Sermon Contest: A Call for Climate Revival Preachers

UU Climate Justice Revival - Reimagine Together: From an Extractive Age to a New Era! 

The UU Climate Justice Revival is sweeping the land with inspiring collective worship, creative learning, new frameworks at the intersection of climate and justice, and the chance to weave together the threads that have always linked our deepest commitments.  Unitarian Universalists will gather to dig into the connections between social justice, racial justice, and environmental ministry.  Congregations will receive training and materials to hold facilitated dialogues, dynamic worship, religious education, and advocacy all designed to transform our congregations through climate justice—September 28 & 29, 2024.  

Together, we can cultivate small, critical connections that nourish relationships and collaboration amongst social justice teams; build capacity to hold complexity in our congregations; collectively craft and embrace a shared vision; and chart a course for the future we want to build together with love at the center of our actions.

Ministers and lay leaders alike, are encouraged to submit a sermon reimagining climate justice for a new era and bringing a spirit of revival and renewal to our work. Imagine that it's 2050 and we've achieved all of our wildest hopes for collective liberation. What is present in that re-imagined reality? What have our values led us to collectively abolish or move away from? The modern prison abolitionist movement imagines a future without police and prisons, drawing on deep convictions, faith, imagination, and hope to do so. Might there be a parallel vision for the climate justice movement that avoids the risks of prioritizing short-term gains or the distractions that so often divide our focus? How would our world transform if love was at the center of our climate actions and collective liberation were upheld as a uniting goal across all of the movement spaces that matter most? Holding this vision at the forefront of our efforts, all sermon submissions should intentionally address climate as an intersectional justice issue.

Our vision is given strength by our faithful commitments. In the spirit of Religious Naturalism, one theological inspiration for this sermon may come from this piece by Ursula Goodenough, which has served as a faithful grounding for the Revival:

From Credo of Continuation by Ursula Goodenough

And so, I profess my Faith. For me, the existence of all this complexity and awareness and intent and beauty, and my ability to apprehend it, serves as the ultimate meaning and the ultimate value. The continuation of life reaches around, grabs its own tail, and forms a sacred circle that requires no further justification, no Creator, no superordinate meaning of meaning, no purpose other than that the continuation continues until the sun collapses or the final meteor collides. I confess a credo of continuation…If we can revere how things are, and can find a way to express gratitude for our existence, then we should be able to figure out, with a great deal of work and good will, how to share the Earth with one another and with other creatures, how to restore and preserve its elegance and grace, and how to commit ourselves to love and joy and laughter and hope.

All submissions are due by August 1, 2024. Early submissions are most welcome.

Five winners will be selected by August 15, 2024. Each winner will receive $500.

  • Please submit your sermons in writing to the Climate Revival Planning team by emailing: UUClimateSermonContest@uua.org

    We ask that sermons be 1,500 - 2,000 words.

    Winners will be asked to video record their sermon to be made available on our website for UU congregational use during the Climate Justice Revival and thereafter. Excerpts will be shown during our Revival programming on Saturday.