Mom, He Started it!

by Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
September 25, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

The second UU principle is that we affirm and promote justice, equity and compassion in human relations. How can you get wise enough to balance justice and compassion?

Most of you know I have two sons, now in their twenties, and, although they are friends now, they bickered when they were young. My mission as a mother was to reach them to be useful citizens and good company. I asked myself “What happens in our culture when people fight? They get fined or jailed for disturbing the peace.” So we had jail (time out) and fines (losing money.) They didn’t have any money to lose, at first, but I fixed that by giving them a bag of nickels at the beginning of the week. When they would fight or whine, I would say “Please stop that. If you don’t, you’re each going to owe me a nickel.” Whatever money they had left at the end of the week, they could keep. Why did I fine both of them? “He started it” didn’t work because I didn’t have time to have court every time. Some kids can start something very subtly, and the less subtle one always gets in trouble. Sometimes if they were fighting over a toy, I would give the toy a time out for starting a fight. Fairness is a blurry and elusive goal.

This morning I’m talking about the second of our seven UU principles, We covenant to affirm and promote justice, equity and compassion in human relations.”

Our principles name the values we covenant together to affirm and promote. “Covenant” means to promise. By signing the membership book of this church you are promising to affirm, which means to say out loud that you agree with, and promote, which means to say it in public to people who might argue with you. The easy part is that most of our principles are so mildly stated and general that most people would say they agree with them. The harder part is actually walking the path they lay out for us on a daily, personal basis. The first principle we talked about was that we affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. That one is hard for some folks who want to believe that some humans are worth less than others.

If you were to write this second principle for a child, you might say “We should be kind and things should be fair.” Justice is making things right and fair. You get what you deserve. Your actions have consequences. You open something, you close it. You pick something up, you have to put it back in its place. You dirty something, you clean it up again. You do the crime, you do the time. We covenant together to promote this value.

Equity is wanting justice for everybody equally. We agree that things should be right and fair for everyone. Male, female (or in between) should have the same rules; all shades of skin color, gay, straight (or in between,) Spanish speaking or Asian, moneyed or poor. Actions should have consequences. People shouldn’t get away with bad behavior. Some shouldn’t be able to dirty everything while others clean up. Our upcoming pledge drive is when we remind one another that the many shouldn’t count on a few people to keep this congregation financially strong and about to act out its mission more and more.

Often, though, someone else does help you: cleans up after you, gives you money, helps you more than you deserve. Sometimes your consequences are mitigated by someone understanding your circumstances. Someone makes the church part if their legacy so we get to have a justice fund and begin to provide breakfast tacos to the people who come to the first service. It’s often a wonderful thing when that happens.

Compassion adds some grace so that sometimes you give more than a person deserves. Or you can get more than you deserve. Why isn’t the world fairer, then? Why is there so much pain, hatred and misery? Often it’s because there is an imbalance among justice, equity and compassion.

How do we walk the path of justice, equity and compassion? You know I advocate adding the words “beginning in our homes and congregations” to the end of each principle, so lets talk about that.

I wrestle with this principle because, in my life, justice, equity and compassion fight with each other. Say I have a situation where someone has hurt me. Justice demands that the hurt be paid for somehow. Equity demands that if I hurt you, I have to pay too. The same rules apply to both of us. I would rather forgive you and have you forgive me. That’s where compassion comes in, I think. Should compassion overpower justice, though? Would it be a better world if we were sweet and understanding about where people are coming from when they create havoc and destruction? Can you be compassionate and still carry through with just punishment?

Here it is in the context of raising children. As I said at the beginning, I think a parent’s job is to prepare children to live in the world out there. In our culture we pay for things in money, labor and time. If one of my children made a mistake that costs me forty minutes, maybe driving something he forgot over to him at school, he owed me forty minutes of his time on some project where I have need. When they were small, if they didn’t obey by the time I counted to three, they owed me a nickel of their allowance. That feels like justice. On the other hand, I have compassion with the boy who made the mistake. I know I made mistakes like that. I understand not obeying. You get busy, you want to do what you want to do. I feel like that too, and I’m not the world’s most obedient person, so they came by that honestly. On the other hand, I know if my mom had made me pay for forgetting with time I might have learned at an earlier age to be more organized. If I allowed my children to ignore me when they were small, they would not have had as much chance to grow up into people I want to spend time with. Too much compassion, too much understanding of how someone got to where they were doing things wrong — it makes you weak on justice. That deprives the person who is behaving incorrectly of the consequences that lead to learning, and that’s mean to everyone else. There has to be a balance between steel-cold justice and mushy-gushy compassion. The Buddhist teachers talk about “idiot compassion,” a term attributed to Trungpa Rinpoche. Pema Chodron expands on this, writing “It is the general tendency to give people what they want because you can’t bear to see them suffering….” You’re doing it for yourself, to avoid discomfort.

To our urge for justice, we might quote Mahatma Ghandi, “If we choose an eye for an eye, we will all soon be blind.” To our rush of compassion, we quote Malcolm X, “We sometimes must kill the one who is evil in order to save the many who are innocent.” My father used to quote what he claimed was a Chinese proverb: “Mercy to the tiger is cruelty to the lamb.”

We wrestle with this in our church community on a small scale in our relations with one another. If one of us behaves inappropriately, how much do we have compassion and say “Well, I know that person, and I know why she is acting obnoxious or why he is hard to talk to or why this one has bad manners or no tact or why that one can’t shut up.” Knowing the person, knowing why, that helps us have compassion. On the other hand, it makes the person never get confronted with bad behavior. That, in turn, makes it hard on the people around them. In fact, I think a belief in another’s worth and dignity makes it important for me not to dismiss that person or give up on them. We shouldn’t give in to a temptation to say, “Don’t bother with them, they can’t change..” “Love” is the one word some use to sum up this principle. Love includes compassion, and it also includes justice. When you love, you want the person to be better. You want them to face themselves. You want to challenge them, to say your piece, you want to encourage them to remember their community. Of course, that kind of challenge has to be done rarely, with fear and trembling, only after you have looked at yourself, faced yourself, and done your best to ensure that your behavior and attitudes are correct.

The Covenant of Healthy Relations you all voted on seeks to flesh this out, it presents what this might look like. You can find it on a big rolling board in the fellowship hall.

“Justice, equity and compassion.” If it feels too vague, as you walk this UU spiritual path, make it more specific. “Justice, equity and compassion.” At the grocery store. “Justice, equity and compassion.” At the gym. “Justice, equity and compassion.” At work. “Justice, equity and compassion.” In our living rooms. It’s really difficult. Let’s see if we can aspire to it. Some justice was moved forward yesterday as the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Sometimes justice involves the experience of finally being heard and seen, finally having your story told. Bells rang out across the nation, echoing the bell from the First Baptist Church of Williamsburg, VA. You have downloaded bell sounds, so let’s celebrate that moment here in Austin with the ringing of our own bells.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

 

Abandon hope and fear

by Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
September 18, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

The first strand of the Buddhist eight-fold path is “Right Understanding.” Do you understand how things work? What causes suffering? What is the way to be happy?

Sermon

I see a lot of articles on how to be happy? They have titles like “7 steps to happiness” and “5 things we do to keep ourselves from being happy.” Most people want to be happy. We’ve all felt it. It tends to disappear, though, when our bank account shrinks to nothing, or our shoulder hurts, it shrinks when people we love are in trouble, or when we’re anxious or outraged or suffering.

