This service, "Living Legacies," from October 19, 2025, at First Church UCC in downtown Phoenix, explores remembering ancestors and fanning the flame of God's gift within us. Led by Christopher Schouten, Member in Discernment, the service includes sacred stories, songs of praise and worship, and a prayer of transformation. Dr. Johnathan Robinson shares an ancestor story, and Christopher Schouten delivers a message on "Living Legacies," emphasizing forgiveness, nurturing healing, and living authentically. The service also features a new song, "Love Has Always Known My Name," written by Christopher Schouten with AI-assisted melody, celebrating God's all-inclusive love. Community prayers focus on democracy, peace in Palestine, healing personal wounds, and celebrating LGBTQIA+ pride. The service concludes with a call to cultivate generosity and a blessing to go forth as bearers of a living legacy.
Sermon:
Friends, we have heard the story of Eleanor "Mini Ma" Williams, and we are reminded that ancestry is not just a lineage of names written on a family tree. It is a legacy of the faith lived out by our forebears - often in difficult circumstances. And if we are lucky enough to know our ancestors as Johnathan did, this legacy becomes a direct transfer of inspiration, courage, faith, hope, and love, making our lives perhaps a little bit easier than it was for them.
This sincere faith is what Paul speaks of in our scripture today from 2 Timothy 1:5: "I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you."
We know that - for better or for worse - our families are one of the most influential forces in our lives. They shape our values, our identity, our sense of belonging, and our very sense of self. To discover that someone in our own lineage shares a deeply personal experience with us is not just a footnote; it is a profound validation that we are part of something bigger and a source of courage. It tells us we are not an anomaly, but a continuation of our family story.
I know, for instance, that much of my success in life is due to the difficult legacy my father inherited. He lost both his parents when he was only 10 years old. You might ask how that could possibly influence me in a positive way! Well, because he had to learn self-sufficiency at a very early age, he instilled that same independent spirit in all his children so that we were ready to leave home at age 18 and find our ways in the world. And all three of us did. Luckily, my mother, who values human relationships above all else, taught us that while self-sufficiency is good, the true richness of life is found in deep relationship, emotional empathy, and vulnerability. The combination of these traits is the living legacy they passed to me, my brother and my sister.
We often focus on the grand, public acts of faith passed down, like when we consider how the children of Martin Luther King Jr. continued the bold and beautiful legacy of their father. But today, I want us to consider the secret legacies we inherit. Every family tree has stories that were buried, truths that were whispered, and authentic lives that were lived in the shadows. Some of those stories were stories of shame, and others of quiet triumphs. And some were both at the same time. The question for us, the living legacy, is: what do we choose to forgive in our inheritance, and what do we choose to nurture, rekindle, and live out loud?
Our message today calls us to forgiveness, recognizing that we inherit both blessings and wounds. In the Prayer of Transformation, we asked the Spirit to: "Help us forgive what we’ve inherited that wounds, and nurture what heals and liberates."
What wounds do we inherit? Sometimes, it is the wound of fear. Look at verse 7 of our scripture: "for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline."
That word, "cowardice," is important. To me, it doesn’t speak to a flaw in our character. It speaks to a spirit of fear that makes us shrink from our own truth, a fear that forces us to bury a divine gift within us. For generations, many of our ancestors have lived with this spirit of cowardice pressed upon them by culture, by law, and yes, by their own families.
My own family has a legacy touched by this as well, as evidenced in the life of my Great Uncle Norm, who was beloved by everyone in my family.
Norm lived a wonderful life that was both traditional and deeply courageous in a quiet way. He married who I imagine to be his very best friend, my Great Aunt Louise, and together they raised two adopted girls in a small Iowa town on the Missouri River and ran a local dinner theater together. And though I don’t know the whole story, for decades, I believe his truest self remained hidden, buried deep beneath the expectations of his Iowa life in those times. Things were complicated by his day job; running an advertising agency alongside his brother - my grandfather - who was, to put it mildly, the Archie Bunker of our family - a caricature of intolerance and anger that has become far too familiar to us again in these times. Uncle Norm’s fear of losing his livelihood, his family's respect, and his place in his joint business meant that a spirit of cowardice had to, for a time, prevail.
