Freedom in Who We Really Are

Emily Jarrett Hughes

June 29, 2025 | Pride Sunday

Text: Galatians 5:14

Hello church

I’m honored to have the opportunity to speak today. When we agreed to be the host family it unexpectedly slipped out that I’d be willing to preach. And here I am! I always begin special occasions like this by acknowledging all the voices that are speaking through me.

I am Emily Jarrett Hughes. My name Emily honors many generations of Emily’s before me, many of them notably creative and intelligent. Jarrett is a name that Elizabeth and I took when we married. The J comes from Elizabeth’s family, and it is combined with Garrett, my family line of Quakers and activists. The Hughes line left Wales in the mid 1600’s and led to many generations of ministers and teachers on this continent.

Like most of you, I live here, near the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers, in a place our Dakota neighbors describe as the place where the water reflects the sky. Drinking these waters, learning to live well with the rhythm of this place, also shapes who I am and what comes out of my mouth.

I come to you as a devotee of the perennial wisdom tradition as it surfaces in many forms. I teach women’s traditional dances from the Balkans & Greece as a spiritual practice, I am a qigong healer and instructor, which is an energetic branch of Chinese medicine, and thanks to my beloved Elizabeth, I am a student of the Christian mystical tradition as well.

I greet each of you. All of you. All the ancestors, communities, and landscapes that shaped you. It is a gift to be together and have this moment to speak from the heart—to connect heart to heart.

Join me for a breath, to prepare our hearts.

I was so fortunate to be raised in a church like Plymouth. I was raised in Epworth United Methodist Church in Berkeley, California. There are many horrible stories of churches being anti-gay and anti-trans. I can share that churches can also be powerful allies.

Church was a place that helped me explore and embrace who I am. The first lesbians I knew were pillars of the church. I was curious about but didn’t dare go to San Francisco Pride until my pastor invited me to attend with our church. A few years later even my father made it to pride, riding on the back of a motorcycle with one of the grand marshals for the dykes on bikes section with a woman from church. Having an intergenerational inclusive community is so powerful.

After I came out, and then my brother came out as well, my mother became an extraordinary advocate. She joined the reconciling ministries network, which advocated for all forms of GLBT inclusion in the church. One of her projects was sewing rainbow stoles. At first the stoles honored the people who could not be ordained within the United Methodist Church due to their sexual orientation or gender identity. Soon everyone involved in the Reconciling movement would be wearing one of these stoles whenever they showed up at church conferences. It turns out that across the country, in New York, Elizabeth’s mother became the master coordinator of sewing stoles. New patterns for every year.

At conferences, my mother helped distribute buttons people could wear. They could say things like “my daughter is of sacred worth.” “My uncle is of sacred worth.” “My nephew is of sacred worth.” She sent one to me that says “I AM of SACRED WORTH.”

That’s a pretty powerful theological statement. I am of sacred worth. You are of sacred worth, too.

It was a lot easier to put on a rainbow bracelet than to wear that pin. I put it on my bulletin board. I felt very secure in my mother’s love and the support from my home congregation, and at the same time it kind of bounced off me. It felt like there was more for me to understand about it. What does it really mean to say that everything and everyone is sacred?

Those buttons were so powerful because they talked about two forms of our identity. We are all the names and titles we give ourselves. And we are more than that, beyond that. There is a sacred dimension to who we are that interconnects us and transcends us.

I had a basic idea that everything is sacred. I loved nature. I loved people. I had a natural compassion. And so seeing the suffering in my community and for our planet went right to my heart. I really suffered with it. Maybe I felt fairly free to be myself, but under the weight of this suffering I felt truly oppressed.

This is what set me on my spiritual journey. If everything is of sacred worth, then how do we bear what we are doing to each other, and how can we find real transformation? Where is freedom of spirit?

At the time I didn’t think that the Christian tradition had a good enough answer to this.

I had a hunch that the answer was beyond words. First, I spent a few years with the Quakers, curious about what I’d find in the silence. Then I found my way into embodied practices of dance and qigong, where I’ve been centering myself for the past twenty years.

There’s so much I can say about how engaging my body helped create a calm that could override the chattering loops in my head.

Body-mind magic aside, these practices have been so significant to me because they have helped me understand who I am beyond all my descriptions.

I’m part of the circle. I am part of nature and the Universe. The Taoists speak of our “original nature,” similar to an “uncarved block” and when we remember this as our true identity we become wise. We become free.