On the front of your order of service is a photo of a path. The reason for this is that, today, we’re going to start talking a one of the oldest “8 part path to happiness,” which is at the center of Buddhism.

Buddhism is a religion that came up out of Hinduism. A Hindu prince had been sheltered from the world. Not just from the world, but from religion. His mother had died when he was a baby, and a holy man had prophesied that the boy would grow up to be a great general, a king, or a holy man. His father decided to eliminate the holy man option by raising the boy in a palace built just for him. When he was 16 he was given a beautiful wife, and they had a family. When he was in his late 20’s, though, the prince wanted to venture out. On the road, he saw an old man. “What is the matter with him?”

“He is old,” answered the charioteer. “that happens to everyone.”

On subsequent ventures out, he saw a sick person, a dead body and an ascetic. His charioteer explained to him that people get diseases. They get old, they (and by they, I mean we) die.

In growing Despair and horror at the realities of suffering and death, grieving at the thought of losing his mother, his father, his wife and children to these terrible ravages of living in mortal flesh, he decided to go follow the ascetic path. He was so committed to this path, enduring pain, starving himself until his belly button touched his spinal cord, never achieving satisfaction, but always wanting to go farther to find wisdom. Five other Ascetics who were so admiring of his dedication that they became his followers. After years of this, the Buddha realized these holiness practices weren’t going to get him to wisdom and peace. He accepted a bowl of rice from a little girl, took a bath in the river and sat down under a tree. His disciples were shocked, and left him. sat down to meditate. He realized that none of the ascetic practices he had been following we’re going to work. He vowed that he would stay meditating under the tree until he reached Enlightenment period all night and evil demon, Mara the demon of Illusion tempted him with food, beautiful women, power, all the normal people just moved into Nirvana when they reached Enlightenment, things that men are tempted with. Enlightenment was his. Normally but the king of Gods himself Brahma asked the Buddha to stay and teach. He agreed. Now he was hesitant to teach, but the simple truths that had come to him while he was sitting under the tree wood rescue human beings from suffering and unhappiness. He walked to the river where some holy men were sitting, among them the Five Guys who had abandoned the Buddha when he took rice from a little girl.

He preached the truth that had come to him as he sat under the tree for several days and nights

1. Life is out of joint.
2. This suffering, this out of place-ness is caused by desire.
3 if you stop craving/desire, you’ll be happy
4. The way to stop craving is the 8 fold path.

This is the first of eight sermons, over the upcoming months, on the eightfold path of Buddhism. The Eightfold Path is not like eight steps, or little boxes you check off one by one as you accomplish them. It is a path of eight elements interwoven, braided together, having to do with understanding, practice and behavior that Buddhism says will take you on a journey away from suffering and toward freedom. The first component of the path is “Right Understanding.” “Getting it” is the first and continuing job of the person on this path. You get stuck by the temporary nature of good health, by the sudden lightning strike of tragedy and trouble. A friend gets killed in a car accident. You have a heart attack. A piano falls on your head. Suddenly the assurance of ongoingness is gone. Suddenly security looks like a laughable illusion. Your ideas of how things work are upended. Or you catch a glimpse of the truth of how things do work. You have a glimmer of a sense that many people create their own suffering, that disquietude lurks at the corners of most lives, that grief, hope, fear, hunger for security or pleasure or acceptance drive people to do what they do and that satisfaction is elusive. A deeper reality crooks its finger at you and whispers ( if you’re old enough to remember the deeply Buddhist movie “The Matrix) it whispers in Laurence Fishburn’s voice: “Wake up. There must be satisfaction somewhere, let’s go look for it. “

One of the things I find most relaxing about Buddhism is that it doesn’t ask you to take any of this on faith. It asks you to try it out and see if it works for you. Buddhism asks you to start with your experience. Most people’s attention is squandered on the anxiety, all the worry, and the fear in their lives. What will happen to us? Am I doing this right? Will people have a good time at my party? Will I get well again? Will I end up a bag lady? Will I find love? Moment after moment, for most people, is filled with hope that things will go well and fear that things won’t. That life is a roller coaster. In the words of the poet John Prine “Some times you’re up, some times you’re down, it’s a half an inch of water and you think you’re going to drown.”

Things happen to you, then you make stories about the things that happen: that they shouldn’t be happening, that they are a punishment for something you did, that your life is unfair, that you are unlucky and unblessed. Buddhism says all of these thoughts about what happens, all of the roller coaster emotion caused by hoping and fearing makes you suffer. There is a way to end the suffering. In your life, you will have pain, but you don’t have to make yourself extra suffering over the pain. The eightfold path, with its eight elements, is the way to train yourself morality, mentally and emotionally, to be free from suffering from the thoughts you have about what happens. Here are the eight elements: right understanding, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.

Right understanding, the first strand of the Eightfold Path, “getting it, ” involves seeing how things are. You understand that you suffer because you have attachments to how things should go. You crave, you cling, you hope, you fear.

You have hopes that an interview will go well. You are anxious about it. You worry afterward about whether they liked you. If you get the job you worry about doing it well. If you don’t get the job you wonder why they didn’t like you. You have ideas about how it should go. You have interpretations of how it went, ideas from your interpretations, and you suffer over those.

Someone you love is drinking or using again. You worry about how bad it’s going to get. You feel the feelings from when it was at its worst. You interpret your friend’s using as his not loving you, because if he loved you he would want things to be good for you, and things aren’t good for you when he is using. It feels as though he is doing it to you.

In your thoughts is a way you wish things would go. You have fears about how things could be. All of these things, hopes and fears, cause you suffering. When you are anxious about these things you miss a lot of your life: seeing your other friends, you can barely hear what people are saying to you, you don’t enjoy your food, sleep, sex, beauty, things seem garbled and dim. You are suffering. How could that stop?

Wake up. “Get it” that if you calm and focus your mind you can see reality more clearly. “Get it” that what happens happens. There are certain things you can do to make the interview go well, and you do them. Or not. Then it happens. You get the job. Or not. You can interpret it any way you want to. They didn’t like you?

Maybe. Maybe they had someone else who was a better fit. Maybe this is not your job, maybe yours is coming. If the job wouldn’t have been a good fit for you, you would have been miserable in it. Is that what you wanted?

In meditation we have the chance of seeing the story we are telling ourselves about our life. You can notice the thoughts you are having about what is happening in your life. There are a hundred different stories, and seeing your story is part of getting it. Another part of Right Understanding, of waking up, is understanding the law of Karma. Its literal name is “right view of the ownership of action” The Buddhist teachers say: “Beings are the owners of their actions, the heirs of their actions; they spring from their actions, are bound to their actions, and are supported by their actions. Whatever deeds they do, good or bad, of those they shall be heirs.” The Buddhist scriptures, like the Christian scriptures, talk about results of actions as “fruits.” “By their fruits ye shall know them.” If our lives are like a river, it’s as if we are all living downstream from our actions, and the dirty or clean water that runs because of those actions catches us later.

Good actions are morally commendable, helpful to the growth of the spirit, and productive of benefits for yourself and others. Unwholesome actions, to use a more Buddhist word than “bad,” ripen into suffering.

Getting it means that you see that suffering occurs from craving, desire and attachment, that the way to end suffering is to end craving and attachment, that the way to end craving is to attend to the eightfold path of right wisdom and right behavior. To own your actions, your part in any situation, to let go of blaming and clean up what you are putting into the water upstream from where you live.