But the beautiful thing about a sincere life, even one hidden, is that the gift of God’s flame never truly dies. It can be rekindled, even at the very end of our lives.
It was in the final years of his time on earth, after his wife had passed, on a park bench on the bustling, beautiful Ramblas in Barcelona where we met together on vacation while I was living in Europe. In that place of foreign freedom, thousands of miles from Iowa and the shadow of fear, Great Uncle Norm finally shared his truth with me.
Sitting there, he quietly disclosed his bisexuality; a rare moment of courage, honesty and vulnerability in his life that I felt honored to be trusted with. It was a truth I already suspected, having seen the unmistakable breadcrumbs of his secret queer life on a computer he had once asked me to repair for him during a previous visit to his home in Iowa.
It was not a dramatic confession. It was a quiet, sacred moment of legacy transfer. It was a fleeting act of power and love in a life defined by self-discipline and caution. He was telling me: This is who I am. This is who I always was. And now, you know.
And in that moment, for me - a gay man often searching for my own place in my family’s story - I realized that my queerness was not an aberration. It wasn't a modern departure or something new. It was, in fact, part of my ancestry. It was a secret strand woven into the fabric of my family's history. I wasn't the first, and I wasn't alone.
This knowledge, however, carried a bittersweet truth: if I had been given this gift when I was younger, it would have made all the difference for me. The pain of feeling like the "only one" could have been avoided. But that is sometimes the wound we inherit, and that is the wound we are called to heal for the next generation.
And that healing has happened in me and in our family. Just this past summer, that gift - the courage to be who God has made us to be - was handed down to the next generation. My young niece texted me, proudly announcing she had a girlfriend. Whether this young experience of queerness becomes part of the rest of her life or not is beside the point; what matters is the fact that because of the quiet courage of her Great Uncle Norm, and the slightly bolder courage of her Uncle Wilbert and Christopher, she, today, at a very young age, has the chance to live her truth in joy and not in shame. My coming out - difficult at times - helped prepare my entire family to be more compassionate and accepting for her generation, which together with the way society has progressed, has made her coming out practically a non-event in 2025. I praise God for that.
This is what it means to be a living legacy.
Paul told Timothy: "For this reason I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands." (v. 6)
The sincere faith of our ancestors - Lois and Eunice, or Uncle Norm - wasn't just about believing. It was about choosing to live fully and authentically - whether at the beginning of our lives or toward the end of them - trusting the truth that God will give us the faith and courage we need if we are willing to fan its flames. Today - as we speak - we celebrate LGBTQIA+ pride in Phoenix with the annual Pride Parade taking place downtown. I stand here, holding both Uncle Norm and my dear niece in my heart, celebrating who God made all three of us to be.
We are called to forgive the wounds they passed on—the silence, the fear, the shame, and the necessity of hiding. And we are called to nurture the gift they carried: the capacity for deep love, the courage to seek and build community, and the profound self-discipline it took to survive difficult circumstances.
Siblings in Christ, the spirit of power, of love, and of self-discipline is within you. Go forth. Be the generation that lives the truth our ancestors whispered. Rekindle the gift, and make your life a living legacy of God’s liberating love. Amen.
Church, it’s a very special moment for me! I’m about to hear a song I wrote sung live for the very first time by a God-given talent as great as Matthew’s, and I’m very excited about that. Full disclosure: I wrote the lyrics, but because my musical talent is limited, I worked with AI to write the melody. But I wanted to leave my own legacy to the world - a message of hope and inspiration that tells those of us who have not always been welcome in church that God has ALWAYS known our name, and that God loves and sanctifies us ALL in living our authentic truths. It’s part autobiography, and part love song to Uncle Norm, to my niece, to all of you, and to any of us who have ever doubted that we were worthy of God’s love. Because without any doubt, by God’s grace, we are worthy.
