We are all tangled up together in a great web of life that is woven with beauty and hardship, love and loss, thriving and struggle. How do we tend well to the weaving so that all of us are held in care?

Rev. Molly Housh Gordon is joined by Violet Vonder Haar, Jamila Bachelder, Rev. Leon Dunkely, Rev. Eric Kaminetzky, Rev. Joan Javier-Duvall, Rev. Jordinn Nelson Long, Rev. Aaron Wisman, Rev. Sadie Lansdale, and Rev. Sarah Oglesby-Dunegan.

Featuring musicians: Natasha Steinmacher, GA Music Coordinator; Lea Morris; Francisco Ruiz; beheld; Violet Vonder Haar; Paul Winchester; and choirs from All Souls Unitarian Church, Indianapolis, IN; First Parish in Concord, MA; First Parish UU in Lexington, MA; First UU Congregation of Ann Arbor, MI; UU Fellowship in Athens, GA; UU Fellowship of Poughkeepsie, NY; UU Church in Cherry Hill, NJ; UU Church in Reston, VA; and UU of Minnetonka, MN.

The worship collection benefits Side with Love, including its campaigns for climate justice (Create Climate Justice), democracy (UU the Vote), and bodily autonomy, including reproductive, LGBTQIA+, and disability justice (UPLIFT Action). Your gift to the Side with Love collection supports all this essential work.

Read the Order of Service (PDF) and the transcript, below.

All of the music in the service is covered under a Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI) license. Congregations should have their own CCLI license if they are using the download or broadcasting the stream. An alternative to purchasing an annual license, such as through CCS, is to purchase a streaming license by song through OneLicense.

Please Note: Congregations are not authorized to edit the service or post it publicly on their own website or social media.

Transcript

Introduction

Rev. Dr. Molly Housh Gordon: Greetings UUs, and Welcome to our 2024 General Assembly Sunday service, during this our first intentionally all virtual General Assembly. It is a delight to be joining you on screen in your sanctuaries and homes, and it is a joy to be connected across every distance, linked from person to person and congregation to congregation. I am the Reverend Doctor Molly Housh Gordon, she/her, minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbia, Missouri, and I am so honored to lead you in worship this morning along with a number of dear colleagues and congregants. I am a pale skinned white woman in the very last months of her 30s with red hair that is very long on one side and very short on the other. I'm wearing a dark teal blouse with a scalloped neckline and a stole with a dove on one side and rolling water on the other. I'm speaking to you from my church sanctuary in Columbia Missouri against a background of large dandelions made of paper plates and napkins and garden hoses by a wonderful artist in our congregation Lily Johnstone.

One of my core beliefs as a Unitarian Universalist is that my life is inextricably bound together with every other life and force on this Earth, and I am grateful to be tangled up with you, my fellow Unitarian Universalists. In celebrating the interconnection that I experience daily and weekly, this service will include members of the staff and congregation of our church here in Colombia, and it will also include members of a minister colleague group that I have met with every week for the last three years to deepen our practice of Unitarian Universalism. They will each introduce themselves. I am so grateful to remember that so much of who I am and how I think and what I write is formed by these relationships.

Additionally, the ideas in this service are formed by a wider landscape of entangled influence particularly the work of theologians Karen Bray and Catherine Keller, the poet Ross Gay, Unitarian Universalist ancestor Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, movement organizers and writers adrienne maree brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and so many others whose words and ideas inevitably make their way into mine.

I wonder: who are you tangled up with in your congregation? In your thinking? In your life? Let's celebrate those connections today. We begin with a Prelude performed by several UU choirs from across the country, their images and voices woven together as our lives and our faith communities so deeply are. I hope you will feel yourself connected as we worship together today, remembering that we are here, gathered from many places, and yet still here together. Let us begin.

Prelude: “Here Together” by David M Glasgow

Lyrics not included in transcript.