I have a friend who tells the story of her mother-in-law, Carolyn, at the drive-through window at the bank. The teller had sent out a pen for her to use in filling out her deposit slip. She had dropped the pen, which had fallen underneath the seat of the car. Carolyn could reach the pen, she could get her fingers around it, but she couldn’t pull her hand out with the pen in it. Finally they made a present to her of the pen so she would go on.

We are caught like that with our grasping, unable to be free. What is the pen under your seat? What is keeping you from moving? Do you need to let it go? Do you need to drive to a safe place in the parking lot of the bank, get out of the car, move the seat, and get the pen? Either way, you get unstuck, and unstuck is where we want to be. Oh, and happy. We want to be happy.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

 

Ritual and Remembrance

by Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons, Video available

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
September 11, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Fifteen years after the attack of September 11, what are the ways we remember those whom we lost? How does ritual help us make sense of the events of our lives?

Call to Worship

We enter, now, into this place of renewal.
We join together, now, in this community that sustains and upholds.
We imagine, now, a world with more compassion, more justice, more love.
We worship, now, that which is greater than us,
and that holds our aspirations, our fortitude, our faith, our hope.
Now, we enter into this shared spirit of gratitude and community.
Now, we worship, together.

Sermon: Ritual and Remembrance: the 15th Anniversary of 9/11

On this day 15 years ago, it was a week day morning, and I was on my way to work when I turned on the radio in my car. I listened as a shell-shocked reporter described how apparent attackers had flown a jetliner first into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, and then about 15 minutes later had flown a second jet in to the South tower.

My initial response was disbelief. My mind went immediately to the 1938 radio drama called “War of the Worlds” that had presented a fictional alien invasion as a live news report, leading to some people panicking in areas throughout the country because they believed it was really happening.

I thought what I was hearing must be like that – a fiction being presented as reality. My brain just could not accept that it could really be happening.

And then I changed the radio station. And then I changed it again. It was on every station. It was real.

Instead of continuing on to work, I went back home and told Wayne that we needed to turn on the television news. The country was under attack.

We watched in horror and disbelief as the gaping holes in the towers burned, and they played endless repeats of the video of that plane turning and crashing into the South tower. We watched as the reports began to come in that hijackers had crashed another plane into the Pentagon. We witnessed first the South tower collapsing and then the North tower, learning in between that another plane, United Flight 93, had crashed into a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.

My memories of that morning are hazy and jumbled. I had to look up the sequence of events to make sure my memories of them were not distorted.

One clear and painful memory that stands out for me though, is that at some point before the towers fell, I had left the room. I don’t remember why. I just remember walking back into the living room and hearing Wayne say, “Oh my God, they’re jumping out of the windows to avoid being burned to death.” I looked at the television and saw images that fill me with horror and grief even today.

These are extraordinarily painful memories. It is so easy for me to want to avoid them. To lock them away in some distant room in the far reaches of my mind. And indeed, I suspect they are too powerful to carry with us in our consciousness all of the time. But I do think it is important that we remember sometimes – that we glance back into that room and retrieve some of what that day was like.

I think we must remember those whose who died, as well as those who grieve them each year, especially on this day – that we remember the horror and the grief and the anger and the confusion and the fear and the subsequent ways in which those feelings were sometimes used to manipulate us in the days that followed 9/11.

We remember because embedded in that day and in the ways we as a society, as a culture, reacted to it are lessons to be learned; illuminations of our values and ideals both healthy and good and some that are destructive; stories about who we are as a people that we continue to tell ourselves even today.

And to do so, that we commemorate. We engage in ritualized remembrances.

This morning, across our country in sanctuaries not so different than this one, n1any of our fellow citizens are also remembering 9/11 through whatever are the rites and rituals of their own faith traditions.

Today, in cites across our country and indeed the world, people are commemorating 9/11 by engaging in secular rituals. In Manhattan, two four mile high rectangular towers of light powered by 88 7,OOO-watt xenon light bulbs will recall the Twin Towers, as the names of those who died in the attacks are read aloud.

In Austin, City Firefighters are remembering the first responders who died on 911 by climbing the Pleasant Valley Drill Tower in full fire fighting gear enough times to equal to what had been the height of the world trade center towers. It is a ritual they do each year in complete silence.

Through these rites and rituals, we reach back into that room where we’ve stored the memories from that day 15 years ago and retrieve them, and it matters – it matters that we do so through such ritual.

When I dove into reading about what we know about ritual, I found quite a bit of scientific research and a number of theories about our propensity to engage in ritual. It has been studied across a wide range of disciplines from neurology to anthropology What I share today will be broad by necessity, getting at what seems to common among these theories about human rituals.

Here’s a definition of ritual developed by two neuroscientists that I really liked. “Ritual is a sequence of behavior that
1. is structured or patterned
2. is rhythmic and repetitive
3. acts to synchronize emotion, perception, cognitions and physical movement to potentially generate powerful unifying experiences and
4. synchronizes these processes among individual participants when in a group setting, creating a strong sense of group unity.”

Ritual has been observed across all known cultures and across both religious and secular institutions. We can see rituals play out in families, schools, workplaces, governments, sports and the military for example.

We find this patterned, repetitive, synchronization in storytelling, drama, music, dance and many of the other arts.

We engage in ritualistic behavior both on our own as individuals, as well as in group settings.

It seems to be embedded in our very genetic structure. Anthropologists have found evidence of ritualized behavior from even before language developed. It even may have been the source of more complex culture and communication.

Even very young children will automatically copy ritual. I’ve seen this several times at the “We Gather” Saturday services we do here at the church once a month. For those services, we put out a carpet and coloring materials so that children can stay with us for the whole service.

They will be coloring away, seemingly oblivious to the goings of the adults, until we start to chant or sing or do some other form of ritual. Then, they will look up and join in right away. We have had some pretty wonderful dance performances spontaneously added to our hymn singing a couple of times.

So ritual seems to be intrinsic to our nature as human beings, and we are developing greater understanding of how it may influence us both on the individual level and in groups.

On the individual level, studies mostly focusing on ritualistic meditation and prayer have found that these practices have a beneficial influence on human psychology, helping us create better coping strategies. They can reduce depression and anxiety and improve mood. They can also reduce blood pressure and heart rate, while improving the functioning of our immune systems.

Some rituals seem to turn off the part of the brain that gives us our sense of time and place, which can lead what our neuroscientists called the experience of “absolute unitary being” – that our deepest most true inner self is identical to the ultimate reality of the universe. Sounds a lot like “there is a spark of the divine within each of us,” doesn’t it?

This experience, in turn, seems to lead to greater valuing of peaceful cooperation and has even resulted in a reduction of implicit bias regarding race and age.

Ritual has also been shown to help with cognitive and memory improvements, and these all of findings are being put to use helping people.

Theresa Klein is an occupational therapist who works with people with dementia at an assisted living facility. Her own grandfather developed progressive dementia, He became disconnected and mute most of the time. He was a devout Catholic though, and she noticed that when she took him to church on Sunday, he happily joined in the familiar prayers and hymns AND that he was more able to connect with her during these rituals.

So, she brought the option to participate in rituals into the assisted living setting to powerful effect. One resident, an 82 year-old woman named Martha, had seemed so catatonic that her daughter who visited her every day had reluctantly agreed to allowing Martha to go on hospice care.

