Sunday, October 5, 2025
Courage doesn’t always look dramatic. Sometimes it’s as simple as showing up for someone who needs support, speaking a kind truth, or taking one small step toward justice. In our Unitarian Universalist community, we honor the quiet acts of bravery that shape our daily lives. The choices to live with integrity, compassion, and hope.
We believe that everyday courage is not about fearlessness, but about living into our values even when the path feels uncertain. It grows when we stand together, encourage one another, and practice love in action.
- Reading, excerpts from The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich, excerpted by ReligiousNaturalism.org
- Sermon, Everyday Courage, by Rev. F. Vernon Wright V, text below the video.
One of the problems of being a person with eyes and some measure of mind, basic respect for the dignity of all human beings, and respect for the tenants of liberal democracy, on the one hand, and the kind of grinding disrespect and daily brutality happening every time we read our newspaper from a president who has promised to “burn it all down” on the other, is that it can lead to a feeling of helplessness, meaninglessness and despair. This month we’ll be concentrating on the topic of courage to inspire for us the strength and hope we are seeking.
Today’s topic is everyday courage. When I began to cast about for important thinkers on the topic of courage, I thought of an old classic that I found to be incredibly inspiring long long ago when I was in seminary. “The Courage to Be” by Paul Tillich. As I gathered together the the quotes and dove back into his thought, I realized how important this thought can be for us today in this historical moment.
Paul Tillich came of age in WWI in Germany. He served in the war in a traumatizing service as a trench chaplain. When he got out he studied existential philosophy, and became the preeminent liberal theologian of the twentieth century. When the Nazi party came to control Germany and he was listed by Hitler as the “first batch” and personally dismissed from his professorship for opposing Nazism, Tillich and his family had to flee to the United States. He first served at Union College in New York City, later as the head of Harvard Divinity, and finally at University of Chicago. He, of course, spoke to people of faith, but it was not necessarily a faith exclusive to Christianity. He also appealed to many who did not claim any faith, and for whom God was dead, because he was so firmly rooted in German Existentialism. For him, God was was whatever one’s “ultimate concern” was, or “the ground of being.” I feel like my basic affinity for Tillich is what has enabled me to feel so comfortable at a place like Murray. Indeed all of Tillich’s work was translated into English by most famous Unitarian Theologian James Luther Adams.
Okay enough explanation: What this has to do with having everyday courage, is really what we examining today. There is the kind of courage that helps accept the unacceptable, or there’s that kind of courage that enables one to become the first top ten enemies of Adolph Hitler. This is not the courage of the one who has the fully selfish will to power as Nitzche imagined, so beloved by fascists, but the courage of someone unafraid to embrace the full monty of their humanity, and live into the full ramification of what it truly means to be. It is the courage of a person painfully aware of their faults, but can still can move forward with courage and hope- each day realizing that at the end of the day, one must accept that they are accepted. Grace is not a theological claim as much as it is an existential reality born in the madness of burying your comrades around you in the harrowing conditions of a world war one battlefield that had been caused by an utter failure of civilization.
Think on the most challenging time of your life? Okay, if that one has been blocked out because of the severity of the trauma what about the one that you you can remember?
What comes to mind for me is the color of the fall leaves lit up from the sun in the midst of the harrowing storm of my infant first born’s diagnosis of Cystic Fibrosis. The contrast between my inner darkness-that frightful place of being overwhelmed and on the brink of despair, and the outer brilliance of the flaming color and the crystal blue of the sky, was so surreal, that I fell into awe. I realized that no matter what, I would soldier on; I would greet a new day; I would do what ever it took, to help this baby and that I could do it.
This is the every day courage of hundreds of millions of mothers and fathers everyday around this globe: millions everyday in global poverty without adequate health care, with no access to education, those very many subject to the violence of war and loss of homes, those with the courage to keep on keeping on- to not succumb to despair and meaninglessness. This is the power of what it is to be human.
A religious, spiritual, or ethical community can be a great source of comfort and the courage to be. I know Murray is a great source of comfort for so many here. But in order to understand our uniqueness, we need to understand what it is we share with other communities- for we are not alone in bringing meaning and comfort. Many other places of worship do it the same way. Many places are quite similar to us, but others are a little different. Wherever the strength is rooted in some glorious mythology of a magical white supremacy where every man could just shoot stuff and every woman was free to serve her man and birth babies till she died, and every preacher could convince you he was right and righteous because the “bible says so” well for us that’s not quite what we are looking for!
Look, everybody wants more certainty; everybody wants God on their side and the flag to be only about their particular political belief- liberals do too, but we know that one individuals certainty is another persons tyranny, we know power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We know that there must be checks and balances, even for us.
Everyday courage writ large in a community like this becomes not a place to gather more certainty, but a source of strength so that we can better live the questions of our uncertainty. Just as it is the practice of a sangha for the members of the sangha to deeply listen to one another- so it is for this place. My office is always here for anyone who needs someone to deeply listen to them. Here in worship we listen and hold each other’s joys and concerns- and it may be the most meaningful part of our service. In every committee and on the board we each check in to share how we are doing. The meditation group does this much more deeply, and the same is true for the soul matters group. Here you get a chance to know a person quite intimately- and to be known!
The wholeness and wellness a community like this can offer, may not be as tangible say as what a surgery practice might offer, to replace a knee, or remove a cancerous skin cell, or drill out a cavity, but it can still have a profound effect. Each of us struggles each day with alienation and meaninglessness, but the love of our community becomes a beacon of hope as we realize that we are not as alone as we think we are, and are inspired to find courage again to move forward with our lives again. Come let us find again a little courage. Let us find the courage to support one another, to hold one another, to listen to one another not to provide certainty, but to help us find courage amidst our very real and trenchant uncertainty. May our courage, every day as it is be a bright light and a flame of hope for the world to see!