Opening Words

Rev. Dr. Molly Housh Gordon, Rev. Eric Kaminetzky, Rev. Sarah Oglesby-Dunegan, Rev. Sadie Lansdale, Rev. Aaron Stockwell Wisman: As we weave our worshiping community this morning, we offer greetings to all UUA congregations, to CUC congregations, to individual UUs tuning in across the country and world, and to Global Unitarian Universalist communities who may be worshiping from so many places. As we begin our service from diverse locations this morning, may we ground ourselves in each of those places, even as our spirits reach out to connect us to one another. Helping me to anchor our worship this morning in some of the hundreds of places from which we gather are several minister colleagues from across the United States who meet together every single week to hone our preaching practice and invite each other into the most daring expressions of Unitarian Universalism.

I am Eric Kaminetzky. I am an older balding man with slightly olive tinted skin. Greetings from the US West Coast, from Edmonds Washington where the deep blue waters of the Salish Sea lap at the shores between the Cascade and the Olympic Mountain ranges. The land I join you from has been stewarded for countless generations by the Snohomish tribe and the Coast Salish people who continue their livelihoods on these lands today.

I'm Reverend Sarah Oglesby-Dunegan, a short middle-aged woman with graying red hair and freckles wearing glasses. Greetings from the United States Southwest, from Valley Unitarian Universalist and Chandler, Arizona where the Saguaros Bloom amidst an array of bright colored flowers and hummingbirds are joined by coyotes, scorpions and javelinas in a desert landscape that is both beautiful and dangerous and full of surprises. The land I join you from has been stewarded for countless Generations by The Hohokam, Akimel O'odham (Pima), Maricopa, Yavapai, Yaqui; also the Gila River Indian Community, Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, and Tohono O'odham Nation. From Arizona we share a wish of cool breezes, shady spots to rest, freedom to cross borders as needed, and enough water to you, our fellow Unitarian Universalists across the country and world.

I am Molly Housh Gordon, a white woman with red hair in an asymmetrical style. Greetings from the US Midwest, from Columbia, Missouri, where the waving grasses of the prairie are deeply rooted, where the Big Muddy Missouri River makes its leisurely way eastward toward the end of its journey to the Mississippi, and where the rolling foothills of the Ozark Mountains shelter vast caverns and abundant life. The land I join you from has been stewarded for countless generations by the Osage, Peoria, Kiikapoi, Oceti Sakowin, and Kaskaskia peoples. From Columbia we share our wish of deep nourishment, wide perspective, and bodily autonomy to you our fellow UUs across the country and world.

I'm Sadie Lansdale, a tall white woman with brown hair pulled back in my church bun. Greetings from the United States South from Greensboro, North Carolina where the blooms are going wild, the produce is ripening on the vines, and the rivers and creeks that sweeten the Earth are thick with life. The land I join you from has been stewarded for generations by the Cheraw, Catawba, Occaneechi, Sissipahaw, Keyauwee, and Shakori people. From Greensboro we share our wish of good food, good music, and rowdy celebration - heaven on Earth for all people - to you our fellow UUs across the country and the world.

I am Aaron Stockwell Wisman, a tallish white man with short blonde hair and a beard. I am wearing a blue ministerial robe and a rainbow stole and I use glasses. Greetings from the United States East Coast, from Framingham, Massachusetts in the Charles River Watershed. We learn about the seasons as the vernal pools fill with water in the spring. They're the home to yellow spotted salamanders and fairy shrimp. We learn about the seasons too with the Vermilion and Golden Leaves of Autumn and the chattering of those bare branches during stick season. The land I join you from has been stewarded for countless generations by the Massa-adchu-es-et, Agawam, Nipmuc and Pawtucket people. From Framingham, Massachusetts we share our wish of changing seasons and flourishing life to you our fellow Unitarian Universalists across the country and world.