Then, they tried offering Martha the chance to participate in some rituals from her religious tradition. She suddenly sat up and joined in. As they did this more and more over the days and weeks that followed, she even looked at her daughter and said, “I love you” several times. Through ritual, a mother and her daughter were given more time to experience real connection with one another.

And that brings us to the role that rituals seem to play when we do them together in a group. First, they seem to create that sense of connection within the group. They bind people together. In smaller groups, rituals that involve fear or even pain can cause participants to very strongly fuse their personal identity with that of the group. This might have had a survival advantage in early tribal societies by creating strong cooperation and making them better able to wage war against competing tribes.

Conversely, regularly repeated rituals that have less negative emotional content can bond much larger groups together but less intensely and around a common doctrine or belief system. More recently, research has found that these differences between ritual settings are probably a matter of degree rather than absolutes.

At the group level, rituals are also a way we pass on social memory. Through ritual, we are embedding memories in a way that, for instance just reading about the events of 9/11 does not. We are getting at the essence of the story, creating and retrieving the common social values and norms, emotions and embodied experience, and we are creating a mechanism, a technology, that allows us to transmit these social memories to the next generations.

So, our 9/11 commemorations, our vigils and memorial services these are how people in a culture remember in a whole bodied, visceral way – a way of collectively saying “we remember you” to those we have lost. And even after all of us who experienced 9/11 are no longer living, these rites and rituals are ways that future generations may also say, “We remember you. We carry you with us.”

Almost all of our practices here on Sunday can be thought of as ritualistic. Our order of our service repeats itself in much the same way each week. We recite many of the same words together. We sing together. We listen to music together. We have a story for all ages together. We have a time of centering or prayer together. We light candles in our window together.

Particularly when I am leading worship, that is one of our most powerful rituals for me. I watch as people from this religious community that I serve and that I love light their candles in our window, and I imagine the powerful experiences and emotions they are holding up, and I can feel in a very visceral way that which binds this religious community together and moves out into our larger world to do justice. It is always powerful and moving.

Powerful too are our rites of passage that mark life’s transitions – our baby parades and coming of age ceremonies, weddings, memorial services and the like – our ceremonies that mark the changing of the seasons – the water communion, Christmas Eve, the burning bowl service, the flower communion.

And much of all of this has been passed down to us through social memory – from the Unitarians and Universalists who came before us.

It is important to note here that as vital as our ritual traditions are, the words that go with them, the stories that we tell ourselves, the theologies we express during our rituals matter greatly too. If these are directed inward, then the rituals by which they are expressed will create bonding within the group that is in opposition to any who are not a part of the group. We can see this with some of the more fundamentalist religions and certain highly white-nationalistic political rallies as of late.

Likewise, if the theologies we express within our rituals are directed toward all of humanity or even all of creation, the web of all existence, then the sense of interconnectedness they will generate also tends to occur both within the group and on a more universal scale.

So on this, the 15th anniversary of 9/11, I want to close by inviting you to join me in a ritual of commemoration. Please rise in body or spirit and extend your palms opened upward in a gesture of openness. I will say a few words of remembrance of several groups of folks, ending each time with the word, “today”. At which point, we will place our hands over our hearts and say together, “We remember” and return our hands to the palms held upward position.

To the Universalists and the Unitarians and then the Unitarian Universalists who have handed down to us this religious tradition that sustains and upholds us, particularly on days filled with difficult memories such as this one, today, we remember.

To our ancestors in this church, who created built, maintained and expanded it so that we are now able to continue this religious community that we love, today, we remember.

In this, our beloved church, we pause this day to look back into that sacred room at the edge of our consciousness, and today, We remember.

To the people who responded on 9/11 by going to the aide of those at the world trade center and the pentagon, some of whom lost their own lives and others who still suffer disabling health effects even now, today, we remember.

To those who attempted to retake flight 93 so that it could not reach whatever might have been the hijackers intended target, today, We remember.

To the families and loved ones of all who died in the attacks, today, we remember.

To all those who died when flight 93 crashed into that field in Pennsylvania, to those died at the Pentagon, to those who died at the world trade center, today, we remember.

For humankind, for future generations, for our world, always and today, we remember.

Amen.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

 

Honoring Norman Martin

by Posted in Guest Speakers, Uncategorized

Robert Janett and Wendy Janett
July 23, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Norman, we love you and we are all going to miss you. Your life should be an example for all of us. Enjoy the present, embrace your family and friends, sing, be prepared to go to war against tyranny, rail at the prejudice and the geo-political injustices in the world, think big thoughts, be generous, and eat a lot of ice cream.

Norman Martin

Norman Martin January 16, 1924 – July 13, 2016

About Norman

Norman Martin was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1924, where he attended primary and high school. As a teenager, just for fun, he taught himself Dutch, first by reading children’s books from the public library and later, upon invitation of the Dutch Consul in Chicago, by attending parties with native speakers to learn the proper pronunciation. At the time, of course, he had no idea where this rather obscure language skill would lead him in the future.

At age 16, he entered the Central YMCA College in Chicago and the next year the University of Chicago, both on full academic scholarships. In 1943, he enlisted in the Army and fought in Normandy, Belgium and Germany and was severely injured. He was discharged in 1945, a decorated war veteran, after the end of the war.

After returning to the US, Norman obtained his Master’s degree in philosophy at the University of Chicago. In 1949, he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study mathematical logic at the University of Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. While there he met Emilia, a Dutch mathematics student, in July 1950. Emilia was seeking information regarding study in the US, and she initiated their first meeting on the advice of a mutual friend. Norman was immediately and permanently smitten with her, and they were married forty days later. In September he moved to Urbana, IL, to begin a teaching position at the University of Illinois. The following month his bride followed, and the couple happily settled into their new life together.

In the spring of 1951, Norman received an opportunity to teach at UCLA while finishing his PhD dissertation in logic. The couple said goodbye to his family in Chicago and undertook the long but beautiful train trip to California. They made many friends and Norman successfully obtained his degree. But after two years when his appointment ended, he found himself in need of a new job. One Sunday, while reading the newspaper, he noticed a very improbable want ad for a logician at the research lab of the University of Michigan in Ypsilanti. Soon after applying he was offered the position, and he flew to Ann Arbor while Emilia temporarily stayed behind to finish her degree in mathematics. While in Michigan he learned all that was known about computers, which at the time was very little. After they reunited in Ann Arbor, the couple’s first daughter, Gabrielle, was born.

Norman was invited to join Space Technology Labs in Los Angeles in 1955, and he commenced an eminent career in computer architecture for the aerospace industry, designing computers for the nascent US space program, ICBMs, and other applications. He helped found Logicon, a computer, aerospace and defense contracting company, with several colleagues in 1961, as the computer era dawned. Logicon was an extremely successful enterprise, and it was ultimately acquired by Northrup Grumman several decades later. Norman and Emilia’s second daughter, Wendy, was born while the family lived in southern California.

In 1965, Norman decided to leave his work in industry and accepted a professor ship in the Departments of Philosophy and Computer Sciences at the University of Texas in Austin.After a distinguished academic career there, he retired in 1990 and was appointed Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Computer Science.

Norman is survived by his wife of 66 years, Emilia, his daughters, Gabrielle Block and her husband Alan Block, and Wendy Janett and her husband Robert Janett, his grandchildren Naomi Salamon, David Janett, Hannah Block and Ethan Block, and his great-grandchildren, Anna and Noah Salamon.

