Introduction
This worship service tells eight stories from our Unitarian, Universalist, and UU histories: stories about how ordinary people showed up, in very different ways and in particular contexts, to side with love and show up for justice.
Since there’s no sermon, this worship service is told through a host of readers, as well as the worship leader. You can involve as few as 4 readers, or as many as ten.
We recommend that each reader have the opportunity in advance to read their intended piece, consent to reading it out loud, and be clear about how to pronounce any names that are confusing.
If your worship team feels ambitious, it can be useful to create a slide show of some of the individuals and situations described in the outline. (Due to copyright restrictions, we are unable to provide that slide show.)
This outline doesn’t include the sharing of joys and sorrows. Worship leaders may insert that anywhere that feels appropriate.
Finally, the first section of this service was designed to engage people of all ages. If you sing your children out during worship, that optional moment is indicated after the chalice lighting–which occurs much later than in a “traditional” worship service.
Service Script
Gathering Music
[We leave this choice to your musicians and service leaders.]
Welcome and Introduction
[Out of consideration for parents of young children, we advise the worship leader to mention that the service mentions slavery, violence, and reproductive justice.]
Musical Prelude
[We leave this choice to your musicians and service leaders.]
Responsive Invocation
[In this section, use the first two readers.]
Worship Leader: Our Unitarian Universalist faith has grown from seeds planted by our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors. From them, we’ve inherited a legacy of courage and compassion, finding new ways to live our values.
Reader 1: These are the words of Rev. Elizabeth Nguyen:
As Unitarian Universalists, our journey is to transform the big and the small, to transform ourselves, and to transform the world. Universalism means no one is outside of the circle of love, and no one is disposable.
Unison Response:
“No one is outside of the circle of love, and no one is disposable.”
Worship Leader: We stubbornly seek out the spark of the divine in each other, no matter what. Interdependence means none of us is truly free until we are all free, and our thriving is bound up in the earth’s thriving.
Unison Response:
“None of us is truly free until we are all free.”
Reader 2: We struggle for liberation from the violence of white supremacy, sexism, ableism, classism, and homophobia. Our covenants mean we make promises to our communities to honor love and justice above all else.
Unison Response:
“We make promises to honor love and justice above all else.”
Hymn
[We leave this choice to your musicians and service leaders.]
Story 1: The Sharps
[In this section, use the next two readers.]
Worship leader: To begin our first story, let’s remember one of our beliefs: “No one is outside of the circle of love, and no one is disposable.”
In September 1938, Nazi Germany invaded northern Czechoslovakia. Thousands of refugees—Jews and others fearing Nazi occupation—fled south, many ending up in Prague.
Reader 3: In January 1939, the Rev. Waitstill Sharp and his wife, Martha, could have turned down the request from the American Unitarian Association to leave their children and home and head to Prague to aid persecuted people.
An isolationist America was not yet at war and reluctant to open its doors to refugees. Seventeen others had declined the mission. But the Sharps said yes.
Just weeks after their arrival in Czechoslovakia, the couple watched Hitler’s troops march into Prague. They were shadowed by Gestapo agents. Their offices were ransacked, and they had to burn files to protect refugees’ identities. The young couple narrowly escaped arrest by returning home in August.
Reader 4: A year later, the Sharps returned to a second mission, securing a trainload of condensed milk, in great demand to feed refugee babies in southern France.
Working with various aid networks, the Sharps rescued an estimated 125 people — Jews, political dissidents and others under threat as fascist armies spread across Europe. They also helped get food and other assistance to hundreds more in urgent need.
Story 2: The Chalice
[In this section, use additional readers, or have earlier readers return.]
Worship leader: We begin our second story by remembering another one of our beliefs: “We make promises to honor love and justice above all else.”
Reader A: By the mid-1940s, the strength of Nazi Germany had grown, taking severe tolls on human life throughout Europe. Not enough was being done to assist the thousands of people attempting to flee the danger of Nazi occupation.