Chalice Lighting

Gretchen Maune & Members of the UU Church of Columbia, MO: Greetings to you gathered in so many additional beautiful spaces. Take a moment to feel your body connected to the place where you are as we join our Spirits with yours from each of these places. Take a moment in gratitude for the land that upholds and sustains you, for its many stewards across generations, and for the spirit that roots and connects us each to each in a great web of living and loving and worshiping. Come let us gather. [Instrumental Music] I am Gretchen Maune, a worship associate at the UU Church of Columbia. I am a white elder millennial and use she and they pronouns. I have short, blue-streaked brown hair and am wearing a black blazer over a blue and black abstract patterned blouse, am holding a blue blind cane and I am joined by members of our congregation to light our chalice, the symbol of our faith in the cup of community that holds us tenderly and the bright flame of spirit that connects us inextricably. Our chalice is made of hammered metal with a round base, a platform holding a candle, and two circles arching their way around the flame. We invite you now to join us in lighting your chalice wherever you are and to let the energy of these many connected flames power our faith with passion and warmth. As you light your chalices, we will share a moment of music and images of a number of chalices from congregations across the country.

Story from “Through the Mickle Woods” by Valiska Gregory

Rev. Dr. Leon Dunkley, Jr.: I am Leon Dunkley. I am an African American man with dreadlocks and an increasingly graying beard. I am wearing a stole that honors the members of North Universalist Chapel Society or North Chapel in Woodstock Vermont, which is the church and the community that I lovingly serve. I'm going to share a story with you this morning from a collection called Through the Mickle Woods by Valise Gregory.

In a kingdom long ago, there was a weaver who spun stories out of thread. One day an owl, white as winter, perched in a nearby tree. "I should like my story to be woven out of clouds,” said the owl. "As you wish," said the Weaver, and the owl brought the woman strings of clouds round as pearls. But every time she tried to weave them in and out they would dissolve quietly as dew upon the grass. The owl blinked his great eyes. "Perhaps we should add some Moonlight," he said, "the kind that shimmers on water." "As you wish," said the Weaver. But though the owl brought baskets of jeweled Moon beams worth more than the king's own Crown, the story's cloth would not take shape. "I do not understand," said the owl. "I have chosen beautiful things for the weaving of my story." "Ah," said the woman, "but sometimes the cloth will pattern itself whether we will or no. You must bring everything: things chosen and things not." And the owl flew over mountains and through valleys. He gathered jade green as gingko leaves and raspberries red as blood. He flew past villages that were peaceful and past countries ravaged by War and when he returned with all of the things that he had found the Weaver smiled. "These will do," she said. She took the things that the owl had brought: the threads of sunlight fine as silk, and cobwebs gray as skulls, and wove them together into a cloth. And when the owl pulled his story around him, it was so full of woe and gladness, so beautiful and strong, that when he stretched out his new made wings, the people thought he was an angel hovering over the breathless sky.

Interlude: ”We Are Weaving Our Lives” by Alexa Sunshine Rose

Performed by beheld.

Lyrics not included in transcript.

Centering Moment

Jamila Batchelder, Director of Religious Education & Violet Vonder Haar, Director of Music Ministry, UU Church of Columbia, MO: I'm Jamila Batchelder, the director of religious education at the UU Church of Columbia. I'm a 46-year-old white woman with lots of wavy dark blonde hair and I am wearing an art nouveau print wrap dress in shades of turquoise, Aqua, black, and gray. My name is Violet Vonder Haar. I'm the director of Music Ministry here at the UU Church of Columbia I am a 30 something white woman with short blondish brownish hair wearing gold glasses and also an art nouveau style handkerchief wearing with a white shirt. And together we are going to lead you in a moment of centering as we do each week here in our congregation.

