Sermons| First
UU Church of Austin
Sermons |
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PRAYEREarth mother, star mother, May all remember You are the grain and the loaf And as you are patient We are radiant light You are: the embrace that heartens, Within you we are born, You bring us around the circle to rebirth,
High School Seniors Bridging CeremonyWe are now going to have one of the rare rituals our Unitarian Universalist tradition has for us. This is a Bridging Ceremony, an initiation ritual in which we will ask our High School Seniors to come up and cross over from their youth and as YRUU community members here the church and into a new territory as Young Adult Unitarian Universalists about to set the world on fire outside the confines of this particular congregation. We have a member of the Young Adult Religious Network, Lisa Fredin, to welcome them. The Young Adult Religious Network is a long standing group of young adults, from all over the city, that meets every week here with the leadership of the Rev’d. Kathleen Ellis of Live Oak UU Church. It is part of a larger network of Young Adult Unitarian Universalist groups which meet in towns all over the continent. This bridging is a symbolic act to re-enact a very real transition in the lives of these young people. They are moving from home and home town and taking on new identities independent of families and church communities. It is a very exciting and significant transition. As we watch them bridge, let us commit ourselves to support them, their parents and families as they test their wings. As the hymn says, wings set us free but the roots, they hold us. That support becomes especially important when new territory and identity is explored. They will each light a candle from our chalice to symbolize their new being within our wider Unitarian Universalist community. Before we get into the bridging ritual, we will hear from our graduating seniors as they tell us about their plans for next year. And then Lisa Fredin will say a few words to introduce the Young Adult Program and extend an invitation to any interested newcomers out there.
Statement: Steven MatthisHello. My name is Steven Matthis.
I joined this church towards the beginning of my seventh grade, very reluctantly I might add. My parents bribed me with a trip to Fiesta Texas, which I still have not cashed in on, if I gave it a try for 4 consecutive weeks. At first they sort of had to force me to come, I didn’t like the idea of getting up and going places on Sunday mornings. So, I came to RE and slept much of the time. I didn’t really know anybody in class, but I kept coming. When I got in to high school, I started going to the dwindling High School RE program and went nowhere near YRUU. Then by chance I learned that a person at school that I was pretty good friends with was in the YRUU and she told me to come. So I came to my first YRUU meeting in January sometime freshman year, at the time a group full of drama, anger and tension. Then I never left, and it basically became more humane and calm as the years went. I gradually and very accidentally gained power and respect within the group. It hit be like a brick in the beginning of junior year when I realized what all I was going to do my senior year. You may remember Will Boney, he graduated last year, I followed nearly identical in his footsteps. My junior year I was already a youth at large on the YPC. In the early spring of my junior year I was elected co-president of the YRUU for a one-year term plus some. Last May I also started my term as Youth Trustee to the Board, and will forfeit it to Karen at the end of this month. I also acquired the job of coffee boy for this year. Next year I will be off to Austin College in Sherman, Texas. It is a small private school that I think will be very good for me. But not before I have the churchiest summer of my life. In June I will attend a youth rally in Oklahoma City as well as attend GA in Fort Worth. In July, I’ll spend a week in Atlanta taking part in the youth trip that Margaret Roberts so kindly made happen for us. Then barely a week later I will go to my first and last SWUUSI as a youth. This church has meant a lot to me, mostly in high school. It has helped me develop skills and confidence in many things. First, I learned to take responsibility for things by myself, by being assigned tasks and duties for rallies etc. I developed leading skills by conducting the majority of the meetings for the last year. I also had to organize all transportation for rallies etc between us and other churches as well. It has also become a place where I have felt very safe. I have become very comfortable with both the church and the people in it. In addition, I firmly believe that my roles in this church had much to do with me being accepted to the colleges I was accepted to, and offered the money I was offered. The things I learned here, and the things I acquired here, will always go with me.