Eulogy for Norman Martin, part 1
Robert Janett (son-in-law)
July 23, 2016

I took a lot of notes here. It reminds me of the story of the doctor giving a eulogy. He hand wrote his talk and when the time came to speak he couldn’t read his own handwriting. “Is there a pharmacist in the house?…”

Seriously, though. I can promise that I wrote this eulogy. It was not copied from anyone else’s eulogy.

It feels comforting to be back in this sanctuary, in this church in which Emilia and Norman have been members for fifty years. They helped build this sanctuary, so this space is very special to the family and is a fitting venue for today’s memorial service.

Who better to spend time with at the end of life, contemplating the meaning of life and death, than a philosopher. Norman Martin was an extraordinary man, a very complex man, brilliant, generous, a man who was gifted in so many ways. Philosopher, mathematician, logician, computer science pioneer, rocket scientist, entrepreneur. He lived a long a full life. Normally we define genius is an average student with a Jewish mother. And Norman did have a Jewish mother. But he was a true genius. We celebrate his life today even as we mourn his death.

I want to tell you a story about Norman’s life that starts with recent events, takes us back 72 years, and then returns us to the present.

The past few months were not easy. My father-in-law was on a revolving door in and out of the hospital and each time he was in the hospital he got noticeably weaker. His final hospitalization told us why. It turned out that he was harboring a chronic form of leukemia. It was not diagnosed until it caused a very severe and life threatening anemia. He was treated gently but aggressively until they could give him a drug to knock down some of the leukemia cells and thereby stabilize the anemia. So he was in the hospital for a week and a half. Wendy and I came to Texas during the crisis, followed soon by Gabby. We wanted to spend time with him because we knew the situation was grave and we didn’t know if we’d get another chance. As it turned out, it was our last visit with him. But we were able to help coordinate a transfer back to the Arbour, a nursing facility at their Westminster life care community, where he received loving attention from the staff and where it was much easier for Emilia to visit him. She could travel by elevator, because his Arbour bed was 3 stories below his independent living apartment.

In the quiet evening hours at the hospital, when everyone else had gone home, he and I spent hours in deep conversation. As some of you know, I am a primary care doctor and quite often I sadly find myself in conversations with patients facing serious illness and difficult decisions. These discussions often revolve around care choices at the end of life. But as a doctor, I have limited time with these patients. It is unusual to have the luxury of time to talk with someone for an hour without interruption. So it was a rare privilege to spend hours on end day after day, in deep conversation with my father in law-a brilliant man who always enjoyed reflecting on profound issues-talking about the big questions in life and of life’s end. On the first evening, he asked me to tell him his prognosis. Sadly, I got it right this time and estimated that he had weeks to months to live-and it turned out to be weeks, not months. He shrugged his shoulders and said that he wanted to make the most of it.

I feel like I learned more about him in the last week that we spent together than I learned in the previous 40 years. A deeply caring man, he was mainly concerned about the impact of his illness on Emilia, on Gabby & Wendy, on the staff that was caring for him. He didn’t want to be a burden. That was his biggest worry. He was not afraid of death and was pleased that he lived an accomplished and prosperous life. He considered himself one of the lucky ones. This seemingly mild mannered man, this consummate nerd, this egghead intellectual, was also a warrior.

He claimed without irony to have won the Cold War. A real honest to goodness rocket scientist, he had important roles in the design and development of the computer guidance systems of Atlas, Titan, and Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles when he worked as senior staff at the Space Technology Laboratories in Pasadena, California. I remember when I first saw Wendy’s birth certificate from Santa Monica. Under father’s field of work it said “guided missiles”.

He spent his last few weeks reminiscing-reviewing some of the key moments in his life. His mind kept returning to his World War II experiences. His experiences in Normandy seemed to dominate his memory and the story.

In those late night chats, he found himself wishing he was 20 again, until he realized that when he was 20 he was lying in a field near Cherbourg, France, gravely wounded. He couldn’t swim and yet he volunteered for the army and landed on Utah Beach on D Day. He was a 145 pound infantryman, an assistant forward artillery observer. That part of France consists of fields bordered by earthen fences knee to waist high with hedges and trees growing on top. What the French call bocage. His job was to stand on top of these earthen berms to look beyond the hedges to see where the enemy was and to direct fire from the allied cannons and mortars. It was up on that hedgerow that he was most exposed and it was near there that he was hit by mortar fire-grievously wounded in the chest and shoulder by shrapnel. He kept recalling how it actually felt to be laying there watching him bleed his life’s blood. He had come to Europe to fight the Nazi’s and he thought to himself, “So this is how it ends.” It was a miracle that he didn’t die on the field between the hedgerows in France. He told me about being found by a chaplain who called a medic to help him; about treatment in a field hospital and then the painful transport down to the sea and across the channel to England for surgical care. As it turns out, Norman died on the day after the 72st anniversary of that fateful event in Normandy.

They offered to send him home after he recovered, but he declined. It was his strong sense of duty, his personal ethics and integrity-because he saw soldiers more seriously injured than him return to battle, and soldiers less seriously injured return home. So they sent him back to France to continue to fight the battles in Europe. Battle of the Bulge nearly did him in with that winter’s bitter cold. His wounded arm became paralyzed and he could no longer fight with the infantry. The Psychological Warfare Division of Supreme Army Headquarters took note of his ability to speak fluent German and tasked him to be an investigator in the Intelligence Section.

He was on an advance team that was assigned to enter Munich as soon as it was captured. His small unit followed just behind the battle front as it advanced through Germany, getting ready to begin their mission in Bavaria. It was on that route from Luxembourg to Munich that they became some of the early liberators of the Dachau concentration camp. He carried into old age nightmare memories of what they saw at Dachau. Along with less traumatic memories of searching out German documents in Bavaria, where he discovered the complete archives of the Nazi party of the region in the dungeon of Eichstadt castle, acting on a tip from a German girl with whom he was illicitly flirting.

The intervening time, from 20 to 92, was a gift. And during those late night conversation he marveled at the miracle of his survival in Normandy, and about all the good things that subsequently came to him in life. His love for Emilia and their long marriage. The pride that he took in his children and his love for them. Scientific and academic accomplishments. The seminal part that he played in the development of radar and guidance systems. His company, Logicon, that he started with a few buddies and is now the IT Department of Northrup Grumman. The countless students he taught and guided over the years as a professor at University of Texas. His knighthood from France as a Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur.

His personal and professional accomplishments were astounding…

He was generous to a fault and freely gave gifts to many people. We also enjoyed giving him gifts. The watch with irrational numbers on its face (the Einstein watch). I remember meeting with the Ecuadorean general who ran the military health system. On his office wall was a poster of all of the Ecuadorean military insignias. I knew that he would love that poster and the general took it down from his wall and gave it to me to bring to Norman. It is still hanging on his office wall. I think that one of the best gifts we ever found for him was a baseball cap that said “As a matter of fact, I am a rocket scientist.”

One of my fondest memories is from time we spent together in Colorado. Norman and Emilia decided to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary by bringing the extended family to Estes Park. We stayed in cabins and took advantage of the proximity to Rocky Mountain National Park to have fun in nature. Now Norman was not an outdoorsy kind of guy. One day the large family gathering split up into smaller groups to take walks or hikes, each to his or her ability. Emilia, Norman, and I took an easy walk through the woods on a relatively flat trail. While walking, he explained to me non-stop, for about two hours, minute details of the history of political parties in Argentina and Uruguay. It was not unusual for him to expound at length on such esoteric topics, as those of you who spent time with him know all too well. And I have been a ready listener to these sagas for forty years.