I'd like to invite you to find a comfortable position for your body, feel your contact with a seat or with the ground, and take a moment to bring your attention to the steady rhythm of your breath in and out for a moment finding your center. And now close your eyes and try to imagine the threads that are being woven into this story of your life: each experience, each feeling, each love and sorrow, its own thread. And let each thread take shape in your mind as color or Texture or sensation until it becomes almost tangible... to where you can almost hold it in your hands delicately between your fingers with all your tenderness. Can you begin to weave it all in? Twining green chutes of new discovery, heavy drab threads of despair, the sparkling sunlight of unexpected joy, the red hot threads of anguish, the strong and supple threads of deep friendship, the endless threads of grief that weave themselves in again and again throughout the fabric... that perhaps the fabric couldn't exist without... because when you look more closely you see that they were spun out of your capacity to love. What is weaving itself into your story? What makes the fabric strong? What makes it vibrant? What gives it poignancy? And now bring your attention to the edge of the the fabric that you are weaving and see it does not end there. Each fabric neat and tidy and separate. Open your mind, your heart, your spirit to threads being woven from a 100, a thousand, from countless others, weaving into yours in colors and textures you could never have imagined. Sometimes weaving together roughly in complicated patterns sometimes beautifully and seamlessly, sometimes some of both. Can you hold the tenderness of their stories, the tenderness, and care of this weaving together? Can you sit here silently a moment longer in tenderness, in love, in awe at this creation. At all that has been woven. We are weaving our lives, won't you sing with me?

Congregational Song: “We are Weaving Our Lives” by Alexa Sunshine Rose

Led by Violet Vonder Haar.

Lyrics not included in transcript.

Prayer & Moment of Contemplation

Rev. Joan Javier-Duval: I am Joan Javier Duval I am a cis woman in my 40s with black hair to my shoulders, brown eyes, and tannish skin dressed in a black clerical robe with a colorful stole. Will you join me in the spirit of prayer or contemplation:

Holy mystery, silent presence, uncertain bearer of the weight of it all. In These Quiet Moments we tune in, we listen for and seek out the maybe still breathing, perhaps still whispering, faintest sign of the universal good. We await wisdom between the cacophony of distractions pulling us towards untruth and falsehood. We await relief amidst the shrill cries of desperation, of we've had enough, of when will they stop killing my people, of how much more will the waters rise, of when will it be safe to return to my home, of how much longer can I hang on? We listen, we attend, and we wait through the tumult of these days. We seek assurance. We seek the fulfillment of a promise... a promise made to ourselves, a promise made to those we have been stretched to call neighbor, a promise written and enshrined and yet unfulfilled. Help us, abiding mystery, to hang on. To hold on when all is in question when all is in doubt. Help us to stay firm to our own commitments and our own promises. Lead us back into connection, back into to the bonds of humanity that help us to know each other as beloved. May we continue attending with care, may we keep watch, may we beckon love and justice and mercy with our own whispers, with our shouts, with our cries until all know themselves part of the circle of love. Amen.

We continue now with several minutes of contemplative music and images of candles on the screen. You may wish to share your congregation's usual rituals of prayer or Joys and sorrows during this time by pausing the video or you may simply take a moment of breath and attention to enjoy some quiet contemplation

Hymn of Response: “Spirit of Life” by Carolyn McDade

Led by Natasha Steinmacher.

Lyrics not included in transcript.

Reading: “Shaking the Tree” by Jeanne Lohmann

Rev. Jordinn Nelson Long: Good morning I'm Reverend Jordinn Nelson Long, a white woman with chin length brown hair and I am standing in a white wooden pulpit at our congregation First Parish Needham, Massachusetts. On which note, Reverend Molly, your intern congregation of long ago sends its greetings.

We are indeed held by threads woven fine. Our reading this morning is by the poet Jean Lohmann. "Shaking the Tree." Vine and branch we are connected in this world of sound and echo, figure and shadow. The leaves contingent, roots pushing against Earth. An apple belongs to itself, to stem and tree, to air that claims it, then ground. Connections balance, each motion changes another. Precarious, hanging together, we don't know what our lives support, and we touch in the least shift of breathing. Each holy thing is borrowed. everything depends.

Anthem: “Weave and Spin” by Starhawk

Performed by Lea Morris.

Lyrics not included in transcript.

Sermon: “Weaving Our Lives”

Rev. Dr. Molly Housh Gordon: My 5-year-old Margot Mae comes to me sobbing and thrusts her snuggle worn sloth lovey into my face.

