Rev Joe’s sermon preached March 16, 2025, can be found here and below.

Moving Forward, Centered in Love

Rev. Joe Cleveland

March 16, 2026

 

All that you feel is welcome here.  All that you are is welcome here.

Humans have an incredible capacity for feeling a multitude of feelings in any moment. And in this worship service, this moment in the life of this congregation and in my life, is a moment in which we are feeling lots of feelings.  My ministry with this congregation is coming to an end, and it probably feels like this is happening really quickly, all of a sudden.  A whole mess of emotion  is likely swirling around in and among us: shock, sadness, anger, confusion, compassion, love, care, and more. .  Every individual is a world. This community is a world of worlds.  Who we are is what emerges from how all these feelings are in relationship with one another.

We are all dynamic beings continually emerging from a web of interdependent relationships, a never static always shifting and growing, weaving and unweaving and interweaving web.

It’s entirely possible that I would not be a minister today if not for a friend of mine named Larry Hoyt.  Larry died about a year ago, and last weekend I joined with some friends to celebrate him and recognize the impact his life had on ours.

I started playing the guitar while I was in graduate school. Eventually, and I’m not even really sure how or why this happened, I gathered up the courage to play and sing at an open mic night at a coffee shop in downtown Syracuse.  It was a long, narrow place with exposed reddish-brown brick walls, not unlike the brick walls in Caffe Lena.  Toward the back of the place was a small raised stage.  And Larry was one of the main hosts of the weekly Tuesday night open mic.  Larry always had a smile on his bearded face and I think the word “avuncular” was invented to describe him.  He was very encouraging of me, and listened to me more than he spoke to me.  He loaned me a banjo when I got curious about learning to play it.  He gave me my first banjo hit for free.  Larry was an enabler — a folk music enabler.  His welcome is one of the main things that put me on the path of playing music, which eventually got me recruited by a local UU congregation, which eventually led to me being here with you.

We are all worlds of feelings right now, part of a web of relationships right now, and that web of relationships also reaches back to the past.

I was an academic when I got to know my friend Larry.  I was a literary theorist and philosopher fascinated by deconstruction. At the risk of teaching you something I think I may have taught you before, as a parting gift to you, I will now teach you how the Hegelian dialectic is important to the philosophic brand of thought called deconstruction.  You are going to love this.

Hegel was a late 18th-, early 19th-century German philosopher. And some of you may know the Hegelian dialectic.  The Hegelian dialectic is thesis – antithesis – synthesis.  Let’s try it together.  You folks on this side will say “thesis!” and then you on this side say “antithesis!” and then all together we’ll say “synthesis.”  Ready?  Thesis! Antithesis! Synthesis!

This is how history moves.  This is how our experience moves.  But the word “synthesis” is actually a bad translation of the word that Hegel uses.  The word he uses is Aufhebung.  And it’s an interesting word in German.  It has contradictory meanings.  It  means “to cancel” but it also means “to pick up.”  In a way, a better translation would use the word “relieve” as in, a new soldier relieved the sentry of his duty, or one pitcher relieves another pitcher at the mound.  There is a change, but at the same time a continuity and continuance.  And support, too: Those sentries, those pitchers, even though they are not physically together in that particular moment, they are helping one another. They are playing for the same team, in support of the same team.  My ministry with this congregation is ending, but the ministry of this congregation will continue.

I founded a folk concert not-for-profit in Syracuse.  I really loved that effort.  It was exhausting but it was so rewarding.  I loved building the relationships with people and the amazing music that I helped make happen.  But there came a time when I needed to make a change and so I made the difficult decision to leave them.

And after I left, the organization took a deep breath and reflected on their identity and mission, and they are going gangbusters now, even through the pandemic. Bigger than it ever was when I was leading it.  The best thing I ever did for the non-for-profit group that I founded was leave it.

I really miss the Folkus Project group, and I am going to really miss UU Saratoga and all of you.

In moments like this, I latch on to something deconstructionist philosophers see in that word that Hegel uses:

We never really leave anything behind. 

