Anchorage Unitarian Universalist Fellowship

Resist with Love (and Support AUUF)

January 29, 2026

 

This is going to be a different kind of stewardship sermon, because, if you didn’t know, I made a quick trip to Minneapolis this week.

 

    As I write, it’s Saturday morning and I’m sitting in the restaurant of the hotel where I’ve stayed the last two nights. While eating my breakfast I’ve been watching people come in, chat, eat, leave, seemingly go about their everyday lives. At the same time, I’ve been continuing to monitor my Minnesota clergy Signal chat. If you aren’t familiar with Signal, it’s an encrypted texting system that many folks are using for security reasons. At first there were messages about delayed flights due to the cold, questions about how we could help if we were stuck here for a while--you know, a bunch of overachieving UU ministers wanting to DO something. Then, someone posted that an observer was shot, and maybe killed. An hour later I found this confirmed on the NYTs app. 

 

    I keep reminding myself to pause and breathe. I need to go walk to settle the butterflies in my chest and stomach, AND I need to write this message. So simply breathing in place until I leave for the airport will have to do.

 

    Two youngish white men, late 20s, early 30s, are sitting at the bar in front of me. They have short, well kept hair and I wonder if they might be off-duty ICE officers. There’s really nothing that is making me wonder this except that they have short hair. They look like regular, kind, reasonable people. But so did the ICE officers I saw intimidating a pregnant Latina woman on Thursday. Have you heard that story yet? Okay, deep breaths.

 

    First off, I decided Sunday night to answer the clergy call that the group MARCH sent out on Friday. MARCH stands for Multi-faith Anti-Racist Change and Healing, and it’s an organizing collaborative. They’ve been working to support their community in Minneapolis in the midst of the ICE invasion since ICE arrived in December. They have been observing and notifying their neighbors when ICE comes near. They follow ICE in their cars so ICE knows they’re being watched. They blow whistles on corners, in parking lots, anywhere that ICE agents may get out of their vehicles in order to abduct or intimidate someone. MARCH folks provide food, medicines, diapers and other necessities to folks who are too afraid to leave their homes for fear of being abducted. On Thursday, the morning we all first gathered together, one of the organizers was late because she was delivering breast milk to a three-month old baby whose mom had been abducted a few days before. These folks are operating on their deep knowledge of the inherent worth of every individual. They’re operating on the fact that no human is illegal. They are operating on and resisting with love.

  

 And the folks who work through MARCH are exhausted. Exhausted. So on Thursday, January 15 they decided to ask for help—much the way that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. asked clergy to come to Selma, AL in 1965. And help came. By Thursday morning, one week later, over 700 clergy from all faiths and from all over the country including 200ish UUs answered their call.

  

But back to my story about the innocuous looking ICE agents. 

 

Late Thursday morning a few hours after all of us had gathered together, those of us who were willing and able were asked to get on buses to go to a neighborhood in south Minneapolis to observe ICE activity for an hour. We loaded ourselves into three buses of about 50 people each. On the bus, we were told to stay in pairs and stay safe. At all times, clergy were asked to discern their needs regarding safety and to act accordingly. We were told that if a certain action seemed too risky, for whatever reason, that all types of help would be welcome and there were many folks, we could take shifts. So, my friend James and I headed in search of a place we thought ICE agents might be. I saw a small L-shaped strip mall with obviously immigrant ethnic businesses in it. The parking lot wasn’t very full, but we decided to go explore. We had been told that even if we didn’t see any ICE agents, we could visit shops, talk with people and maybe buy something as a show of support. Out of the nine businesses located in the strip mall, six were closed. One of the three that was open was keeping their doors locked.

 

If this story is sounding familiar, you may have read it on AUUF’s or my FB pages. It’s worth retelling again—many times.  

 

As we crossed the parking lot, James noticed a dark colored Suburban with four people inside. They were parked so they had a full view of the mall. One of them was absent mindedly playing with his buff, pulling it up over his mouth and nose, then down again, as one does. Both James and I felt a rush of anxiety. Should I pull out my whistle and start blowing now? What should we do? Would that antagonize the agents or needlessly scare people? We were new to this and didn’t know for sure if they were ICE agents. Maybe they were harmless. We hailed two more clergy over for support and the four of us stood on the sidewalk in front of the stores, talked, watched and waited.  

 

After about 10 minutes we stood aside to let a group of Latina women walk by. They had come from a business further down and were chatting, even laughing. They passed out of my sight on my right side, my poor vision side, and then everything happened at once. I turned to my right and saw the suspected ICE vehicle had pulled up to block the mini-van the Latina women had gotten into. Two more vehicles with ICE agents suddenly appeared. None of us saw where they came from. 

 

Within seconds about nine agents were either surrounding the car or standing between us and the Latina’s car as we moved closer to film and blow our whistles. One agent was in short sleeves, no coat and no gloves! James jokingly asked where his gloves were. In a friendly manner, the agent said, “Yeah, I need gloves like yours. I forgot them back in my room.” The agent was fairly young, no more than early 30s. A couple agents looked like they might have been Latino. About three more agents stayed back in the parking lot by the ICE vehicles. James tried to move to the other side of the Latina woman’s mini-van so he could film from a different angle. The ICE agents politely but firmly told him to stay where he was. He did. We both were about 15 feet from the Latina’s car and the other two clergy were another 10-15 feet behind us. 

 

Agents closest to the car authoritatively opened the doors to the Latina’s mini-van, and talked to the people inside, while we waited anxiously to see if things would escalate. Then almost as suddenly as it had begun the ICE agents were through with their interrogation. No people were removed from the mini-van. The agents on the sidewalk nodded to us, a few thanked us for staying back, then they all got into their cars and drove away.  

