Courage

In-Person & Online.

Tamara Range, Worship Associate

What word do you use for what is most real? This month we sit with one of the oldest and most contested questions in religious life, what we mean when we reach for language about God, the holy, or the sacred. You don’t need an answer. You need only be willing to ask.

Sermon Summary

Rev. Aneline’s Oct 4 sermon traced a line from LGBTQ worship services held in a Jamaican office and a repurposed house, to Troy Perry’s 1968 living-room service that became the Metropolitan Community Church, to the congregations sheltering displaced neighbors in Gaza today. Her question for us: what does holy ground ask of those of us who have never had to borrow a room?

The first LGBTQ worship service Rev. Angeline ever attended in Jamaica was held in an office — the kind of office people visited during the week for help they couldn’t safely ask for anywhere else. On Sunday mornings, the desks moved aside, chairs lined up in rows, and a table draped in white cloth became an altar. The posters stayed on the walls around the bread and the wine.

The second service was in a house that had been a club the night before. Empty bottles still sat in the corners. They sang hymns in the same room where people had danced to dancehall a few hours earlier.

“Neither place had a sign,” she told the congregation Sunday. “You found them because someone trusted you enough to tell you where to go.”

This month’s worship theme is the Holy and God — what word do you use for what’s most real? For Rev. Angeline, raised Roman Catholic and then Brethren, the word has stayed “God,” even as what she means by it keeps shifting: a friend some days, a struggle on others, divine mystery in between.

As Unitarian Universalists, we like to say the holy isn’t confined to a building — it’s on a trail, at the ocean, at a favorite beach back home where a river meets the Caribbean Sea. That’s true. But it’s also, she pointed out, a claim made mostly by people who get to choose their holy places. The rooms she described in Jamaica weren’t chosen. They were what was left.

So this is what she asked us to sit with: the holy is everywhere, but the freedom to worship anywhere has never been evenly shared. Some of us have always had the front door of a sanctuary open to us. Others have had to borrow a room, keep the address quiet, and hope no one followed.

She traced that borrowing back 58 years, to October 6, 1968 — a Pentecostal preacher named Troy Perry, recently thrown out of his own church for being gay, setting out folding chairs in his Huntington Park living room. Twelve people came, mostly friends. The singing, he remembered, was thin and tinny, but it became the Metropolitan Community Church — a congregation that outgrew that living room within weeks, moved through a women’s club and a string of theaters, and in 1971 finally bought its own building on South Union Avenue in Los Angeles. It shared that building with the world’s first LGBTQ synagogue. Two years later, the building burned in a fire investigators called suspicious. The people kept gathering anyway.

There’s an old rabbinic teaching about this kind of loss: when the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, the altar’s sacred work didn’t end — it moved to the kitchen table, into the hands of ordinary people feeding a guest or a stranger. Buildings burn. The holy moves into the people.

Rev. Angeline didn’t let the congregation rest easy in that history, either. Holding holy ground — a building, a sanctuary, land that was Yocha Dehe Wintun land long before any deed — is a privilege, and privilege always comes with a question: what is it for? She named Knoxville in 2008, where a gunman drawn by hatred of “the liberal movement” and of gay people opened fire in a UU sanctuary during a Sunday service. She named the churches in Gaza — Orthodox, Catholic, Evangelical — that have sheltered displaced Muslims and Christians together since 2023, even after an Orthodox compound was struck and at least 18 people killed. The doors stayed open anyway.

“Every week,” she said, “we decide who our door is for.”

She closed by asking us to look at our hands. Not metaphorically — actually look. The old song she grew up with starts with holy ground and ends with holy hands and holy lips. Whatever part of you makes room for someone else — your hands, your voice, your showing up — that’s what’s holy. The question for the week ahead isn’t where the holy is. It’s where your hands are making ground holy for someone who has nowhere else to stand.

Next week: what it means when that holy word is “Lord” — a word that’s a wound for some of us and home for others.