With each transition, we are new and yet we still carry our past with us.  At the heart of deconstruction is a recognition that every text —and I would say every person— is a complex and even contradictory plurality of thoughts and feelings and experiences.  There’s one of my favorite Walt Whitman quotes I shared just a few weeks ago: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then…. I contradict myself; / I am large…. I contain multitudes.” And it is out of those multitudes that who we are emerges.

My friend Larry is gone, but in many ways, I carry him with me. The people we have known are part of who we are now.

And it’s also true that the people we are now, the web of relationships we are right now, extends into the future.

The decisions we make, the priorities we have, the questions we ask, the sort of activism we practice, the way we practice welcome — there are all sorts of habits that we carry with us that we learned, consciously or unconsciously, from one another and from people who are no longer with us, and which we will, consciously or unconsciously, share with others as we move forward.

The Reverend Manish Mishra-Marzetti, reflecting on the ways friends supported him through a crisis, comes to a new appreciation of how, “In any given moment, we might not know the outsized impact our loving presence and care may have.” The way we are in relationship with others lives on in ways we may not even realize.  In all my future ministry, there will be a piece of UU Saratoga and Saratoga Springs.

As this congregation and this minister live on, separately from one another but still in covenant, all of us UU’s and committed to the fact that our faith is rooted in covenant, with that support, this minister and this congregation can look forward in confident hope to important ministries to come.

 

For many years, I have bragged about this congregation’s sense of communal care, the way you all look after one another, and how that ministry is formalized in the congregation’s amazing Care Team.  You gotta keep that up, and I have no doubt that you will.

And, as you build new literal walls for this congregation’s new home, I hope you will continue to reach out beyond your literal and figurative walls, growing the presence of love and compassion and justice in Saratoga Springs, New York State, and beyond. Keep  making calls and sending letters to your elected officials. Keep showing up at the New York State capitol to advocate for the passage at long last of Medical Aid in Dying in this state.  And keep looking for ways to grow your connections and collaboration with local liberal religious congregations and social justice groups, and also to grow your connections with your fellow Unitarian Universalists in the Hudson Mohawk cluster and through the UUA.  Keep nurturing your web of relationships, keeping love always at the center.

Unitarian Universalists covenant to collectively transform and grow spiritually and ethically. We are accountable to one another for doing the work of living our shared values through the spiritual discipline of Love. I know that sounds Big. As a way of living that commitment, I urge you to take part in the upcoming UUA Common Read event being sponsored by your Social Justice Team. The UU Association of Congregations’ common read for this year is Authentic Selves: Celebrating Trans and Nonbinary People and Their Families. Reading these stories has opened my eyes to experiences I could never have imagined. It’s given me a new set of relationships, from which a new set of feelings has emerged, and a new set of understandings — ways I can feel more love and compassion for people I haven’t even met. It has opened my heart to people I’ll never meet.

And follow the lead of your Social Justice Team and renew the congregation’s commitment to being a Sanctuary congregation, and explore what that means.

 

From the moment I arrived, you opened your hearts to me.  You have invited me into your hearts and homes and minds and lives.  You have challenged me and encouraged me.  You have praised me and you have criticized me. You are large; you contain multitudes. You have thanked me for things I’ve said from the pulpit, and lots of you have, you must admit it, encouraged my singing, my guitar playing, and even my banjo playing.

Our shared ministry is ending, and you will never leave my heart.  UU Saratoga feels like home to me, and though I am leaving, I am going to carry you all with me, too.  We are parting ways, and yet each of us has a piece of the other that we will carry with us as we travel those ways, creating new relationships and expanding understandings as we center ourselves on and ground ourselves in love.

We will be able to become next who we become because of the commitment in love that we have shared.

I am proud of you and I know that I will be proud of you and your ministry to come.  Just as I hope that as I go my way, I will make you proud.

 

May we honor the interdependent web of all existence.
With reverence for the great web of life and with humility,
May we acknowledge our place in it.

So it is.  May we make it so.

 

Resources

Manish Mishra-Marzetti.  “The Transformative Power of Love.”  Love at the Center: Unitarian Universalist Theologies. Unitarian Universalist Association, Skinner House Books, 2025.

UUA Bylaws.  Article II Purposes and Covenant.