Baba is ripped she cries. I love her so much can you fix her?

I tear my eyes away from my phone where I've been watching a photojournalist's video of a child just like my own covered in the dust of bombs, vibrating with medical shock and soul trauma beside a pile of rubble in Gaza.

Child, I can fix nothing,

but I pull her to my chest and let her tears join mine.

30 years before I sit with my great-grandmother Iva Mae, at the table her mother brought in a wagon across the Prairie, running my hand over a notch worn smooth by wagon wheel and the worrying of women.

I am nine. We sit packing away blankets whose edges she neatly crochets by feel - her beloved hobby as a seamstress with sight long gone.

She gives these blankets to every baby she learns of. The mail deliverer's son, her cousin-in-law grandson's newborn child. They're all ours, she tells us.

That day we are packing away my blankets for the children I do not yet know I will have. Can you teach me? I ask, pointing to her crochet hook.

Yes, she can, but first things first.

Before we learn to weave, we learn to mend.

She brings out a needle and thread, a torn old rag. I cut the string, thread the needle, tie the knot, learn the simplest looping stitch.

By this the world is sustained. Just this thread. Just this lesson.

First, we learn to mend.

Now, my daughter calms herself in my arms. More truthfully, we calm each other, and together we fetch the needle and thread.

Under my hands, Baba becomes whole again, while beside us images of devastation flicker on the screen of my phone.

I can fix nothing. But Iva taught me: Every baby is ours.

First, we learn to mend.

It is a theological truth long understood by our tradition that all of our lives are woven and sewn and bundled up into one great tapestry of life.

It is a terrible truth of this moment that the weaving is torn and frayed and sliced. Sometimes by our very own hands.

And I'm not certain that we have learned well to mend.

Friends I want to speak to you today of the Web of Life. An existential fact about which we Unitarian Universalists love to sing and rhapsodize, and sometimes joke.

Did you see the UU Valentine that said baby let's let our interconnected webs interconnect?

It's beautiful, isn't it?

The Web of Life.

Sparkling with Dew like Jewels at every join.

All the ways we are connected accompanied and so deeply held across all of time and all of space.

The depth of our interdependence means that you are in the dancer showing something true about love in the shape of her arm, and in the painting glowing with impossibly captured light.

It means there is something of you in the way a rose unfurls, something of you in the engineers that found a way to reach the stars and something of you in the stars.

All of life is woven thick and that means we are each reflected in poetry and in prayer, in science and in every silence.

We are echoed in the ocean waves and found in the deep how beautiful.

You could almost forget couldn't you, that a spider's web is also the tool of a predator?

That a web is sure death for the fly.

Our connections are sticky, and sometimes they are terrible.

We are in the rot as much as the roses.

And there is something of us in the avarice of the billionaire who hoards 10 lifetimes of security while everyone else teeters at the brink of disaster.

And we are not separate from the old boy sneering with racist slurs and a powerful need to be better, to make others less.

Or from the casual vast cruelty of the truly powerful.

We are not separate.

And for me there is this.

My great grandmother Iva Mae, who crocheted countless soft blankets to hold new life,

She also upholstered the plane that destroyed Hiroshima. How do I hold both of those things?

So tenderly.

Our connection is a soothing balm, but it is also in those bombs.

Every baby is ours, and so is every harm.

The tapestry of our lives is thick woven, warp and weft of love and pain. It is beautiful and it is awful.

Our interdependence is sustaining and threatening and God sometimes I wish it was just one or the other.

Our whole culture is set up to tell us it's only ever one or the other.

My survival brain would really like it to just be one or the other so I would know how to act.

All of us sometimes behave like it's only one or the other. Like we're all saved or all damned. All good or all bad.

Like we could cut away the harm and have only the love.

I know I've wished it for my family tree. To trim off the branches of shame and only let the good stuff remain, perfectly formed, all blessed, holy, uncorrupted.

I've wished it.

And how could I not?