Inspired by Rev. Waitstill and Martha Sharp’s courageous mission, the Unitarian Service Committee was established in 1940 to continue humanitarian service. Its commissioner was Rev. Charles Rhind Joy.
Reader B: Lisbon was the only open port in Europe, and millions of refugees were pouring in. From his headquarters in Lisbon, Rev. Joy oversaw a secret network of couriers and agents, helping to provide travel documents that would allow those refugees to escape to freedom.
But the Unitarian Service Committee was an unknown organization. That put them at a disadvantage: establishing trust across barriers of language, nationality, and faith could mean life instead of death.
Reader A: Joy needed an official symbol for the papers issued by the Service Committee. He wrote, “When a document may keep a man out of jail, give him standing with governments and police, it is important that it look important.”
He asked Hans Deutsch [pronounced DOYTCH], an Austrian refugee artist, to create one. The result was essentially the flaming chalice as we know it now—and like our faith itself, the flaming chalice symbol has evolved over time.
Reader B: The chalice as a two-dimensional drawing eventually transformed into the object used in worship, thanks to our religious exploration programs. Curricula in the late seventies encouraged the children to make chalices in different media. Eventually, those chalices morphed into objects that could be lit. The first documented uses of chalices in the main sanctuary are from Sundays on which the children and youth led worship and demonstrated their practice to the adult congregation.
Chalice Lighting
Worship Leader: Our chalice lighting words come from Rev. Elizabeth Nguyen:
To be a Unitarian Universalist means we’ll never be done with the work:
the work of telling the truth about oppression;
the work of resisting any laws, policies, or practices that deny anyone their humanity;
the work of stubbornly seeking out the spark of the divine each other, no matter what;
the work of creating heaven on earth.
To be a Unitarian Universalist also means we’re not alone in the work:
we are not alone because of our promises to love one another;
we are not alone because we are companions on the journey;
we grow ourselves into allies,
helping one another get free —
because none of us is truly free until we are all free.
Sing Children Out
[Optional; meant for congregations in which children typically leave early in the service.]
Story 3: Abolition
[In this section, use additional readers, or have earlier readers return.]
Worship leader: We begin our third story by remembering that “None of us is truly free until we are all free.”
Reader A: In the 1800s, white Unitarians and Universalists had inconsistent responses to what we now recognize as the evil of slavery. The country’s bitter divisions grew when the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850. Some Unitarians and Universalists stayed on the sidelines, while others became avid abolitionists.
Unitarian minister Rev. Theodore Parker was a Boston abolitionist: a leading member of the Boston Vigilance Committee, an underground group that helped hundreds of enslaved people find freedom.
Reader B: In 1854, a 19-year-old enslaved person named Anthony Burns escaped from slavery in Virginia and fled to Boston, where he was arrested and held at the courthouse.
A crowd of five thousand assembled at Boston’s Faneuil [pronounced FAN-you’ll] Hall, where Theodore Parker told them, “I love peace but there is a means and there is an end; liberty is the end, and sometimes peace is not the means towards it.”
Meanwhile, members of Boston’s Black community were meeting nearby and rushed to the courthouse in an attempt to rescue Burns. Hundreds of white abolitionists ran from Faneuil Hall to help them. An estimated 2,000 antislavery protesters mobbed Court Square that Friday night and tried, unsuccessfully, to free Burns.
Reader A: The United States was built on a legacy of slavery, racism, and oppression that continues to take new, ever-changing forms. Today, 172 years after the Boston slave riot, Unitarian Universalists bear witness to the systemic devaluing of Black lives. We commit ourselves to dismantling systems of white supremacy — which is an institutionalized cultural pattern reaching far beyond any single incident or person.
Sung Response
Worship Leader: As our service continues, we’ll respond to some stories by singing—and each time, we’ll change the pronouns in “There Is a Love” to remind us of how our love is directed within, among, and beyond ourselves.
