Sermon: The Gift of Trust – Rev. Birch Cue

I underestimated the weight of this question. “How did it feel to respond to this poem by moving your bodies?”

I waited for an answer. We began this class on spiritual practices as we usually did. After check-ins and our chalice-lighting, we began a practice together. This morning, we were exploring practices grounded in moving and noticing our bodies. So we began with one that invited us to respond to a poem through movement. We moved our arms and shoulders, hands and heads, eyes closed, eyes open. We moved our bodies as we moved through the poem, stanza by stanza.

The room was unusually quiet after I asked this question. Then someone spoke. She was surprised by how much she enjoyed the practice. Someone else found this challenging because of their particular neurotype. Someone else felt caught off-guard by the poem. One word snagged her, reminded her of ways she and other women have been criticized and demeaned.

This was not what I planned for. Had I made a mistake? I wondered. Had I asked too much of my congregants? After all, our bodies can be sites of great joy and intense shame. So, we stopped. I stopped, and changed the agenda. We took the time we needed to spend with this.

As I opened up the conversation, people moved forward with courage and vulnerability. Those of you in the room joined me in caring for each other. Firmly and gently, we held both discomfort and wonder. You trusted each other. You trusted me enough to encounter what we each brought into the room. We honored the many experiences present there together. All of this was possible because we took the time to build trusting relationships.

None of this can be taken for granted. After I got here, a year and a half ago, I began to learn how deeply true that was. In those early weeks, I heard so many stories about the decade that preceded me here. Stories of great personal and institutional hurt.

As I attended to all of these stories, I remember other hurt congregations I have encountered and been a part of. We pour so much of our hearts into these places, our spiritual homes. We meet our passions in these places. Passions for justice, spiritual fulfillment, beauty, connection. We choose to raise our families here. We find the loves of our lives here. We choose to remember our dearly departed here.

Which makes it all the more painful when our communities hurt us. When our love and trust go disregarded. Get taken for granted. And when our relationships rupture, our hearts can close us off. In acts of self-preservation, we extend less of ourselves. There’s less at stake that way. But being in community, fully, asks us to put almost everything we have at stake. Turn, for a moment, to everything each of you has put into this community.

Your hopes. Your dreams. Your passions. Your future.

You’ve traveled a long road to rebuild this community with each other. That can’t be taken for granted, either. You committed yourselves to naming who you wanted to be, and then moving toward that. You reimagined how you govern yourselves. You reconsidered the mission and vision that guide your way through this world. You called on professional leaders who could help you grow and heal. You opened yourselves to love and trust. That is good, hard, work of the heart.

And then, you did something you hadn’t done in a while. You welcomed an intern minister into your midst. I found my way here with a cold call. I had been reading the Happenings newsletter for a while before I sent Rev. Eric a letter expressing my interest in this community. That I hoped you would consider training a new minister. But, I didn’t know anyone here. I had never visited before. I really had no idea what to expect.

So I was almost a little surprised to hear back from you. Rev. Eric wrote back something like this.

“Thanks for your letter. We haven’t had an intern in a really long time, and we hadn’t planned to have one next year. But, I believe that forming new ministers is an important practice of our faith, so let me see what we can do.”

An interview followed a couple of weeks later. And a couple weeks after that, you invited me to join you in the coming church year. You trusted the discernment of your minister and the lay-leaders who interviewed me. You trusted them to trust in me.

This, I have come to know, is an intentional practice of Love. To open ourselves, to put some confidence in a person we haven’t even met yet. The activist and educator adrienne marie brown writes that “when you trust people, they become trustworthy.”1 This is one of her key convictions as a community organizer. Over and over again, she has realized it through her work and experiences. But when I first encountered the idea, it seemed counterintuitive. Trust, I had believed, was something that had to be earned first. Demonstrated. Proven. It was not something I was often willing to extend on credit. But becoming a minister, encountering this new perspective, shifted how I understood this practice of love. Not as a good to exchange, but as a seed to plant and grow into something beautiful. You helped teach me this.

You’ve taught me a lot of other things, to be sure. How to preach a good word in troubling times. How to feed hearts as well as minds. But the power of trust is the greatest thing you have taught me. I say all of this, I bring up all of these stories, to say, what a gift you have given me. What a gift to trust a stranger in your midst.

And this gift has helped me to not only practice better ministry, but to answer an existential question, too. Especially in our most formative years, we ministers spend a good amount of time thinking, discussing, and arguing about authority. Where does a minister’s authority come from? Many in this world might say it comes from the Divine, or from the tradition that precedes them. But in a faith with a fluid relationship to both Divinity and tradition, where does a Unitarian Universalist minister’s authority come from? You taught me, it comes from the peoples’ trust. From their trust that their leaders care for and love them. From their deep knowing that they can trust someone with their deepest hopes and fears. From their willingness to go into uncertain futures together. I will probably cherish that lesson for the rest of my life.

I can’t thank you enough for this gift. You did a hopeful thing in a time when hope feels challenging for many of us to practice. My time with you is coming to a close. My internship ends with the close of the month. But then I will be back for my ordination. I won’t be your minister anymore. But I will continue learning from my time with you for years to come. And as we prepare to part ways, at least for a while, I wish these things for you.
Keep practicing hope, even in the face of despair.

Keep putting trust in each other, even in the face of rupture.
Keep practicing love, the cornerstone of our faith.

1. adrienne marie brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (AK Press: 2017), 42.

Birch Cue © 2026. Views here represent my own, and may not be representative of my denomination, school, or congregation.

Rev. Birch Cue

Ministerial Intern 2024–2026

Ordained at First Universalist Church of Denver with First Unitarian Church of Des Moines on Saturday, June 27, 2026.