’ He was quickly subdued by multiple attendees but not before he had killed two people, injured eight and traumatized an entire congregation.” Spirko recalls a group of people who disarmed the gunmen and collectively risked their lives to prevent more harm than the day already entailed. The ripple effect of this shooting continues to be felt, but it was also immediate. From local interfaith partners coming to the aid of the congregation, to the wider UUA collectively responding with care and resources, this event was a turning point in our larger UU story. Perhaps it was when love began moving toward the center. Case in point, it was in the aftermath of this event that the Side with Love campaign of the UUA, then called Standing on the Side of Love, was conceived of and launched. In a UU World article published a year after the shooting in 2009, the Side with Love campaign chair, the Rev. Meg Riley was quoted saying, “The Knoxville shooting inspired deep thinking about the message of hope that those two congregations brought in the wake of tragedy and the theology that was embedded in that hope. We felt that that was our good news to share as a faith and we really wanted to strategically maximize our voice in that way. This is going to be a real grass-roots-oriented campaign. We will be resourcing congregations to take action. We will put much more energy into where there are local leaders whom we can support who will have the impact that’s needed.”
Indeed, “Love cannot promise us safety, but we cannot have safety without it…” With love at the center, we are faced with increased risk because for some reason love is a threat. But our centering and proclaiming of love is worth the practice of risk. From our reading, Spirko writes, The more we practice, the better our skills and discernment become. We need to prepare for those moments when we have to take action, when the risks of not acting are greater than those of action. We need practice, especially, with institutional risk.” Where and how do we practice risk and by extension the practice of love? Taking the metaphor of the circle, we practice risk and love not at the center of the circle but throughout the area of the circle and at the margins or edge or circumference of the circle. If we place love at the center, then we are consciously or unconsciously acknowledging that we are called to move beyond the center to navigate the radius back and forth and experience risk as a result, for these can be unknown places, they are beyond ourselves, beyond what we know in here to what we may come to know out there.
To place love at the center, we must discuss the margins, the edge, and the boundaries of our love. I believe in so doing we will come to better know love, to understand love in its intimacy and its ultimacy, in its proximity and when it feels distant. And when it feels distant, our hearts and minds might open to feel and wonder why? Why? Why have we allowed this world, why have we allowed our humanity, ourselves to divide our access to love, our ability to experience love, touch it, sense it, and be embraced by it? It is noble to draw the circle wide and even wider still, but not if it creates unnecessary degrees of separateness and gaps or voids of connection between the center and the margins. Some distance is to be expected in a world as diverse and beautiful as ours. But with love at the center we are invited to travel. It’s like that saying of an incredulous person asking a UU, “hey, what do Unitarian Universalist stand for?” And the correct response is not defense, but honestly, that “we do not stand for anything, we move.” We move toward justice, we move with hope, we travel back and forth from the wellspring of love to the margins where too often the sources of life have gone dry. We move with compassion and understanding of the suffering of others. Or as our children are taught we move with an open mind, a loving heart, and with helping hands to bless the world through our actions and lives.
So when we are asked to consider loving from the margins, I believe we are ultimately balancing the equation or answering the question of what it means to place love at the center or for love to hold us and our shared values as Unitarian Universalists. This work of love is risky and it is not easy. It requires courage and resilience, but it also requires community. And thankfully, in community, we are able to experience love in a profound sense, in a way that traverse time and space, culture and tradition, a love that is alive, that is living, and that will not ever leave us.
As we are held in that love, may we be willing to travel across face of this circle, the earth, this life we have to live. May our movement with love at our backs, bring us peace, a deep peace, knowing that the world that we are envisioning and co-creating is one where someday, that wondrous love will break free of a singular center, and will move in pluralistic ways beyond our simple dimensional thinking, into a new love where all are celebrated in our diversity, yet held in our sacred oneness.
May it be so. Amen.