 

This had all taken place in less than two minutes. We know because Dan, the American Baptist minister with us who had also been filming was able to record it. My friend, James, had been so flustered he thought he was filming, but ended up taking two very blurred photos, mostly of his thumb we think. At one point he handed his camera to me to keep filming while he put his gloves back on—I hadn’t even noticed anything was awry with our filming. I assumed I was holding the camera steady and continuing to get good footage. I wasn’t. Needless to say, we were stunned, shocked. Deep breaths. 

 

We started talking about what had just happened and I walked forward to the Latina woman on the driver’s side of the car just as she was starting to back out. She pulled back in, rolled down her window and as I started to ask if she was alright, she started thanking us profusely. She said she was six months pregnant and had papers and showed me some official looking legal documents. After a few more moments, she thanked us again and drove away.

  

What would have happened if we hadn’t been there? It seems to reason they didn’t have a warrant for anyone’s arrest, or they would have taken them, regardless of their right to legally be in the United States. This was racial profiling pure and simple. They had been waiting for a likely suspect and then moved into action. And why did they need 9-12 agents to check the papers of three very compliant women? Was that because of us—a group of middle aged white people wearing religious stoles? Why did they even need all four of the original agents we had seen waiting in the car?

 

After the agents and our new friends left, a woman with brown skin from a bookkeeping business unlocked her door to see if anyone had been taken.  A Chinese American woman who owned the laundromat we had been standing in front of invited us in to get warm. She too was relieved to know that no one had been taken. She then showed us photos of her US passport on her phone, wanting us to assure her that this photo would keep her from being taken. How would we know? Simply because we were white? As we know, white people, though still privileged, are unprotected, too.

 

Ever since Thursday morning I’ve been transitioning between feeling agitated, extremely sleepy and stunned. I had a reprieve during the march when I was surrounded by so many thousands of people protesting about ICE. That was good, that was joyful. But, if I am feeling such emotional turmoil and depletion from two and a half days in Minneapolis, how do the people who live there feel? How do the black and brown people who have been facing this kind of domestic terrorism since the early 1600s feel? And now, I am wondering how I can write about something as mundane as a stewardship drive when people are dying and stolen for no good reason. Deep breaths.

  

And what I come back to, is that this is why we are here. This is why AUUF exists as do so many other positive life-giving congregations across our land. We are here to learn from one another, to encourage each other to be better people, to comfort each other, to share joy and remind each other that joy is possible, even in the darkest of times. We are here to take the support, strength and compassion we glean from one another out into the world to ensure that all people are recognized as worthy, and are treated equitably with respect. We need to ensure that the laws of our nation are upheld so that everyone has the economic, educational and medicinal opportunities that allow them to thrive. We need to act and resist from a place of love.

 

The money that this congregation provides for my professional expenses, allowed me to go to Minneapolis. On short notice, the plane ticket was about a thousand dollars, I paid money to MARCH to help pay for our gathering spaces, buses and food. I paid for a place to stay—all told it cost about $2000 for me to travel, witness, learn from people on the ground and be able to come back to you to share what I’ve seen. Let me tell you—experiencing it is so different from reading about it. And there’s so much more I tell can you.

 

And in less anxious, fearful times we need AUUF too. Because it’s during those times that we are building up the capacity within one another to meet the urgent and dark moments with love when they come. We do this by (helping) to pay for OWL training so that our children learn that all kinds of love and ways of expressing our genders have meaning and worth—that we don’t have to fear our differences. We have Peace Camp for them and regular Sunday morning classes and they take the companionship and lessons learned with them into the future to make a better world. By offering our space for the Trans Day of Remembrance we let people know today that they have a safe place to be—Esme and I did some quick figuring and considering the cost of rental space, security offered by volunteers, the use of a minister, a pianist, and AV coordinator, we provided our community with an event worth about 380 (minister) + 100 (pianist) + 30 (A/V) + 360 (rent) + 75 (security) + 50 (posters) = $995 (!), not including food.. We all paid for that through our financial stewardship. We’ve also offered space for theatrical productions that share important social justice messages about gun control or racism.  Our financial stewardship makes it so that we can stay connected through Zoom even if we can’t be at AUUF. Our AV system may have cost money, but it also allows us to lessen our carbon footprint and enable people to attend services even during pandemics or ice storms. Yes, we pay money to the national Unitarian Universalist Association, and their resources give us a larger public voice for good and love on the world stage. They help us with run of the mill organizational challenges, they let us know that we aren’t alone in our path for good, our path for better.  

 

Over and over again I heard from folks in Minneapolis, the clergy who live there and regular folks on the street, how wonderful it was that so many people came to their town to witness and help. It gave them a boost of energy, of hope. We let them know they aren’t alone, that there are people who care. We all need that (acknowledgement/recognition). That is why we come to and continue to make sure that AUUF exists. For our betterment and that of our world, in dark times and in the quiet. To keep up our capacity to resist with love. Please give to our financial stewardship as generously as you can.       

 

A letter from Rev. Lise while traveling through Vilalba Spain
April 30, 2025

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Hi Everyone!

 

I hope you're doing well!  I think about you all and am sorry I haven't sent more postcards.  The reasons I haven't are:  A.  I'm usually really tired at the end of the day, and B. Postcards are hard to find.  I think email is making them defunct.

 

Anyway, I'm having a really good time.  The countryside is beautiful, I'm learning a little more Spanish, and I'm meeting interesting folks--mostly younger ones although there have been a few folks my age and a few older.

 

I'm taking tons of pictures and will share more when I'm back, but here are a few now.  Oh, I'm in Vilalba tonight--5 or 6 more days and I'll be in Santiago!

 

Thank you again for this opportunity.  See you in two more months!

 

Blessings and love, Rev. Lise

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