SERMON: When You Love SomeoneGoodmorning. Happy Mother’s Day. Happy Mother’s Day to you. Whether you are a mother or not, we all have mothers. For older mothers, for mothers who are in need of care, for mothers who have died, let us remember our mothers and give thanks. For active mothers who are in the thick of nurturing babies and small children, let us honor your important work and say thank you. Whether you are mother to grown up children, whether you are mother to kids who you’d like to see grow up, Happy Mother’s Day. Also, let us remember to acknowledge those among us who might be longing or grieving for loved ones, parents or children. There is no human being who did not come into this world through the body of a woman and there are many among us who can attest to the power of a mother’s love, a parent’s love, to work magic in our lives - showing us what harmony feels like from a very young age. It is often when we lose this feeling of harmony that we come to our greatest appreciation of it. And this is a humanizing process. Thank you mothers, here and everywhere, and thank you to all mother-spirited souls, inclined toward caretaking and peacemaking and determined to actively find ways to love the people and world around you. Mother Teresa, such an extraordinary example of motherly love on a universalized scale, has said: (SLT #562) Love cannot remain by itself - it has no meaning. When you love someone you learn a lot. You learn that there is someone in the world who is able to inspire your love to flow. You learn that you are connected with another in a mysterious and powerful way. You learn that you are a center of decision and that, depending on how you behave and communicate, you have the power to greatly affect others for better or worse. Sometimes it is surprising to find that we love someone, consider the plots of thousands of romantic comedies like, “When Harry Met Sally”: Meg Ryan’s character disliked Billy Chrystal’s character from the start in that movie. They were thrown together by circumstance, sharing a ride to New York City. He was attracted to her from the start but she was repulsed by his overatures. After all, she was a friend of his girlfriend’s. What kind of a jerk would do that? She needed to respect a man, a great example of the connection between character and love. But as it happens in the movie, they become friends. They both love New York and Sally does not hold a friend to such a high moral code. What begins then is a slower process, a connection of trust which, with time, allows for the discovery of character which, with time, engenders affection for anothers’ quirkiness. Love blooms as a series of smaller surprises or revelations. This is making reference to the experience of romantic love, the kind of love that can develop between two adults, young or old. But of course, the human experience of love is not limited to that. There is the love of a mother or father for their children, and the love of children for their parents, filial love. These are important bonding loves which ensure the survival and well being of individuals into the fabric of family. On this special day when the congregation is celebrating the bridging of our high school seniors, as we did in this service, and the bridging of our middle school-age youth, as we did in the earlier service, it is this parental and filial love I was thinking of when I read the words of Anne Morrow Lindbergh. “When you love someone you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to.” There is something wonderfully honest and gutsy about this observation. It rings true to the experience of family life doesn’t it? Growing up is hard and it can make the best of us cranky no matter what our age. So if we are going to stay together and continue on as a family, we need to broaden our repertoire of loving ways. There are many approaches that serve to bridge the space between moody people. There is laughter and the will to keep a sense of humor. There is the fine art of saying sorry, and the fine art of just listening without trying to make it better or give advice. There is the home base, a place that can be made into a refuge or sanctuary where food and rest and warmth are regular fare. Family life and all the love affairs that go on in that domain need to be flexible and resilient. If people are going to be honest about their wants and needs, their angers and disappointments, then there will be ripples effects. You don’t love someone all the time in exactly the same way. It wouldn’t be possible or authentic to try. Our capacities for giving vary with the weather and so do our individual needs. But the will to ride along together, to ride out the conflicts, always seeking resolutions which work for everyone concerned, that is the true resource for family life. Always returning to the source of our human, social, compassionate natures There are still other forms of love such as fraternal love. This is a connecting love which transcends the immediate relationships of family, upon which the institutions and organizations of society are built. These fraternal loves move us from out of the realm of the personal and start to lead us into philosophical realms, where love starts to define our relationship to ideas and ideals. You love the truth, freedom, your country. When you love you have a complex experience. Loving engages all aspects of your being. It is physical, and emotional, and mental. It is also mysterious in that it engages the human capacity for imagination and hope: we see this in church life, for instance, in the will to move ahead into the future together based upon a shared vision or understanding of purpose. Mark Morrison-Reed, one of the ministers at Toronto’s First Unitarian Church, and one of the first preachers of this movement to inspire me, has said that “…the task of religious community is to unveil the bonds that bind each to all…[that there is] a connectedness…discovered amid the particulars of our own lives and the lives of others.” This morning you have all been called to witness to such particularities in the lives of a handful of families of this community. And this with the hope that