Unwittingly sometimes our descriptions can really entrap up. In the quest to understand our unique selves we can fall into the trap of endless identity customization, endless I-am-me-by-not-being-you. But that sets us up to always be defending ourselves from others and for always being alienated.

This brings me to the scripture passage for today. The lectionary reading from Galatians resonated with me, and in particular this line from Galatians 5:14, from the Message translation of the Bible:

14 For everything we know about God’s Word is summed up in a single sentence: Love others as you love yourself. That’s an act of true freedom.

The first part of this passage, “love others as you love yourself” I’m sure is very familiar.

There are many places in the bible where Jesus gives a similar teaching. Theologian Beatrice Bruteau paraphrased Jesus’ teachings in the gospels as “You and I are one; whoever sees me, sees you and whoever sees you, sees me. Whatever anyone does to you, they do to me; what they do to me, they do to you; what you do, I do; and what I do, you do.”

These all point to a different sense of an identity. It is beyond our descriptions of ourselves. It is interconnected. These are invitations to understand our original nature that co-exists with all the definitions of our lives.

The verse from Galatians ends with “That’s an act of true freedom.” This seems to be the only translation that feels it necessary to add that point, but I think it’s important.

I ended up in the Message translation because this passage from Paul in Galatians is all about the freedom we find when we live beyond pure self-interest. Unfortunately, that’s often translated as flesh. But this translation helped me stay focused on the real point. I am going to keep reading verses 19-25 as Paul continues:

19 It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness;

20 trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits;

21 the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on. This isn’t the first time I have warned you, you know. If you use your freedom this way, you will not inherit God’s kingdom.

22 But what happens when we live God’s way? [God] brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard—things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments,

23 not needing to force our way in life, able to marshal and direct our energies wisely. Legalism is helpless in bringing this about; it only gets in the way.

24 Among those who belong to Christ, everything connected with getting our own way and mindlessly responding to what everyone else calls necessities is killed off for good—crucified.

25 Since this is the kind of life we have chosen, the life of the Spirit, let us make sure that we do not just hold it as an idea in our heads or a sentiment in our hearts, but work out its implications in every detail of our lives.

Freedom is a theme throughout this passage. The chapter even starts with “Christ has set us free to live a free life.” So this all goes back to why I think it is interesting that the commandment to love others as yourself is followed by the statement “that’s an act of true freedom.”

As I have developed my sense of self that’s beyond my descriptions, that taps into my original nature, and is part of Divine Source, I do feel so much more free.

I still make mistakes, but with less emotional drama. I greet unexpected challenges with more curiosity about what’s emerging. People can spew hatred at me, but my heart conjures so much less enmity. I have a confidence that I can use whatever is happening as fuel to help me live more deeply into my life purpose.

Plymouth, as we think about the threats to freedom in our community. The threats to the GLBTQIA community in particular on this day, I invite us to see the largeness of what we can offer.

It matters profoundly that as a community we celebrate all sexualities and genders. It matters that we welcome people, whomever they are with that love. This creates a freedom of self-expression that can be lifesaving.

Freedom is also bigger than the liberty to be and live as we please. We set ourselves and others free when we know ourselves as part of each other and part of Divine Source.  When I went through serious illness, the strongest life-saving energy came from experiencing myself as interconnected.

We need ritual and prayer practices that help us know our incarnated and transcendent selves and our incarnated and transcendent God. As a young person growing up in a wonderful affirming church, I was also left very hungry for these practices. They do exist within Christianity, on the margins. I didn’t yet know how to find them until a lot of Elizabeth’s spiritual journey rubbed off on me. She happens to have been speaking about Centering prayer at the 9 O’clock hour, before this service. That’s one way, and there are many more. Elizabeth and I gathered with friends to found the Eye of the Heart Center for Creative Contemplation because there are many, many ways into contemplation.

We are fortunate to have Kate Taber’s leadership and renewed inspiration in the Board for Spiritual Formation. As we live into these transformative times at Plymouth and imagine how we want to grow, I hope we become increasingly diverse as we affirm and celebrate a multitude of identities and life experiences. I hope that each of us will continue to grow beyond who we thought we were into a larger sense of self. I hope we become a vital place of renewal where people can come, tired, wondering how did we get to this mess, and find both affirmation for their identities and a rich array of offerings and practices that help them expand who they think they are and set their spirits free.

I feel an extraordinary sense of possibility with you right now, Plymouth. May it be so.