It's in our faith to pursue that moral perfection.

Our great grand forefather William Ellery Channing told us that we could, that we should, grow in likeness to God.

Really that was the Unitarian good news - that we could grow in likeness to God, could become less messy, more divine, leave bad behind for good, make our way up the shining hill, no mistakes.

But hills keep rolling on, high to low, and messing up is how we grow, and growing never ends.

And no matter the language you use for the ultimate, perhaps you've been left with just that likeness, just that purity, just that choice: perfection or damnation. And are you just exhausted from the climb?

Because maybe you're afraid that they're on to you.

Your congregation, your friends, your colleagues, or your people.

That they know you haven't got it all right yet.

That there's still some greed in you, or some confusion, and lots of fear.

Maybe you're afraid that you haven't got it all right yet and that makes you all wrong.

And maybe you've even tried to slice yourself out of the web sometimes, because nobody told you that you could just keep growing.

Because nobody ever taught you how to mend.

And even when we do feel like we're getting it mostly right, it hurts sometimes to be so tangled up. To be present to all that beauty and all that pain at once.

To hold your sparkle eyed child and her precious stuffed sloth in your lap while another child is covered in the dull dust of bombs and yet another is dead in her mother's weeping arms.

It aches to be so tangled up.

No wonder the weaving is frayed. No wonder it is sometimes torn.

It aches to be so tangled up, and it is dangerous sometimes.

When everything depends, one misfortune can send it all tumbling to disaster. Surely Covid taught us the danger of our beautiful tight woven connections. That we ignore them at our peril, and that even when we manage to attend to them well tragedy may still unfold.

Tangled up in the web of life, so much depends upon forces over which we have no control. Forces we may never even witness or

understand.

We are at each other's mercy, and not all of us are merciful.

The poet Jeanne Lohmann writes: precarious, hanging together, we don't know what our lives support, and we touch in the least shift of breathing.

Each holy thing is borrowed.

Everything depends.

Our interdependence sustains us and because it sustains us it also makes us so vulnerable to one another. There is no outright safety to be had in the Web of Life.

There never was.

It is dangerous to be so tangled up, and it aches.

No wonder the weaving is frayed. No wonder it is sometimes torn.

And the call of our faith?

The call of our faith is to respond to these tangled realities all at once:

the sustenance and the danger, the holding and the teetering, the beauty and the pain.

We really don't like to feel that second part.

Sometimes we try to slash and hack away at the web to avoid that second part.

Maybe if we could just cut ourselves away from that interdependence we could be safe. Maybe alone, on our own, it wouldn't ache.

If I don't rely on you I could be sure I was okay, and if I leave first they can't kick me out, and if I distance myself from your mistakes I won't get kicked out too, and I'll never have to reckon with the shame of things I used to do before I knew

So slash and hack and tug away.

And the power hoarders, and the supremacy systems, and the forces of Empire, well they are standing by sharpening their knives.

They are whispering to us that we don't have to depend. And that the cost of our separation? Well, it would only be the parts of us that hurt in the first place.

All we have to do is cut out the warp of the weaving.

Slice away the pain and fears.

Cut out the anger and the longing. That doesn't sound like such a bad deal does it?

Until the weaving won't hold, because we aren't whole.

Until it all begins to unravel, and our humanity leaves us too.

And the weft of joy that cannot stay without the warp of sorrow. And the weft of love that does not exist without the warp of loss.

Our lives must have them all.

And not just our lives.

Life on Earth must have it all. Every strand. Every warp and weft.

Yes, it aches to be so tangled up. Yes, it is dangerous sometimes. And yes, Empire is standing ready with a knife, inviting you to cut your way free of the web.

Don't.

You must stay.

You must stay woven in.

Everything depends on us all staying woven in. On us each learning to mend. Everything depends, and any separation we might win would be an illusion anyhow.

Interdependence is beautiful and it is terrible but more than that it IS.

Our entanglement comes from living in a universe of bouncing atoms and growing life and exploding stars. We cannot escape it if we try, and we harm it when we try.

