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Labor Day
Sunday, September 1 @ 10:30 am - 11:30 am
A celebration of live music and poetry readings – Don’t miss this Labor Day Sunday service centered on social justice and HOPE. Come and be inspired! Rev. Dr. María Cristina Vlassidis Burgoa will be preaching.
How to Attend
We encourage masks in all buildings. Read more about our In Person Guidelines here.
• To virtually attend, please Zoom in using room number 989 3107 9078, passcode: chalice.
• To phone into the service, call 669-900-6833, Meeting ID: 989 3107 9078.
For those joining, please mute as soon as you enter the room, so everyone can hear. Please note, the services will be recorded, but at this time, there are no plans to share the recording.
More Information
This is an all ages service. Learn more about our programs for Children & Youth here!
If you don’t have a chalice, but want to light one, check out our Making a Chalice at Home page.
In person services are followed by coffee hour.
Children’s Story
Sermon Audio
Labor Day
Sermon Text
I grew up in a working class family and neighborhood. Working class in my country was more like sometimes employed, underemployed, juggling three or four side jobs. Bakers, ice cream vendors, bus drivers, miners, seamstresses, fishermen, maids, shoe cobblers, farmers, and rebels who led the radical party demanding safer working conditions, time off to be seen by a doctor, to be with their families, to rest. In my family my grandmother was a school teacher for the children of the miners in northern Chile. She was a widow raising four children with a meager salary without any benefits and often shared food and supplies with her students who often came to school hungry, without shoes, and sick. My mother was a single parent who struggled to provide for me and for my grandmother. My mom made all my clothes, put food on the table and paid for my uniform, tuition, and one pair of new shoes per year. One year we had to cut the tip of the shoes to make room for my toes! In Chile, she went door to door selling goods that she would buy at the duty free shops on the border with Peru. She saved and scraped to pay for a round trip bus ticket. The trip took 18 hours one way. She sold everything on credit because none of our family or friends could pay all at once. I remember vividly her little notebook where she kept her accounts and learning basic math from her notes, mostly in red ink. I also remember waiting excitedly for her to return from her trips, the opening of the bags, and getting to see so many wonderful things: wind up puppies that walked and barked, soft satin scarves, potato peelers, dolls that said “mama”, fragrant soaps, and my favorite chocolates. In the United States my mother worked as a seamstress in several sweatshops in Manhattan. She also worked in a thrift shop where she made friends and got me great clothes that had been discarded because they were missing a button or the zipper was broken. Her last job was in a coat factory, where she finally was treated with dignity, received a decent salary, and was able to pay into the social security system. But by that time, her back, her legs, her hands, and her eyesight had been forever atrophied and a source of chronic pain. From my grandmother and my mom, I have learned that all labor has dignity. I have been working since I was 12 years old. I have been a typist, janitor, coffee picker, factory worker, waitress, voice over narrator, Spanish literacy and English teacher, HIV/AIDS advocate, domestic violence survivor advocate, legal advocate for mothers in prison, hospital chaplain, teaching fellow, adjunct faculty, and now Minister. Not all my jobs paid fair wages or had benefits. As a single mother, sometimes I juggled three part time jobs to make ends meet. This is why I resonate with and support Rev. William Barber’s Poor People’s Campaign. A campaign that we Unitarian Universalists have endorsed as a moral imperative. The Poor People’s Campaign is the continuation of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. ‘s work which more than 50 years ago called for a “revolution of values” in America. A revolution against the “triplets of evil”—militarism, racism, and economic injustice.
In 1968 during the SEVENTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST ASSOCIATION a resolution in support of the Poor People’s Campaign was passed. It urged us to support the Poor People’s Campaign of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and endorsed several legislative goals: Meaningful jobs at adequate pay scales, effective enforcement of anti-discrimination statutes, a guaranteed minimum income for all, and family allowances; school desegregation and provision of quality education for all Americans from kindergarten through college; decent housing, both for the poor and for those on minimum income; adequate medical and dental care for all Americans to be implemented by a program of national health insurance.
Today, we honor workers and the histories of resistance that echo their truth down through the centuries and the power of the blood that has been shed through generations of struggle.
We proclaim that we will keep on moving forward, never turning back, sin volver atrás!