[All of the sung responses in this service are set to the tune of “There Is a Love,” by Rev. Dr. Rebecca Parker and Elizabeth Norton.]
There is a love holding me
There is a love holding all that I love
There is a love holding all
I rest in this love.
Story 4: The Secret Six
[In this section, use additional readers, or have earlier readers return.]
Worship Leader: We remember, again, that none of us is truly free until we are all free.
Reader A: In the years before Kansas was admitted to statehood in 1861, there was violent conflict about whether slavery would be legal in the new state. John Brown, who had been born in the territory that became Kansas, was fiercely opposed to slavery. He believed that violence was justified in this righteous cause, because whites would never willingly, peacefully, put an end to slavery.
Reader B: In 1857, and again in 1859, John Brown came to Boston to seek financial support from local abolitionists. His strongest (and richest) supporters came to be known as the Secret Six. Five of them were Unitarians, and two—Theodore Parker and Thomas Wentworth Higginson—were Unitarian ministers. The Secret Six helped fund and supply John Brown’s 1859 raid on the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry.
Reader A: In the words of Rev. Carl Gregg,
We can today see the ways in which the Secret Six were naïve in supporting John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry…. At the same time, the Secret Six did risk their comfort and privilege to support Brown’s armed insurrection because they had come to believe that nonviolent, legislative means of ending slavery had no chance of succeeding… The historical consensus is that Brown’s raid—even though it failed—did catalyze the movement toward Civil War.
Worship Leader: Dismantling oppression is not easy. The systems of white supremacy, sexism, ableism, classism, and homophobia don’t want to be changed; they’re powerful. They fight back when we attempt to find another way.
How far would you go to set other people free? It’s your question to answer: Our Unitarian Universalist tradition will not provide the answer for you. Instead, Unitarian Universalism demands that you adhere to the journey of your free and responsible search for truth, for meaning, and for justice as we hold the tension between the world as it is and as we wish it to be.
Sharing in Stewardship / Offering
[A place for your congregation’s usual offering.]
Story 5: The Women of the Unitarian Society of New Haven
[In this section, use additional readers, or have earlier readers return.]
Worship Leader: Some of our stories of Unitarian and Universalist justice-makers are about how injustice—the diminishment of a person’s dignity, inherent worth, and autonomy—impact our most personal choices. And so we begin our next story by remembering that “We make promises to honor love and justice above all else.”
Reader A: Unitarian Universalists believe that freedom includes the right for people to make decisions about their own bodies. We believe that people who can get pregnant always have the right to make decisions about their own reproductive health.
In 1879, the state of Connecticut banned the sale and use of birth control. Under this law—which stood for over eighty years—a woman in Connecticut could not legally purchase any form of birth control.
In 1961, Estelle Griswold put Connecticut’s ban on birth control to the test by opening a birth control clinic in New Haven. This simple act of civil disobedience resulted in the police shutting down the clinic and arresting Estelle Griswold. Deborah Weiner, a UU religious educator recalls:
Reader B: My mother was one of the founders of the Unitarian Society of New Haven. She, along with a bunch of activist Unitarian women, were leaders with Planned Parenthood of New Haven.
During the time the clinic was closed the board was determined to continue dispensing birth control. They set up in our basement with the windows cardboarded up… typewriters set up, boxes of diaphragms and gel and birth control pills everywhere.
I was warned not to tell anyone what was going on: I was told that it could result in my Mom getting arrested…so I kept quiet and the operation continued.
When the Griswold vs. Connecticut ruling came down from the Supreme Court in 1965, there was a huge celebration in New Haven. My mother and her friends, who were almost all UUs, were heroes because they carried on even when the police tried to stop birth control from being available.
Worship Leader: Our bodies are sacred. No matter how many bodies bear scars from misogyny encoded into law; from violence; from lack of access to medical care… women’s bodies are sacred, and so is their reproductive freedom.
Sung Meditation
There is a love holding us
There is a love holding all that we love
There is a love holding all
We rest in this love.
