April 20, 2025: Celebration Sunday! - One Service: 10:30 a.m.

Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray

Come celebrate the close of our Pledge Drive campaign. Please submit your pledge no later than this Sunday. We’ll have one service and then a celebratory party for all ages, including an Easter Egg hunt for children.

Graphic created by Abby Henkel Roman

View the video archive of this service here:

Sermon Text

Celebration Sunday: Love Blooms Here

Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray

UU Church of Bloomington

April 20, 2025

READING

“In a Dangerous Time” by Rosemary Wahtola Trommer

I think of the bones

of the unsung rib cage,

the way they protect

the heart. How bone,

too, is living, how it constantly

renews and remakes itself.

I think of how ribs engage

with other ribs

to expand, to contract,

and because they do

their solid work,

they allow the heart to float.

This is what I want to do:

to be a rib in this body

of our country,

to make a safe space for love.

There is so much now

that needs protection.

I want to be that flexible,

that committed to what’s vital,

that unwilling to yield.

SERMON Love Blooms Here!

I had an exciting thing happen this week. Following our amazing installation service three weeks ago, the Indiana Daily Student (IDS) responded to our press release about the celebration and asked to write a profile piece about my ministry. How cool is that! I had the interview this week and I hope it turns out well.

During the interview, the journalists asked me several questions about why I entered the ministry and when I knew it was right for me. To one of their questions, I shared the story that I think is the reason I went into the ministry. I have shared it here before.

It is the story of the impact the UU congregation where I grew up and, in particular, two Religious Education teachers had on me in my young life. When I was little, there was a period of difficult turmoil in my family. But alongside those memories, I remember the church being a place of warmth and music and joy. And this experience profoundly changed the course of my life.

It didn’t change the challenges I was experiencing, but it offered two other incredible – life saving – gifts. First, it was a reprieve from the daily challenges. I remember being 5 years old and my Sunday school teacher pulling out his guitar and all of us kids singing and dancing along while he played. It was pure joy – and that was an unbelievable gift.

Second, the magic and joy I experienced in that classroom also showed me that something else was possible in life. My eventual call to ministry and my love for Unitarian Universalism; and the value I know that religious community can have – was all born from that experience.

And I recognize how all of us – at some time in our life – need a reprieve from the challenges we experience, and need again that reminder of the beauty and joy that is present – that is possible – in our lives and in our world.

In her poem, “In a Dangerous Time,” Rosemerry Whatola Trommer describes the role of the ribs and the rib cage – living bone protecting what is vital – protecting the heart and also giving it room to float.

What a powerful image – what a powerful image for the work we are called to in this congregation.

For we are living in the midst of a dangerous time in our country. I am not going to repeat the litany in detail – you’ve heard me speak to it – the attacks on free speech and academic freedom, on due process, on immigrants, on the constitutional crisis created by the administration’s willful dismissal of court orders. We know this reality.

The question is what is our work – in this community – for such a time as this?

The answer is three-fold.

• First, to be a religious community of courage. To be a place where we are strengthened, encouraged, and inspired to courage – both collectively and as individuals. To be a place that speaks truth in a time of lies and propaganda. To strengthen each other so we can show up for what we know is right and for what we value. And to be a community of courage that organizes against the efforts to dismantle our rights, our constitution and our democracy.
• Second, to be a sanctuary – a community that protects each other and what we love. To be a sanctuary that nurtures within these walls – and within our own hearts and community – a spirit and practices that proudly proclaim that love is at the center of our faith and that all have inherent dignity and worthiness – that all are welcome. A sanctuary that celebrates diversity and inclusion. A community that by its very spirit contravenes, or counters, messages of fear and division, and acts of injustice with practices of generosity, compassion, connection, and openness of mind and heart.
• And third – to be a place of possibility! To be a religious community that in addition to being a sanctuary to provide protection and a reprieve from the challenges and hostilities of our circumstances – is also a place of imagination and beauty where we make music and art and good food and community together across the generations. To be like a garden where we remind ourselves, and show to our children, that another world is possible and where together we do the work to plant the seeds and nurture the soil of that new possibility. To be a place of joy – for our own hearts and for our children, where we incarnate hope and love and beauty into our lives again and again. Where we care for the earth and for each other.

The poet Rebecca Baggett, writes of the importance of remembering beauty in her poem “Testimony,” which she dedicates to her daughters. In excerpts from the poem, she writes:

“I want to tell you that the world is still beautiful. I tell you that despite my own terror and despair.

“I want you to know that spring is no small thing, that the tender grasses curling like a baby’s fine hair around your fingers are a recurring miracle…”

“I want to tell you that the world is still beautiful.”

Today is Easter Sunday – a day that celebrates a miracle, and a religious holiday whose particular traditions are rooted in the ancient celebrations of the miracle of Spring.

Let us remember that Jesus lived in a time of repression and state violence and was martyred for his vision of a world where the last would be first, where love would reign supreme, and where the kingdom of God is already here if we would just take the time to recognize it in each other, and nurture it among us.

But above all, as my husband, Brian, says, “for Christians, the message of Easter is that the death-dealing ways of the world and the cruelty of the state do not have the last word.” And so too for us, it does not – will not – have the last word. Not when we choose courage over cowardice, mercy over cruelty, justice over injustice, freedom over domination, and love over fear.

For this is a place of courage and resistance, of sanctuary and resilience, and above all a place of possibility – rooted in practices of joy, community, imagination and creating beauty together. A place where we feel again the spirit of love moving through our bodies, our bones – enlivening us, strengthening us as ribs around our country, our community, ribs around our loved ones – calling us to continue to renew and proclaim the beauty, the love and the freedom in this world.

May this be a calling for our community.

In closing: a few weeks ago, in his stewardship testimony, Charlie Pickle said “This community is miraculous.” I felt that miracle again this morning with the all-ages orchestra, with the choir, with all of you and the spirit, the breath, the singing, our hearts beating as one – even our broken open hearts beating together – it is miraculous!

It is not miraculous because of some supernatural intervention – it is miraculous because of the spirit, the care, the attention, the love, the joy – we each bring to this place.

This community matters. It matters that it is strong. Each of us have gifts to bring to make this community the powerful, life-saving, freedom loving, justice centered, courageous, compassionate, resilient community that it is. Today is the close of our Pledge Drive. And we ask for and celebrate the financial gifts that make this community possible.

I am in! I have made my pledge! We ask all of our members to renew their membership by making your pledge for the next fiscal year today! And we invite all friends of this congregation to support our vital mission and ministry by making a pledge today to support this congregation throughout the next fiscal year.

Together, when we each give generously from what we have, when we reach out in care, in support, in attention and in generosity – we make this a community where

Love Blooms Here.

• •