By: Rev. Dr. Harold Marrero
Dear UU Miami Family,
After last Sunday’s service, more than one of you found me with the same question. I had said, from the pulpit, that the world would not change by Wednesday. And some of you went home turning that phrase over, wondering what exactly I meant by it. It is a fair question, and it has stayed with me all week, so let me try to answer it properly here.
There is so much happening right now. In our politics, in our cities, in the small corners of the world where each of us actually lives. It is a great deal to carry, and, to be honest, there are mornings when carrying is the hardest part. The sheer volume of it can start to feel like a message in itself. Give up. Stop hoping. Nothing you do will move any of this.
I have come to believe that feeling is not an accident. The overwhelm is a tool. It is the instrument used, deliberately, by those who would much prefer us tired, because a tired people surrenders without a sound. When everything feels too large to change, the quiet temptation is to change nothing at all, and to call that wisdom.
And then there is the other side of it, which I know just as well, because I live there too. The hope that this will finally be the moment. That this time, surely, the line has been crossed for good. That after everything we have seen, the country will wake up, because how much more proof could anyone possibly need that what is unfolding at the highest levels of our nation is not normal, and betrays the very soul of what this country was meant to be.
And yet the change so rarely arrives on the schedule our hearts would set for it. We speak, and it can feel like speaking into a void. We tell the truth out loud, in full voice, and then Wednesday comes and the world looks exactly as it did on Sunday.
For a long time I thought that was a reason to despair. I have come to believe it is the whole point. Because when we speak the truth out loud, something does change. It may not be the world, not by Wednesday, maybe not for a long while. But it changes us. It anchors us, in truth, in hope, in love. The world did not change by Wednesday. We did. And we keep changing, every single time we proclaim, boldly and without apology, a truth that begins with the worth of every person.
That, finally, is who we are as Unitarian Universalists. We are not a people who settle comfortably into our own privilege while others suffer down the street. We know better, because we know our history, and because we hold, at the center of everything, the conviction that every person carries inherent worth, at every level of our society, no matter who they are or what they have been told. So we speak. Even into the void. Especially into the void.
And here is the part I most want you to hear, because it is the part that surprised even me. This past week, the world actually did change before Wednesday.
You will remember the news that sent me back to my desk to rewrite last Sunday’s sermon. The Pentagon had taken more than two hundred religious affiliation codes and consolidated them down to thirty-one, folding our tradition and the traditions of our closest siblings into broad and flattening categories. And then, within days, something happened. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints objected, loudly and publicly, that the new list mischaracterized their faith. Two United States senators from Utah said so out loud. The national church said so. And over a single weekend, the Pentagon revised the list. The Mormons spoke up, and the machinery of the state moved.
I have turned that over all week, and I take two things from it. The first is simple. Pressure works, when it is loud, when it is organized, when it refuses to be embarrassed. The second is a question I cannot stop asking myself, and now I ask it of us. If a faith community with that kind of voice can move the Pentagon in a weekend, what does it mean that ours has been so quiet for so long?
It is time for us to speak more loudly. More boldly. With far more confidence in who we actually are. We are the descendants of the people who dreamed up this great and imperfect experiment in the first place. The free pulpit. The democratic conscience. The equal worth of every soul. We did not borrow those ideas from anyone. They are ours, our forebears were their architects, and the country desperately needs us back in the conversation about who it is becoming.
My hope, my deepest and most stubborn hope, is that by daring to change ourselves, we might become messengers of hope to a world that is starving for some. Which is exactly why I am so glad for the month we are in.
This coming Sunday, our Pride in Motion series continues with a service called From La Paloma to Chalking the Sidewalks: Stories of Floridian Queer Resistance, and together we will celebrate Flower Communion. The question we will sit with is concealment and disclosure. What do we hide. What do we refuse to hide. And what does it cost us, either way.
We will hold that question inside the long memory of queer resistance right here in Florida, and we will tell two stories, eighty-eight years apart. In 1937, a nightclub just outside Miami was raided by men in white hoods, and within weeks it reopened, with the very symbol of its attackers turned into a farce on its own stage. In 2025, a rainbow crosswalk was painted over in the night by the state, and chalked back in the next morning, and the morning after that, by hands that knew full well the chalk would not last. They chalked it anyway.
A perennial is a flower that knows how to come back. You can cut it down, pave it over, call it a weed. And the next spring, something rises up where the flower used to be. We belong to a long line of them.
Andie Arthur will lead us in worship this Sunday, and I can think of no better way to reconnect with the values that hold us together. We may not be able to control the chaos of the world. We can, together, learn to awaken the hope that lives within it, and within us.
Bring a flower, if you are able. We will see you on Sunday.
Peace.