Story 6: The Clergy Consultation Service
[In this section, use additional readers, or have earlier readers return.]
Worship Leader: Unitarian Universalists know that life comes with hard choices, and we believe that pregnant people can be trusted to make hard choices—including the decision to terminate a pregnancy.
Reader A: Even after the Griswold v. Connecticut ruling in 1965, it was difficult for women to get birth control in many areas of the country. It was illegal and often deadly to seek an abortion.
Reader B: In 1967, an unlikely group formed to help women obtain safe abortions: the Clergy Consultation Service, an underground network of rabbis and ministers–including UU ministers.
Reader A: The charge for “aiding and abetting” an illegal abortion was a $1,000 fine and up to a year in prison. But the Clergy Consultation Service operated “out in the open,” says one minister, “sending the message that we were choosing to defy [the] law in order to adhere to a higher law.”
Reader B: By 1973, roughly fourteen hundred clergy members across the country had helped hundreds of thousands of women access safe abortions. Having clergy take such risks helped to change social attitudes about abortion. And the case that became Roe v. Wade started in Texas, with encouragement from Unitarian Universalists, especially the Women’s Alliance of the First Unitarian Church of Dallas.
Worship Leader: Today, we affirm this commitment. In the words of Rev. Lisa Sargent, “the movements for reproductive rights, for gay and lesbian rights, for civil rights, for immigrant rights, for human rights, cannot be separated. Each of them is fundamentally about ensuring that every person has control over their own life.”
Will you again enter into the spirit of meditation as we sing together:
Sung Response
There is a love holding you
There is a love holding all that you love
There is a love holding all
We rest in this love.
Story 7: AIDS
[In this section, use additional readers, or have earlier readers return.]
Worship Leader: Our seventh story shows us, again, that “No one is outside of the circle of love, and no one is disposable.”
Reader A: In 1982, the CDC created the term AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) to describe an infection that was killing people. As the AIDS epidemic grew to claim the lives of tens of thousands each year, it became clear that AIDS was moving with particular vengeance through the gay community.
The response from both secular and religious voices was silence or outright condemnation. Many churches refused to hold funerals for gay men, and their own families would turn away from them.
Reader B: Unitarian Universalist ministers were among the few clergy who entered the pastoral breach: grieving with and tending to the dying. One of them, Rev. Kim Crawford Harvie, recalls:
Reader A: I conducted the early memorial services with the clear insight that the first victims of a massive shipwreck were just washing ashore, though I couldn’t possibly have imagined the magnitude of the loss…
Time and again, we stood facing the ocean and scattered the ashes of our dead into the wind.
Reader B: Harvie remembers sitting in silence with a parishioner whose death was imminent. “Listen,” he said, breaking the silence. “In all this madness, even if it kills every single one of us and there’s no one left to tell the stories, it matters that we love each other well.”
Worship Leader: We are left to tell the stories. It matters that we continue to love each other well; that “we make promises to honor love and justice.” Please sing again as we remember the love that lives inside each of us, and which continues to call to us.
Sung Meditation
There is a love holding me
There is a love holding all that I love
There is a love holding all
I rest in this love.
Story 8: Responding to ICE / Minneapolis
[In this section, use additional readers, or have earlier readers return.]
Worship Leader: In our final story today, we recognize yet again that none of us is truly free until we are all free.
Reader A: On Sunday, March 7, 1965, Alabama state troopers attacked 600 unarmed protestors as they walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside Selma, in an attack that became known as Bloody Sunday. The following day, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called on clergy across the nation to come to Selma, to witness the brutality and to bring national attention to the violence and injustice there. In his call to clergy, Dr. King wrote:
Reader B: No American is without responsibility.… The people of Selma will struggle on for the soul of the nation, but it is fitting that all America help to bear the burden. I call therefore, on clergy of all faiths representative of every part of the country, to join me for a ministers’ march…. In this way all America will testify to the fact that the struggle in Selma is for the survival of democracy everywhere in our land.