Well, we were so focused on his stories that we failed to follow the map. And we became a little disoriented in the woods. Not quite lost, because we knew that the road was to our right and down-hill. So we chose a short down-hill trail to the road. It turned out to be an extremely steep old stream bed full of loose rocks. Emilia was sturdy and was generally able to negotiate this rough and dangerous trail without much help. But Norman needed assistance the whole way down. Arm in arm, we picked our way from foot hold to foot hold. I was sure that we were going to end up with four broken hips before we got to the road. At least one of them might well have been mine! But we made it back with happy memories. Another survival story.

That family reunion was so great. A picture of the group hangs today over Emilia’s desk. And I was looking at it this morning. We all looked really good, not just the kids (who still look good today!)

Emilia deserves credit for sustaining him for all of these years, taking care of his every need. I am sure that her loving dedication gave him several extra years of life-because she relentlessly insisted that he get up out of the chair and walk. He hated exercise, but if he was going to get to the dining room for some of the marvelous Westminster food he had to walk there. No matter how long it took. And that walking kept him vigorous.

Norman delighted in strong flavors and he enjoyed spicy ethnic foods from exotic countries. But he hated his vegetables. At the end, he couldn’t really eat because he was too sick. He despised the bland pureed or ground food they were giving him in the hospital. He just couldn’t bring himself to eat it. But leukemia means never having to eat your vegetables, and he seemed to thoroughly enjoy the various flavors of ice cream shakes that we brought to him 3 or 4 times per day for the next few weeks. They were his only source of nutrition, but they did the trick.

Special thanks are due to his medical and nursing team, especially his oncologist, Dr. Cline, who managed to halt the hemolytic process with gentle interventions. This gave him more quality time for several extra weeks of life, and gave us the extra precious time that we had with him. He didn’t suffer. He used those weeks well, singing songs, being read to by family, watching TV and railing at the geo-political news on TV, engaging in lively discussions with all of us, at his usual high intellectual level. David Newton was a frequent visitor and was his usual entertaining self, keeping Norman engaged in erudite conversation and laughter. Norman was holding court with friends from is room in the Arbour at Westminster even on the last weekend of his life. He knew and we knew that his time was severely limited. But that didn’t stop him from experiencing joy at the end of life. And we can all take comfort in that, both for him and for ourselves.

Norman, I love you and we are all going to miss you. Your life should be an example for all of us. Enjoy the present, embrace your family and friends, sing, be prepared to go to war against tyranny, rail at the prejudice and the geo-political injustices in the world, think big thoughts, be generous, and eat a lot of ice cream.

Eulogy for Norman Martin, part 2
January 16, 1924 – July 13, 2016
Delivered by Wendy Janett (daughter)
Memorial Service – July 23, 2016

My father was the son of immigrants. His mother, Fay Kaplan, came to this country from Poland in 1908 as a young girl. Her father was a rabbi. My father’s father, also a Jewish immigrant, came from Ukraine as a teenager at about the same time. At the time, Ukraine was still part of the Russian empire, though many of its residents longed to return to independence. As a member of the Social Democratic Party since the age of 15, my grandfather participated in an uprising against the czar. Sometime thereafter, he learned that he was on a list of people selected to be deported to Siberia, and decided instead to flee to the US. He traveled on foot and, when he could, hitched rides on wagons with other travelers, all the way across what are now Poland and Germany, to the city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, a distance of over 1200 miles. There he worked odd jobs until he earned enough money for passage to America. After disembarkation at Ellis Island, his name, once Kagansky, became Harry Cohen.

The families of both of my grandparents settled in Chicago, where they met, married and had two sons. My father was the younger of the two, and he idolized his big brother, Marty.

The family’s life was not easy. My grandfather was a union organizer for the necktie industry, and my grandmother was a laundress. They often struggled to find work of any kind to keep a roof over their heads and their sons fed, especially during the Great Depression. But my father was always consumed by books and learning, and his brother was his champion and protector. Both of these advantages stood him in good stead as he grew into a young man.

From childhood, Dad was the quintessential scholar, not only excelling in his schoolwork, but spending most of his free time independently studying topics he found interesting, such as obscure aspects of world history, politics, and the Dutch language, which he mastered to fluency. In addition, Dad took his personal spiritual journey very seriously. He developed strong personal ethics focused on honesty, integrity and justice. While still in high school, he became a pacifist and, for a time, a Quaker, and as the threat of war increased in the late 1930s, he joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Youth Committee Against War. Even the bombing of Pearl Harbor did not immediately deter him. Despite his extensive mastery of politics, which made him more knowledgeable about fascism than other kids his age – or, for that matter, most adults – he was so passionate and sincere about his pacifism that when the draft was instituted, he applied for and was granted Conscientious Objector status.

In early 1942, Dad was awaiting assignment as a CO while majoring in philosophy at the University of Chicago. He had a special interest in Ethics and Kant, and in particular the concept of “moral duty”. In May of that year, he decided to reconsider, through study, the actions of the Nazi regime, particularly in regard to its policies in occupied Holland. By the end of that very month, he concluded that his moral duty to help defeat the Nazis outweighed his pacifist convictions. As a result he requested that the draft board reclassify him as 1A and volunteered to join the Army.

To his surprise, when he reported for Army service, his physical exam revealed a hernia and, hence, he was classified 4F and rejected. Although the condition was correctable by simple surgery, the government would not pay for it and his family could not afford to do so. He eventually found a social service organization willing to fund the operation, and in June 1943 he was finally permitted to enlist in the Army.

Once the war was over, Dad returned to the US and resumed his studies at the University of Chicago. It was then that he made what he believed was “one of the best decisions of my life,” namely, to continue studying philosophy, but instead of focusing on ethics, he specialized in logic. With his prodigious aptitude in math, logic was a natural fit for him. In making this slight turn in his course of study, the breadth of his career options instantly ballooned, though he couldn’t have known how much at the time, from a professional life lived entirely in the halls of academia (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) to being instrumental in the creation of an entirely new field – computer science. This choice would give him a wide variety of opportunities in both industry and academia.

Later, Dad was awarded a Fulbright grant for the study of mathematical logic at the University of Amsterdam. There, he met my mother, a Dutch math student who was considering studying abroad in the US. A mutual friend suggested that she look him up to ask him about US universities, and she did. When they met, Dad instantly realized that he had met the woman of his dreams. Before long, the feelings were mutual, and they married 40 days after that first meeting. Their marriage lasted 66 years, until he died.

