Together

Sermon: June 28, 2026 . Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of San Dieguito

Why do we seek out community when it so often feels like working with others is a challenge too emotionally taxing to keep up? Why do we continue to come together when it can be just so difficult to communicate and feel understood? Here at UUFSD we have a lot of personalities. We have a lot of very learned, intelligent people, many of whom were or are leaders in their respective fields. As such, many people here believe they have answers, or if they don’t have them right now, they are certain that they can solve your problem if only you do things the right way (their way.) Of course, even when we come together with the best of intentions, opinions vary because perspectives vary, and consensus can feel impossible. It can be like pushing a shopping cart through the supermarket with one wheel that keeps getting stuck on some kind of invisible impediment, or insists on turning in the opposite direction of the others. It can be quite the challenge.

Author Jason K Pargin says “Everything requires tenacity. I didn’t begin to understand this concept until I became a homeowner. The minute you repair one thing, something else breaks. I realized that every single minute I own this house, it is trying to return itself to the dust. And this is a metaphor for everything you try to do in life, your marriage, your friendships, your health. We have to work hard just to keep this going. And by this I mean everything. Keeping things from crumbling around you takes the heroic effort of you and many, many others. This is both inspirational and terrifying.”

So why do we do it? Why chose to remain in Beloved Community?

Because we need it. According to the National Institute on Aging, the health risks of prolonged isolation and loneliness are equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day and have been estimated to shorten a person’s life span by as many as 15 years. The toll isolation takes on us isn’t just mental, it’s physical as well. This is because too much time without interpersonal communication and without community causes an increase in stress hormones that cause inflammation. It seems that to remain healthy, we must find meaning and purpose with others. A study out of Harvard that followed participants for 84 years found that people not only live longer, but thrive when they have good relationships with others. Perhaps some of you have read the book about this study called: The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness by Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz. It turns out that social isolation and a lack of belonging is as harmful to your body as alcoholism and twice as harmful as obesity. So we need to belong.

Recently, Marty Embry, a black American chef and former professional basketball player, tried a political social experiment that he later shared on social media, in which he wore the iconic, red Make-America-Great-Again hat for one week. When he encountered conservative Maga folks, he says he was surprised by the warmth. He called it “not hollow, nodding warmth, but immediate, chest-open, you’re-one-of-us warmth.” He said the hat was his passport to belonging. And belonging is powerful. When one experiences belonging after a time of isolation or disenfranchisement, when one is embraced in community in times when connection is desperately needed, the feeling of safety, peace, and care is tangible.

On top of providing the essential need to belong, community is necessary to do the work we want to do. Sure you can clean your home by yourself, but can you clean up a whole city? A whole ocean? Can you influence lawmakers and shift systemic systems of racism or bigotry? Can you provide homes for the homeless in your community? And what about honoring life’s special moments? Can you celebrate a wedding alone? Can you bury a loved one alone? Can you sing all the vocal parts of a choral anthem alone? And even if you could, do you want to?

The benefits of community are undeniable. Things just work better when we’re together. We get more done, we share in a sense of accomplishment, and we create bonds that stand the test of time.

So how do we navigate the challenges?

First of all, let’s stop focusing so much on the challenges. Let’s stop focusing so much on what’s going wrong. There will always be something to fix. Just as Jason Pargin says, you repair one issue in your house and another thing breaks. There will always be something to criticize, something to judge, something that could be better. That’s a given reality of life. If we focus only on these things, we will live in a constant state of deprivation, frustration, and disappointment. The real question is, how often do you notice the things that are going well? Our minds like to find patterns, to distinguish similarities and differences, to find things that stick out from the rest. This was a survival skill humans needed for eons. We needed to be able to scan the crowd for possible threats which typically posed as people who didn’t look or act like us. In modern day, our brains still do this, but instead we look for things to criticize or judge, things that are different. Things that lie outside of our expectations. 

For example, when we see a line of tables with beautiful tablecloths on them and one of them has a stain, our eye goes right to it. It must be fixed. The Rockettes are known for their precision and their exactitude. If one of the dancers isn’t kicking the exact same height as the others, it draws our eye. She must be replaced. Now, I’m not discounting the satisfaction of things being neat and tidy or precise. I’m only trying to explain how our minds work, how they are set up to find the “other” and to want to ostracize it. When you notice something different, or unexpected, or not-up-to-par according to traditional standards, what if instead of feeling the need to take action, you just noticed it, then carried on with your day? What if you took a moment to observe it? Perhaps the stain on that table cloth was from last Thanksgiving when we were laughing so hard that someone knocked their drink over. And look, you can see that someone took the time to try and get the stain out because it should be much darker, and it’s been neatly laundered, someone took the time to do that, and to dress this table so we can sit here together, how lovely.

