The Long Faithfulness of Justice

I spent New Year’s Eve watching the conclusion ofStranger Things. The show did not hook me with any one character, or one act of courage, or one heroic moment that fixed everything. In fact, I loved the show because there was no single leader — no savior who carried the story alone. Even the magic was never just in Eleven. It was in the family and friendships of the entire group. Each person had a role, a particular set of skills, and a way of showing up that mattered in how they could resist and stand together, down to the youngest member. Some were brave. Some were smart. Some just stayed when leaving likely would have been easier. And some were jerks, at least some of the time. What saved them was not one extraordinary sacrifice, but the fact that they kept coming back to stand together.

And that feels like an important place to begin this year. We are often taught to imagine the pendulum of justice comes as a single wave, a decisive protest, or one clear moment that changes the world. But real societal change rarely works that way. It is collective and uneven because it unfolds through relationships, not heroics. Transformative justice is many people offering what they have, when they can, and trusting that shared commitment over time is what carries us through the hard moments. It is sustained by ordinary people doing unremarkable things without certainty that their efforts will succeed in their own lifetime.

Justice Moves at the Speed of Commitment

The Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted 381 days. The Greensboro Woolworth sit-ins persisted for 174 straight days and spread from there to multiple cities for the next four years. The first formal petition in North America to end chattel slavery was written in Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1688. It would take nearly two hundred years, a war, and the suffering and deaths of millions of Black people before legal emancipation happened. Those numbers do not just measure endurance but tell a larger truth about how slowly change happens over time. It is rare for those moments of change to happen rapidly enough for those seeking them.

Most of the people who walked instead of riding the bus every day for over a year did not see themselves as heroes. They were tired and they worried about their jobs, their safety, and their families. But they kept walking anyway, because it was necessary to do something even when the something seems like too little for that moment.

Many of you in our welcoming UU congregations understand this kind of faithfulness. You know that being welcoming is a way of being in community, even when it is messy, or when attendance dips, budgets tighten, and wider societal winds shift.

And right now, many of your communities are holding people who are hurting and afraid. This includes transgender and nonbinary members wondering whether they will be safe this year. Immigrant families are bracing for what additional policies may bring after a challenging 2025 and watching actions unfold in cities across this country. Black and brown members are frustrated that the rhetoric of white nationalism remains targeted on their families.

Movements endure because relationships are built that continue working together. Welcoming work is not about reacting and chasing the pendulum as it swings backwards. When we anchor ourselves in relationships, they provide strength to us to keep pressing forward in community. This enables us to see and recognize that each swing backward is followed by a swing forward that brings us further toward a world centered in love.

Unitarian Universalism offers a spiritual grounding for this kind of persistence. Our values and our covenants do not ask us to save the world in a single season. They ask us to refuse to abandon one another when the work becomes slow, complex, or uncomfortable.

The Quiet Work That Keeps Us Together

This kind of faithfulness is quieter than a march. It looks like keeping the doors open. Like listening again to a story you have already heard, because the teller needs to remember it again. It looks like the tedious and hard work of updating policies when language changes and training leaders when practices adapt, along with the emotional work of repairing harm and making space for grief. It is about boldly continuing to declare “you belong here” even when the world is getting louder in demanding you reject some to fit in.

Cesar Chavez once said, “Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot un-educate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore.”
We do not know all of what 2026, or 2027 might bring. So perhaps the question before us this year should not be how much more we can take on, or how loudly we can speak, or how quickly we can change what feels broken. Perhaps the question is whether we are willing to trust that what has already been set in motion still matters. That the relationships we have built, the truths we have named, and the people who have found courage because they were welcomed as their authentic selves in our spaces is transformation that cannot simply be undone.
 Our work now is to tend to what is already alive, keep faith with one another even when it is complicated and when we are hurt, and to stay present, steady, and unafraid enough to continue. Not because the outcome is guaranteed, but because this is how long-lasting change has always happened.

A CHALICE LIGHTING

We light this chalice at the threshold of a new year
aware that beginnings are rarely clean.

What we carry did not just fade when the calendar changed.

This flame is not a signal that everything will be different now.
It does not promise resolution.
It simply names that we are here, together,
still willing to stand in relationship
even when the work is slow, when the path is unclear,
and when justice asks more patience than certainty.

We light this chalice to honor the quiet courage of people who refuse to disappear from one another’s lives even when the world is hard.

May its light become an reflection of trust
that what has begun among us cannot simply be undone,
and that the long work of love continues
because we choose, again, to carry it together.