My parents gave their children a strong sense of security. I always knew, even through the ’70s when so many of my friends’ parents and family friends split up, that my parents would never, ever divorce. They both took their marriage commitment extremely seriously, and for both of them, to violate it would be a breach of their moral duty. More importantly, they both respected each other deeply, appreciating their partners’ strengths and accommodating weaknesses. They were openly affectionate, and when they moved to Westminster, they quickly acquired a reputation as “the cute couple” because they always walked hand in hand. My father was to be completely enamored of my mother from the day he met her until the day he died. He truly believed that he had won the lottery of love by capturing the heart of his Dutch beauty – and he was right. A few weeks before he passed away, my father told me that he had probably been a terrible father. This is not true. Especially by the standards of the times, when fathers were primarily expected to be breadwinners and mothers were expected to be É well, mothers, he wasn’t even a bad father. We knew that he loved us and was proud of us. He had a special activity with each of us – with me, my stamp collection. Though my interest in and patience for collecting stamps definitely waned before his did, I loved spending the time together and having his full, uninterrupted attention. My father enjoyed collecting things, especially facts about those things. Though I have to admit that I never quite shared Dad’s enthusiasm for his hobbies, through stamp collecting he taught me to identify many of the flags of the world, and I enjoyed learning to remember the flags and locating the corresponding countries on our globe. (I still question the usefulness of this knowledge – maybe it will come in handy some day, perhaps if I ever go on the reality show “The Amazing Race”. Who knows?) As I got older, we engaged in many spirited discussions, especially about religion and politics, and I always learned new things from him, even just a few days before he died. In spite of what you may think, Dad, you were a good father.

A little later in the memorial service, we will pay homage to Dad through another of his interests, national anthems. Dad loved national anthems, and these two anthems had special significance for him. The Marseillaies, the French national anthem, was one of his favorite songs, and he requested that we all sing it, to the best of our ability, at his memorial.

And we will hear the Dutch national anthem. It may seem improbable that a poor Jewish boy from Chicago would develop a fascination for Holland, but that is exactly what happened. And as things turned out, if one believes in such things, it would seem that he was merely living out the mysterious part of life that we might think of as fate. Dad’s father literally embarked on his journey to a new life from the Netherlands. My father decided, rather arbitrarily, to teach himself Dutch, and a few years later changed his deeply held ethical beliefs because of the political situation in Holland, resulting in the life changing experience of military service in wartime. And, finally, the Fulbright that enabled him to study in Amsterdam and meet my mother, his lifelong companion, proves that, whatever the cause, his enchantment with the country was well founded.

Dad, we love you and will miss you, but we will look to you as a model of a life well-lived.

 

Water communion service

by Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
September 4, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Water Communion Service. We each bring our water from a place that has meaning to us and pour our waters together. We sing water songs and have a child-friendly sermon.

Notes from the sermon

Earth my body,
water my blood,
air my breath
and fire my spirit

In the stories the ancient people tell about how the trees and rocks and animals and people got here, Some stories are of God shaping human beings from mud. Others are of a divine being named Spider Woman gathering different colors of earth, mixing them together to make all shades of skin, plants, flowers, and singing the Creation Song over them so they came to life. Science teaches that life came from the ocean, and beings emerged who could live either in water or on land, and then life evolved so that some lived in water and other life lived mostly on the land, breathing air. So we sing:

Earth my body,
water my blood,
air my breath
and fire my spirit

Our bodies are more than half water. It’s not like water is from here down, that’s silly because you can feel the bones in there! It’s mixes all in with the bones and muscles, blood and skin. Have you ever seen your blood? Sometimes when you get hurt, you skin breaks and some blood comes out. People’s blood all is pretty much the same. What color is it? Red. All life needs water to survive. We like to teach our children to be very aware of water. We are grateful for the clean water we get to drink. We are careful with the plants we plant around our houses, so they don’t use too much water, we don’t leave the water running while we brush our teeth. We like to drink water all day long in order to stay healthy, and we do what we can to help people in other places in the world where they can’t easily get to clean water. Some children your age have to walk a long long way to get some water and bring it back to their families. Sometimes the water is dirty, and it sometimes make their families sick. Some people are working with those families to build wells closer to them so they can get good water without sending their kids out to get water from far away.

Earth my body,
water my blood,
air my breath
and fire my spirit

Have you ever held your breath? Boy, do we ever need to breathe! Air comes into our bodies, all the way in. and we blow it all the way out. Sometimes we can sing while we breathe out. Sometimes we talk. Sometimes we just breathe. Some places have air that is clean and good for you, and some places have air that’s dirty with car exhaust or factory smoke or pollen. We like breathing, and so we use our votes to vote for people who will keep our air the cleanest. So we can sing!

Earth my body,
water my blood,
air my breath
and fire my spirit

Our religion, Unitarian Universalism, has a symbol, the lit chalice. See it up here? The fire represents the spirit that helps us love, the spirit that is a voice of truth inside us. Do you have a sense inside when you’ve done something good? When you’ve made a mistake or hurt someone? Ancient people said there was something inside us that lives forever, that lets us feel when we are close to God, close to the Big Spirit that connects us all, and when we are farther away. The Big Spirit that connects us all is a spirit of love and truth. That’s why we light a chalice for our Sunday services, in our home chalices before dinner together, even at meetings that we have here at the church.

Our spirit brings us close to the fire that speaks to us of the Big Spirit of Love and Truth.

Let’s sing again while the last group of people come up and pour their water into the bowls.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

The deep end of the heart

by Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
August 28, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

There is a set of memes (photos) on the internet where we are shown what our picture of a certain occupation or activity is, and then next to it, a picture of its actuality. They can be very funny. People’s dreams of parenthood, of having one’s own business, of being a college student, etc. What is our picture of how church should be? What is its actuality? What are we doing here? We will talk about our mission and about our new venture into “accompaniment” of refugees as a way to do hands-on justice.

Here is one thing I love about UUism. The DRE in a New Jersey congregation heard that a three year old boy called Roo had been bullied by a grown man for wearing a tutu in public. He got himself a pink and purple tutu, (or maybe he had one already,) put it on, took a selfie and posted it online with the hashtag tutus for Roo. It’s going viral, and other UU men are taking selfies with tutus as well, posting them with the tutusforRoo hashtag, so when Roo sees grown men wearing the tutus he loves, he can be strengthened to resist the cultural enforcers. This feels like love to me. It feels like kindness. It feels like church.

What do you love about UUism? Friday night 240 of us came to eat from food trucks and talk about that. The facilitator asked us what excited us about what the church is doing, and what we wish the church could do in the future. The results are written on the hearts, scrolls and arrows you see up on the wall, and I think you will have fun reading them when the service is over. Some members of the youth group were there, young adults, older adults, and we listened to one another. And a member of the youth group was asked to facilitate one of the larger groups. That is what church looks like to me. Please stand up if you came to the party. Now, please stay standing if you helped make it happen. Now, please just stay standing if you stayed until the very end and helped clean up. Thank you.

The reason we came together is because it is the time of year when we ask one another to make a commitment of financial support to the church, and it’s important for us to talk about what the church means to us, what we are doing together that feels exciting and important, what we wish for, what actions we see as necessary. Those who were there dove into the deep end, listening, hoping together, connecting and wishing. It is these dreams you are fueling as you respond to the canvassers to let them know what your commitment can be. f want to give you a piece of information, and then I will ask you to forget it. If you were to divide the budget by the number of members of the church, every one person’s share would be about 1500.00 a year. Now I’m going to ask you to forget it, because what this church asks is that you are generous within your means. That is between you and your conscience. Giving generously means giving generously enough so you are hoping from the deep end of your heart, so that part of your heart comes to take up residence with this community, so that you take it personally, so that what this church does matters to you. I am increasing my pledge to the church by 20 percent this year. It hurts a little, but I believe in us, in these loves, these dreams you see on the wall. I believe in our mission.