This carries into interpersonal relationships as well. If someone here at the fellowship behaves in a way that you don’t prefer, perhaps they say an off-handed remark to you that you find rude, what do you do? Here are some obvious options:

1. You can respond in kind and tell them their remark was rude. Direct and honest yes, but you’ve made a judgement about their remark.

2. You can say nothing and go tell someone else what they said and admonish their rude behavior behind their back. This causes further disconnect and negativity.

3. You can disengage and leave. Sometimes we have to draw these boundaries, but it does fracture community and leaves no room for growth on anyone’s part.

4. Or you can stay, observe, and say to yourself “Hmmm… so that’s where they are” then follow up with a question like “What do you mean by that?” or “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear your clearly” which gives them an opportunity to clarify or repeat what they said. Often you will find you have misunderstood, because your personal trigger alarm caused you to pass judgement due to an assumption you made about what they meant instead of clarifying what they actually meant.

Staying in Beloved Community doesn’t just mean having perfect behavior so no one needs to clarify what you just said. It means working on self-awareness so we understand our own triggers and our own neediness. How am I showing up for the community? Am I being the community member I want to work with? To engage with? Or am I jumping to assumptions and judgements because of the expectations I have of others, because of my personal need to control my environment to soothe my own anxieties or to make me feel safe? 

How many of you have been caught up in someone else’s priorities? How many of you have felt the pressure of someone else’s timeline? This sense of false urgency is a tactic people often use to get others to do what they want them to do. This isn’t necessarily a conscious tactic, but it is used often. When you find yourself in this situation, either as the one using your timeline to push someone, or as the one finding yourself pushed, just stop. Pause. In that pause, realize that nothing is happening, nothing is going wrong. In this exact moment there is peace. This sense of pressure you feel is an illusion. Even if you’re going to be late, or someone else is counting on you for something, or you’re worried about being judged, or all the countless things you can imagine happening, in this moment of pause, none of that is happening. Right now, there is only peace. 

Unfortunately, we often believe this illusion, because we so desperately want to be good people and we so desperately want to be accepted in our beloved community. Our sensitivities, however, as well as our lack of self-awareness, coupled with society’s current era of judgement and lack of acceptance, is creating communities where people are consistently offended. We’ve begun to draw hard lines in the sand, boundaries that keep our hearts protected and our minds comfortable. This makes us feel strong and empowered. However, the byproduct is that we create communities that police each other and ones in which it is difficult to foster trust. One misstatement could land us in a huge conflict. One unintentional misstep could be taken in such a way as to divide us. We have become so vigilant in our quest for healthy environments that we walk on egg shells around each other, afraid we might say the wrong thing, or hear the wrong thing. We watch each other, waiting for mistakes to be made so that someone, maybe I, can jump in and correct the environment. How does that feel to be in that kind of consistently critical environment? Wouldn’t it be nice to sink into community? To be held by it? Not held accountable, although that’s important, but just held? To trust that it will be there to hold you in grace when you actually do make a mistake?

In a letter sent out by our UUA regional lead Rev. Sunshine Wolfe this very week, they state “Our congregations now are dealing with the natural outcome of a society under duress- behaviors that are harmful at worst and soil for miscommunication at best. … At the end of the day, it is our relationships that we center- how we choose to be present and in relationship with one another that matters. In the current social and political climate- centering relationship is a revolutionary act.”   

We need to realize that we are here for each other, not for ourselves. We need to shift our minds to a state of togetherness. We should come to this fellowship thinking, “I can’t do the work I want to do without this community. This community holds me, cares for me, and gives me the opportunity to care in return. Not to judge, not to criticize, but to care.” In that kind of community, growth can occur, real growth that isn’t forced, pushed, and bound by expectations or self-righteousness, but organic, holistic growth because we have created an environment that invites you to become the person you want to be, the person you already are somewhere deep inside. This necessitates a shift of consciousness within each person, individually. In her book “Belong,” Radha Agrawal says this shift of consciousness is “to awareness, to glimmers of true unity, to a true communion.” She says you can see this kind of effect when communities gather to offer immediate assistance during times of natural disasters. No one that is present is worried about their own needs. They are there for the other, for the community. She says “When we have no thoughts of ourselves, only thoughts of wanting to get the work done, thinking only of others, what they need, what I can offer right now… those are the moments we remember as the most joyful, as the most meaningful.” 