the sharing of the milestones of our personal lives may build the strength of the bonds of our communal life. Morrison-Reed asserts that the religious community is essential because, “Together, our vision is widened and our strength is renewed.” He was speaking about the potentiality of the religious community to act for justice in the world, and that is a very important calling on the church, but what he says is also true for meeting the challenges of changes and transitions in our lives, in all their personal and particular dimensions. Love is the cement with which we join ourselves to others in a multitude of ways. It is the means of continuing relationship. As Mother Teresa says, love has no meaning if it remains by itself. It has to be put into action and the action of love is to connect one creature to another. Now I want to fall back onto a description of love which is very traditional and very valuable. You have likely heard it before, some of you many times. It is about what love looks like, sounds like and feels like: 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 (NRSV) Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Now when we are talking about being patient and kind, of trying not to be envious, arrogant or rude it is pretty easy to take this statement as a standard by which to measure ourselves. And we can all admit to being patient as well as impatient, kind as well as unkind towards others at different moments in our lives. The important thing to consider is not that we are imperfect lovers but that we have experienced how kindness connects us to others and unkindness distances us. Let us claim this insight and therefore our own power to be a connecting force for ourselves and others. If we choose to entertain envious feelings, or engage in boasting, or give in to rude behaviors, then we should know that we will feel disconnected and alienated from others as a result. We are all called to love and are free to answer the call with every decision that we make. Love as a connecting force might be invisible, mysterious and magical, but the choices we make in the way we will relate are plain and simple. Now when we think of love as bearing all things, believing all things, hoping all things and enduring all things… we are moving away from our own capacities of loving to the more mysterious nature of love as the source of creation and the connecting reality which we can recognize when we love actively. Here is the ultimate reality that is beyond our comprehension but not beyond our perception. It is the truth in statements like “God is Love,” and “love is eternal.” These describe how love operates among us regardless of whether we are active lovers or not. Here is a little story about a fish swimming along. He is burdened with a big question on his mind. But then he comes across a big fish…. “Excuse me,” said the little fish. “You are older than I, so can you tell me where to find the ocean?” “The ocean,” said the other fish, “is the thing you are in now.” “Oh, this? But this is water. What I am seeking is the ocean, “ said the little fish. Disappointed, he swam away to search elsewhere. (Anthony De Mello, The Song of the Bird, pg.12-13) We are like this little fish, we swim in an ocean of love but are often so concerned with finding it, that we don’t recognize it. The teller of this story, a great storyteller named Anthony De Mello, says:
One of my favorite images of love, as the expression of ‘the way things are’, is the cow. The mother cow with a suckling calf at her teat. I know this is not very Texan, in fact, it is much more a reflection of Indian or Hindu influences (with hints of vegetarianism lurking too!). In India, the cow is revered as the epitome of motherhood. She is a very gentle creature and provides milk in abundance to nourish her young. These dual qualities of nurture -gentleness and abundance- do define mothering. As any woman who has borne a child knows, the wisdom of the body to both grow a baby and sustain a newborn after birth are completely overwhelming to her previous sense of identity and control. After the profound experience of birth, the amazing changes which prepare the breasts to provide milk for the newborn are equally dazzling. I disagree with the billboard up around town which says, “Babies are born to breastfeed.” We do not know why babies are born, that is my assertion as a religious liberal. But we sure do know why we have breasts once a baby is born. We are vehicles for life’s longing after itself as the poet, Gibran has said. We are part of a grand scheme which connects generations, if only we submit to the order. A cow does not just let down her milk, she also stimulates her young’s instinct to suck by using her mouth to take care of the other end of its digestive track. Mother cats do this too. They keep their young clean by ingesting the wastes that pass through their new digestive channels. This is not something we human animals do, thank God, but I think it illustrates the completeness of the connection between mother and young. The mother is the source of all that is needed for her newborn. When the relationship is functional, she embodies, literally, all that is required for the newborns survival and well-being. For me, this image of the circle formed by two bodies, the mother cow cleaning her calf’s rear end and the calf sucking her mother’s teat, is beautiful and real. It is not romantic or sentimental, it is earthy and confronting. It is a picture of love in the metaphysical sense, bearing all things, enduring all things for its own continuation. It lifts us out of our preference for control and measured distance and reminds of us of the radical truth of the interconnectedness of all things. Words fail to signify the depth and power of such experiences of love and relatedness. But the fortunate truth is we are experiencing creatures and we don’t need words and ideas to draw the vital spiritual sustenance available to us through relationships with others. It is there in the eyes, in the face…So, let us always take the time to look into one anothers’eyes and faces and see there communion. |
| First
UU Church of Austin
Sermons |