We harm it when we try.

So what if instead we hold on tighter to each other and so embraced we learn to abide.

To weave all of life whole.

To reknit unjust entanglements into more just ones,

to mend the places we've torn in our desperation to escape where the weaving's been worn.

What if we turn back to each other and refuse to turn away.

Even when the bombs break our hearts, even when one more loss will unravel us.

What if we tangle our fingers up together on purpose, and cup this delicate web in our hands, and tenderly mend every tear?

And what if every join in the weaving is where the power lies that will make us all free, tangled up in mutual thriving?

And what if our heartbreak is the needle that will sew us back together?

This has always been the wisdom of community organizers and spiritual leaders and prophets.

That our power lives right next to our broken hearts.

Another warp and weft and the weaving of our thriving when we're learning to mend.

I live in Missouri, where the voice of Empire and domination is very loud right now, and where the state legislature is very extremist and very afraid, and they have taken their sharpest knives to our interconnection.

They are afraid of how life and death intertwine, so they have banned abortion.

They are afraid of how possibility and unruliness dance together, so they have banned gender affirming care.

They are afraid of the way curiosity unfolds into deeper mystery, so they are defunding education.

And I wonder where their hearts are broken too. And I wonder if we can help them learn to mend because we need them to weave themselves back in. Because we can all turn back to each other again.

Because right next to the threads that they have tattered there is also a strong woven Missouri, ready to receive and reweave what is frayed.

A Missouri where farmers with Missouri Rural Crisis and activists from the Organization for Black Struggle and union members from Jobs with Justice have spent years investing in our Web.

Building deep relationships together, fighting factory farming together, protesting police brutality together, successfully raising the minimum wage together, and getting abortion rights back on the ballot together.

Because they know that they are intertwined.

Because they know in their bones that their interdependence is an inescapable fact.

Because they would not leave this web even if they could, because even though it aches and even though it is dangerous sometimes, it is so sustaining and so beautiful.

In this Missouri, we live in a vast and shining web of organizing relationships, where we stay connected, where we prize our interdependence, where we turn toward each other, where we mend what we tear,

and yes, we are heartbroken together, and there we find our power.

I hope you have a web like that too.

In your community, in your congregation, in your beautiful family of choice.

I hope you are weaving a beautiful web like that

where we already know that love and loss are intertwined,

and because we've accepted that tender truth the power of our care cannot be stopped.

And this too is the promise of our faith.

That when we accept the tender truth of our aching, dangerous, sustaining connection,

the power of our care cannot be stopped.

We UUs know the whole woven web: joy and sorrow, hope and despair.

And at our best we are rooted in it, and we are sustained by it, and there is nothing woven that we need to fear

because we are learning to mend.

Because we are willing to cry and rage together and dance and rejoice together.

And with the strong-threaded needle of our heartbreak and our care, we are present to all of it together, and that is where our power lies.

In depending on each other,

and knowing we depend on each other,

and being unafraid to depend on each other, because it's all woven so tight, because everything depends.

I am sitting with my daughter, mending her snuggle-worn sloth and stitching myself in with the children of Gaza.

I am sitting with my ancestor, learning to sew and stitching myself in with the victims of that bomb.

I am sitting here with you, deep in the web.

We are here together, tangled up in the gorgeous ache of love, weaving and mending, and when all else fails, joining our tears.

By this the world is sustained.

Just these threads, all of them,

wound and bound together,

unbroken or mended, encircling.

And finally, we pray, we promise, we proclaim,

finally woven whole.

Hymn: “Circle Round For Freedom” by Linda Hirschhorn

Led by Natasha Steinmacher and Francisco Ruiz.

Lyrics not included in transcript.

