In the sermon from the 2018 Wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, American Episcopal Bishop Michael Curry gave an impassioned plea to live by the power of love. Inspired by MLK’s sermon about how to love your enemy, Curry reminds us that love could transform the world, if we could just be open to it.

Rob Hardies shares a personal journey of losing faith in God and calling himself an atheist out of pain, not belief. After coming out, he couldn’t accept that God loved him as he was, and so he stopped believing in God to get back at him. But time and healing brought him back to Life and gave him a new name for God.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice” is an often spoken idea from abolitionists to civil rights leaders. Martin Luther King used it often. This episode explains and illustrates what this means. This pulls from a 2007 William Schulz sermon – Schulz was a one-time President of Amnesty International and President of the Unitarian Universalist Association.

Two sermonlets about the power found in a name. Rev Justin Osterman (UU Raleigh) tells his story of when we served as a translator in Guantanamo. When he entered the prison cell, he did the most natural human thing.

A core part of effective activism is individual witness – standing up to those who one sees and works with every day.

This sermon captures the story of one minister’s behind-the-scenes efforts to cleanse her church’s leadership of sexism and sexual predators and the conflicts that emerged. It reveals how even the most liberal institutions are still not immune to #metoo problems. Efforts at fostering a healthy diversity within the church did not permeate the leadership. And amazingly, as of Februrary 2018, Susan was not just removed from the puplit, she was defrocked by her ordaining denomination. One person’s pursuit of the truth is another’s professional misconduct.

We are on a journey. Are we caring for each other along the way with respect and mindfulness? Or just trying to put up a facade to hide our own struggles from public scrutiny?

Source: Susan Moore, All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church in Washington, DC

Martin Luther King, Jr was an amazing preacher. Listen to excerpts from one of his sermons on how to love your enemies. He says, “Jesus has become the practical realist… his commandment [to love your enemies] is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization.” He argues it is the only pragmatic way to change the world, and restore unity where there hate has sown the seeds of division.

There are three parts of being an effective activist:

It’s a bitter pill, but if you are serious about transforming the world, it must be your life’s work.

“Do you need to be an activist to be a Unitarian?”

That was the question posed to Rev Dr Justin Osterman of the Raleigh UU fellowship (http://www.uufr.org/). His answer is the best 20 minute explanation of how to be an effective activist I’ve ever heard.