Fellowship member Alison Duren-Sutherland delivered this sermon Jan. 1, 2017.

The week before the last time I stood up here to share my own words with you all, I mentioned to my co-worker that I was giving the sermon at church on Sunday. Her eyes got wide, and she said, “I can’t imagine doing that.” When I asked her why, she said, “Oh, I just wouldn’t have anything to say that’d be worth saying.”

It broke my heart to hear that. As Unitarian Universalists, we have six sources that inspire our free faith

They’re printed on the back of your order of worship, along with our principles. All the member congregations of the UUA voted to affirm and promote those principles and sources. Let me read you first of the sources: “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces with create and uphold life.” Direct experience of the mystery. That’s the first source. We don’t claim to know what the mystery is, but we know for sure that we each have our own direct experience of it, and that that experience is the number one place where we find our religious truths. You might say that as UUs, we believe that each of us is divinely inspired, but then, many UUs wouldn’t say that, due to discomfort with the concept of divinity. We might say that our human faculty of reason allows us to discern what is right and good through education, experience and reflection. Different words, same concept.

So when someone says to me that they don’t think they have anything useful to say about religion, that nothing they think would be worth sharing to a group of their fellow worshipers, I simply don’t agree. Each of us is a unique expression of humanity. All your life experiences, and your thoughts and feelings about them, make your perspective unlike anyone else’s in the world.

DIY Prophecy, Step One: Encounter your own truths.

Any time I stand before you, I am confident that what I have to share is worthwhile, because our faith tells me that my own experience of the Great Mystery is real and central. More than that, it tells me that YOUR experience of the mystery is central to our faith as well. Your direct experience is different from mine, and because of that, your insights are unique. Part of the reason we come together in community is to give and receive the benefit of those unique insights. This is our idea potluck, like I talked about with the kids. I love sampling all the different dishes at the potluck by listening to other people talk about religion and spirituality. As I entertain their unique ideas, it expands my insight in ways that would never have occurred to me on my own.

So, if you have engaged at all in the free & responsible search for truth and meaning that our principles call us to pursue, you have some insight worth sharing with this community. You can come join the worship team and prophesy to all of us from up here in the pulpit, or you can speak your truth among a small group of your fellow seekers, taking time to listen to their prophecies as well. Not everyone wants to get up and preach a sermon, but everyone can find ways to share. For instance, some members of our congregation meet together in small groups, our SoulMatters circles to discuss monthly topics related to our faith. Over different months, we’ve engaged with the ideas of Presence, Simplicity, Healing, Covenant, Blessing. There are resources to explore, and questions about the topic that participants wrestle with on their own. Then the group comes together to share. The theme this month is Prophecy, and to me, the SoulMatters circles also embody that concept in that they are a place to share the direct experience you have had of whatever has moved you in the course of your contemplation over the month. To search for what is true within yourself, and then to share the truths you have discovered with others, that is your prophecy, and it is also the work of building a UU faith. For me, that work began long before I ever set foot inside a UU church.

I have a very clear recollection of my first prophecy, which in many ways set my feet on the faith journey that has lead me to this pulpit today. Prophecy is certainly not how I would have talked about this experience at the time, but years of learning and reflection have made me think better of it. I was a young woman, laying in the arms of my beloved, when she turned to me and said, “Alison, what if my mother is right, though, and we really are going to hell?” I didn’t hesitate, “She is not. We are not.” “How can you know?” she asked me.

This was a different time in my life. I knew a lot of things that I didn’t believe in, but I didn’t know much about what I did believe. I probably would have said that I didn’t believe in anything. And yet, about this, I was certain. “I just know,” I told her, “I know that God is not like that.” We went back and forth, and I wasn’t able to console her that night, not really. She saw that I believed what I was saying, but she couldn’t understand how I knew. I’m not sure that I did either. But now I can say, I looked into my heart and saw a divinely inspired truth, the only reasonable conclusion in the face of the love I found inside myself, and in hearing that truth challenged, I was compelled to share the good news of my inner knowing.

DIY Prophecy Step Two: Speak your truths to loved ones and fellow seekers.

As you speak your truths, you’ll get clearer about them. The discussions that ensue will teach you as much as you learned by looking within. And then, as you get more comfortable speaking, the big work begins, the work that I encourage you to commit to in this new year. The kind of prophecy we need right now, that YOU can bring into the world, is the subject of the second of the sources of our faith. I’ll quote this one too: The second source is “Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love.” For when we seek divine truths, when we search in our hearts for what is right to promote in the world, this is what we find: love, justice and compassion, an affirmation of the worth and dignity of every person. And these ideas are the tools that break down structures of oppression when they are lived and spoken, especially when they are spoken in the face of those who seek to oppress.

The most hard-core DIY prophets will raise our voices beyond the walls of this church, wherever we see our core values challenged. When anonymous individuals put posters up in our towns asking us to imagine a world without Muslims, we will stand up, in public, in Medford, Oregon, and say that no, we cannot imagine a world without Muslims, we will not, our diversity makes us strong and beautiful, we are all free to worship as we choose, and to get rid of our Muslim neighbors, they will have to go through us. This is our prophecy, friends. It needs to be shared!

Our prophecy can heal our broken world, our prophecy, coupled with our willingness to listen to the prophesy of others, because as UUs, when we show up at Standing Rock or for a Black Lives Matter demonstration, we are there to listen to the native prophets and the black prophets just as much as, if not more than, we are there to speak up ourselves.

Both the #NoDAPL and the BLM movements, which the national Unitarian Universalist Association and this individual church have voted to support, grew out of people, just folks, speaking their divinely inspired truths to the systems of power that seek to destroy those truths, and that is the movements’ great power, the power of prophecy. These prophets are changing the conversation, an important first step on the journey to changing the world.

My dear brothers and sisters, on the first day of 2017, I am speaking these words to you because the truth is that the world needs prophets a lot right now. You all have felt that need. And I believe that we can be those prophets, and when our voices shake, or when someone with more direct experience speaks, we can amplify other prophetic voices by showing up to support them.

DIY Prophecy Step Three, courtesy of Maggie Kuhn: “Leave safety behind. Put your body on the line. Stand before the people you fear and speak your mind, even if your voice shakes. When you least expect it, someone may actually listen to what you have to say. Well-aimed slingshots can topple giants.”

Let’s make 2017 a year of prophecy. May it be so.