Offering Introduction

Nicole Pressley for Side with Love: Our relationships and the values that ground them are sacred. And just as they are the thread that weave our covenantal community, our web of interconnectivity is what holds the strength and possibility in Justice organizing work. Side with love holds the public Justice work of the Unitarian Universalist Association, bringing our values to life through mobilizing leaders within our congregations and beyond. And in these times where threats to democracy and liberty devastate our communities, our families, and our individual lives, we are fortified by the truth that throughout history people, Unitarian Universalists, rise to meet the moment, to side with love and struggle towards the highest aspirations of our faith. To reject the disposability of any human being and proclaim all are worthy of love and belonging and to make it so through our actions.

Side with love works on four intersectional priorities: democracy with UU the Vote, climate with Create Climate Justice and the Green Sanctuary programs, LGBTQ and gender justice through Uplift action, and decriminalization. In 2024 we are rising to the challenges that we are facing in our world today, launching the first ever Faith-wide Climate Revival that will break down silos and springboard hundreds of congregations to usher in a new era moving beyond extraction and into a wider climate justice movement, supporting congregations with tools and trainings to equip us to take courageous and impactful action. We're building response networks across the country for Trans people, students, and many folks targeted by state violence and legislative attacks. Side with love calls on us to show up, to be bold, and to be a part of a Moral Majority that knows another world is possible, and we are taking action right now towards that future. Especially in this consequential year with UU the Vote 2024. UU the vote is anchored in the promise of democracy to build an inclusive and accountable democracy that works for the many, not the few. It is grounded in the process of democracy that demands that we combat voter suppression, safeguard our elections by volunteering as poll workers, to protect abortion rights, and to show up to make sure every vote is counted. Our trainings equip us to be communities of action and care for the Urgent work that will remain in the days and the years following the election. UU the vote is anchored in the people, all of the people who power our democracy at the polls, on the steps of the Supreme Court, in the halls of our legislatures, and in the streets. Today under the leadership of democracy strategist Nora Rasman, we are already underway. We've already made 8,000 calls to voters in Georgia ahead of the primary. We mobilized congregations to action in Orlando, Sarasota, and Palm Beach to cross the finish line and add to the nearly 1 million petitions that got abortion protection on the ballot, and we are working with many more other congregations who made their congregations petition drop off hubs for voters in their communities. In Arizona, we held mobilizations in Tucson and Phoenix to have values-based conversations with voters and train our communities to gather petition signatures and it's only June. We can achieve so much more right now if we do it together. This is why we're working with UU State action networks in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, and many more, helping to bolster voter contact and add capacity so that they can build the election defense and safety teams to be responsive to the needs on the ground. Together with national partners like Power the Polls we're filling in the gap of a major pole worker shortage that leaves the administration of our elections at risk. We are rising to the challenge of Frontline Partners who have asked for Unitarian Universalists to be bold and vocal in our support of abortion rights and trans rights and to grow a strong Interfaith movement that contests theologies of domination that seek to control the lives, bodies and futures of BIPOC, trans, disabled, and many other targeted communities. Side with love is proud to organize thousands of Unitarian Universalists every year, and today I am asking for your support to make this work possible. Your gift today will be used to fund to the programs that mobilize Unitarian Universalists across the country to take urgent action that meets the moment with faithful courage and prophetic determination. Love calls us to embody the highest aspirations of our faith and harness our power by acting boldly and committing to the work today and for the Long Haul and I’m excited and grateful to share that all contributions you make will be matched up to $50,000. Thank you to all who made this possible thank you to all for your support your work and your generosity. Select donate in the GA mobile app, use the QR code on the screen, donate online, or text SWL to 91999

Offertory: “Hold On” by Yola

Performed by beheld.

Lyrics not included in transcript.

Benediction

Rev. Dr. Molly Housh Gordon: By this the world is sustained.

Just these threads.

All of them.

All of us.

Woven together, learning to mend, keeping the circle whole.

Go in blessing UUs, and be a blessing to a world that needs our care.

Postlude: “Weaving Our Songs”

Arranged by Paul Winchester; Music by David M. Glasgow, Alexa Sunshine Rose, Carolyn McDade, and Starhawk.

Lyrics not included in transcript.