When we ask what is special about those times, why we feel the most connected to others when we are working that way, it’s because we have let go of our expectations and our assumptions of the world. We have set aside our own emotional or psychological needs and stopped demanding that the world respond to us in a certain way. When this happens, the world can reveal its own process, which is by nature, a collective one. 

I don’t want any of you to think I’m talking about lowering our standards. I’m not. I hope that many of you know by now that I have high standards for myself and for this community. We should still have goals and work to achieve them. I’m offering instead a different way of being with each other, a way that focuses on process over product, a way that supports authenticity and real connection. 

The practice I would like to leave you with, that I’ve been recently discussing with some of you individually is that of sharing your inner monologue. If you find yourself in a situation where someone has said something that you think is passive aggressive or rude, lean into reality. Lean into your inner monologue. 

For example, if someone says, “Hi Barbara, gosh I haven’t seen you at services for a while.” Your instinct might be to become defensive and try to mutter an excuse because you assume they are judging you for not having been here. But they might really just be delighted to see you. They might have missed you. So, instead of believing the illusion of assumption, instead you can lean into reality.

“Hi Barbara, gosh I haven’t seen you at services for a while.”

“No, you haven’t. It’s really good to be here.” 

Or let’s say someone says, “Oh, I see you decided to dress casually today.”  Your assumption might be that they think you should have dressed more formally. You could say, “Would you have preferred me to wear something else?” or  “Yes, I really wanted to be comfortable today.”

The benefit of speaking to reality is that it disarms the other person, if they were actually armed in the first place. 

Once, when my child was little and crying in the supermarket, I got a look from an older woman, you know the look. Instead of apologize, I decided to lean into reality, “It’s really hard to be two years old.” To my surprise, she said, “It’s really hard to be seventy.”

Not falling into the illusion of assumptions and expectations is an even better practice than not making assumptions and expectations in the first place. The more I practice this, the more I find that many others aren’t actually making assumptions or placing expectations on my behavior at all. I had merely believed the illusion that they were. This has really helped me feel more positively about others. The more I retrain my brain, the more I realize that the negativity I think I’m perceiving is an illusion. Most people’s intentions are pure. And in the other cases, when I find that someone does have assumptions or expectations of how their world should be and that I’m not supporting that version for them, it is important for me to identify that their expectation is theirs. And then I observe and think, “Oh, so that’s where you are.” Someone else’s expectations of the world do not have power over me unless it is something I agreed to, unless we are in covenant with each other in that regard. Separating myself from the assumptions and expectations of others provides an extraordinary sense of freedom, which ironically allows me to completely show up in community, in a new, authentic, and grounded way.

As we close this year, my first year as your minister, I feel so strongly that our community has the potential to be a true communion of souls. I have seen some beautiful, sacred moments of belonging here and I know that together we will foster a community of authentic love and amazing grace. We are on our way to being a place of Radical Belonging, and I’m so honored to be on this journey with all of you.

OTHER READINGS FOR REFLECTION:

Author Marianne Williamson:

"In every community there is work to be done. In every nation, there are wounds to heal. In every heart, there is the power to do it."

"In Honor" By Amanda Schuber, Minister:

In honor of the risk takers, those that hold the vision with clarity and charge forward with optimism even in the face of others doubts. You are our lamp lighters and our guides; may we never forget the courage it takes to lead the way forward.

In honor of the cautious skeptics, those that gather the information needed to navigate the tumultuous waters of change. You are the map-makers and the preparers of the stores; may we appreciate your attention to the details that keep us on course.

In honor of the doubters, those that may fear the changing tides of a turbulent world. You are our anchors, and remind us of where we have been and where we are as a community now. May we relish your commitment to our history and your passion for who we have become.

In honor of the dreamers, those that imagine what we can be to, and in, this world. You are the wind that blows the sails of change, pushing us ever-forward; may we revel always in your whimsy and hope that dares us to never stop becoming.