Reader A: The struggle for the survival of democracy continues today. In January, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better-known by their acronym ICE, came in force to Minneapolis and St. Paul to conduct sweeping raids on Somali-Americans and others. They have terrorized the Twin Cities; when faced with nonviolent protesters and observers, they’ve responded with pepper spray, tear gas, and bullets. Renée Good, a beloved community member and mother, was murdered by ICE agents as she followed directions to leave an area where ICE was operating. In response to the escalating violence, faith leaders have once again been called to witness.
Reader B: In 1965, clergy responded to Dr. King’s call. Today, clergy are again responding to the call. UU ministers and other religious leaders from across the country have come to Minneapolis to bear witness to the ongoing injustice. As Side with Love writes:
Reader A: Our faith calls us to affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person, to side with love, and to work for justice. We go to Minneapolis because when our neighbors are under siege, when mothers are dying from fear in their own homes, living our principles demands we show up. We go to bear witness, to use our bodies and our covenant to say: not here, not in our name.
Worship Leader: Not all of us can go to Minneapolis to witness. But our response to all injustice must be as a community, not as individuals. No one of us is powerful enough to fight the oppressions we are experiencing. But together, we can respond powerfully, some of us witnessing in person, others supporting at a distance, all of us answering the call.
Silent Meditation and Prayer
Worship Leader: [We invite you to name the members of your congregation, including any staff, who have answered the call to the march in Minneapolis…. Invite them to be present with you in the silence….]
[After a time of silence, offer this prayer: ]
Worship Leader: Rev. Ali K.C. Bell offers this prayer:
Spirit of love and justice
because we know these two
must be held together
if we are to get where we are going.
Be with us now,
in a time when so much is changing
unimaginable,
horrific,
multiplying by the day.
Give us the strength
not to turn our heads,
but to lift our voices,
our bodies,
our very selves
to keep bending the moral arc
toward thriving,
toward equity,
toward care for all.
Help us examine
and act on what we are learning
not only about the world,
but about ourselves.
About how we shape,
echo,
and amplify
the noise of division.
Turn our voices.
Turn our habits.
Turn our silence
until what once divided us
becomes
a song of resistance.
Settle us out of our minds
and into our hearts,
so we may release
whatever keeps us disconnected
from one another.
We cry out, How long?
And we answer back
now,
and in the past,
and into the future
because justice does not take a break
from tyranny.
Fascism cannot change
the face of compassion.
Equity will not surrender
to the false comfort of the inequitable.
Let us remember
that hope has feathers,
that it takes wing
not because it is naïve,
but because it is present,
active,
alive.
And let us rest
not in complacency,
but in truth:
we are survivors,
we are thrivers,
and we will not stop
until our work is done.
Amen, Ashe, Blessed Be.
Hymn
[We leave this choice to your musicians and service leaders.]
Responsive Chalice Extinguishing
Worship Leader: These are, again, the words of Rev. Elizabeth Nguyen:
Unitarian Universalism is for those who have seen the arc bend toward justice and those who doubt it will ever bend but know we must organize as if our lives depend on it anyway. Some theologies say that only some people are saved. From those theologies flows a world where people are criminalized for their identities—for being Muslim, transgender, black, undocumented.
Unison Response:
Our theology says that we are all saved, and salvation is what we strive to build now, for each other.
Worship Leader: So we resist any laws, policies, or practices that deny anyone their humanity. We know that now on earth is our chance to create heaven. We know that love crosses borders and prison walls, lives in queer families and disability justice organizers, thrives among trans young people and working-class elders.
Unison Response:
We extinguish this chalice with gratitude for our roots: the ancestors who taught us to be brave in creating a fair and loving world.
The flame is now ours—as is their work. We side with love; we work for justice; and we carry the flame forward.
Postlude
[We leave this choice to your musicians and service leaders.]
Many thanks to Rev. Dr. Everett Howe and to all people quoted in this service for their gifts, and for their generosity of spirit.