Church is about community, about connecting with one another, meeting people we might not meet in our daily routines, it is about feeding souls; having interesting things to think about and do, helping people be seen and heard; it is about transforming lives: partnering with the working homeless by providing lunches for them, transforming our lives and others’ by visiting people who are in detention, partnering with asylum-seekers by accompanying them to their government appointments, using our privilege as citizens to allow them to be better seen and heard. Church is about doing justice, working to understand and change the structures that “stack the deck” against some people and advantage others. We do things together that we cannot accomplish alone.

My theme for this fall is “Going back to basics,” as I ask you to support this congregation I want to tell you where it came from. We UUs have our roots in the fourth century, with a teacher named Arius. He taught that Jesus was created by God like humans were, that he was the first created, but still not God, and subordinate to God. In the sixteenth century, King John Sigismund and his chaplain, Frances David, declared religious freedom in Transylvania. People came from far and wide to discuss, without fear of being imprisoned, the nature of God.

Michael Servetus, a Spanish physician, had written a pamphlet called “On the Errors of the Trinity.” His ideas were freely discussed in Sigismund’s kingdom, and the ideas that made the most sense to David and the King were known as “Unitarian,” to distinguish them from”Trinitarian.” When John Calvin, the father of the Presbyterian Church, burned Servetus at the stake, his martyrdom energized Unitarianism throughout Europe, and it spread to the New World. Thomas Jefferson liked Unitarian ideas, and wrote in a letter to a friend that he believed, in his lifetime, every young person in the US would be Unitarian.

In the 19th century the Transcendentalists: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Thoreau and their friends brought in Eastern philosophy and a love of Nature to mix with the liberal Christianity. In the 20th century, the Humanist movement took the Unitarians in a very rational, skeptical direction, and in 1961 the Unitarians merged with the liberal Christian Universalists, and it is that rich gumbo that strengthens us to hold up our values, to live our mission, to give the gift of our free faith to our children and others who have need of us, and to reach out to those who are hurt, who have been violated, who want safety and sanity of life in this country. We will do our best to choose people who will benefit most from partnering with us. We will connect with one another by volunteering together and having shared experiences.

– Transcendence – To connect with wonder and awe of the unity of life

– Community – To connect with joy, sorrow, and service with those whose lives we touch

– Compassion – To treat ourselves and others with love

– Courage – To live lives of honesty, vulnerability, and beauty

– Transformation – To pursue the growth that changes our lives and heals our world

So here we are just regular people, and this community gives us a chance at these deep things. Sometimes we touch them and other times they elude us. All of these things live in the deep end. The risky area, the place there you are over committed, where you care too much, where your joys are great and your disappointments are painful, I remember finding the UUs, I remember feeling that I was in the midst of my people. A thinking people, a people hungry to be justice makers, who wanted to be better people, I remember loving the way these people talked about nature, were stern with themselves about seeing racism and working against it, where you could be an atheist and go to seminary. I remember hearing UUs talk about God, about believing in nothing, about believing God has 300,000 faces, about love, I remember people who were ok being honest about despair, about being tired, hopeful, wanting to learn more about the lives of gay people, the real complicated history of the slave economy, the story of the indigenous nations who were here when the Europeans arrived. There was courage here. There were questions here. I have been,since then, deeply nourished by our UU people. I have been, since then, deeply disappointed in us. I have been challenged to grow. It feels real. I want to stick with it. I’m coming from the deep end of my heart to support and strengthen this faith where grace surprises us looking like a tall DRE in a tutu. Looking like a teen with a blue streak in her hair facilitating an important church discussion group. How about you?

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Big Gay Sunday

by Posted in Audio available, Marisol Caballero, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Marisol Caballero
August 21, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

August 20 is the Austin Pride Festival and Parade, and the party will continue on Sunday at First UU! Join us for a celebration of love, justice, and perseverance.

Call to Worship

Gratitude to My Ancestors
by Rev. Marta Valentin

With honor and respect, these eyes see for you
all manner of life you could have not imagined.
My lips move with the rhythm of your words
flowing through me,
my tongue caressing each morsel of wisdom
I am graced to pass on.
Your DNA rides my veins
and with every breath I take,
your cautious steps from the past
toward a fuller life become
bold moves I make toward my destiny.
Together, we wrap arms
around a new generation,
here to become who were born to be,
to cast their magic as we once did
and bless each day for their ability to do so.

For you, dear ancestors, we live this day.

Reading

“A Litany for Survival”
by Audre Lorde

For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children’s mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours;

For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.

And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full
we are afraid of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty
we are afraid we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak
we are afraid our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid

So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive

Sermon

Two years ago, I preached the Sunday before Austin Pride and called the service Big Gay Sunday- partly because this title was vague enough to give me plenty of wiggle room for the direction of my sermon while meeting our newsletter deadline, and partly because, let’s be honest, putting the words “Big Gay” in front of any event makes it sound like it’ll be ten times more fun! “Big Gay Lunch Buffet.” “Big Gay Grocery Run.” “Big Gay Tax Audit.” See? It works! And that service was so much fun. The Intergenerational choir sang Lady Gaga’s, “Born This Way” and wore feather boas, dangled a disco ball, and got us dancing in the aisle.

Last year, I wasn’t the one scheduled to preach on the Sunday before Pride, and I’m not sure if I would have called the service “Big Gay Sunday” again, but no fewer than five different people have asked me in the past year, “Why don’t we do Big Gay Sunday anymore? Is there a reason we stopped doing it?” Once. We had done it once before, but in the memory of at least several, Big Gay Sunday was a beloved annual church tradition that had inexplicably disappeared.

So, back by popular demand, is ye old tradition of yore, Big Gay Sunday, The Sequel: Bigger, Gayer, and Sunday-er than ever before! A pep rally, of sorts, to get us good and hyped for First UU’s participation in next Saturday’s Pride festival and parade.

Today also happens to be my Sunday swan song, as it’s my last Sunday with you all as one of your ministers. My last day on the job here is August 31st, and you will see me at Pride, but I won’t be at church next Sunday, so I feel a special responsibility to go out with a bang and give this service a real party feel.

Pride is an annual celebration of survival by people who, due to cultural saturation of both homophobia and violence, was never meant to survive. Yet here we are, together with our many allies, speaking, singing, dancing, advocating, simply living in ways that our ancestors never imagined. We are their eyes, their breath, their tongues, their arms, their help them bless the generations coming up.

In Spanish, the word for ancestors, antepasados, directly translates to “those who have passed before.” Circumstance has left my family many unanswered questions about our genetic relations, so I find this definition of ancestors appealing & quite useful. In this way, my ancestors; our ancestors, need not be blood relation, but rather those who have gone before, leaving us behind to continue their legacies.

I’d like to introduce you to one of our ancestors. Her picture is on your orders of service. Her name was Marsha P. Johnson. She was born Malcolm Michaels Jr. in 1944 New Jersey and lived as a transgender woman in lower Manhattan. Of course, back then, the terms she used to describe herself were, “transvestite,” “transsexual,” and “queen.” She spent much of her adult life experiencing homelessness. Sometimes Marsha slept at the home of friends, in Times Square movie theatres, or anywhere else she could find to lay her head. In the documentary about her online, “Pay It No Mind: The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson,” a friend recalls once seeing her asleep under a table in the Flower District. She was known for wearing elaborate crowns of fresh flowers on her head and was often given colorful varieties by the wholesalers she made friends with. Her friend recalls asking the vendor, “Why do you let her sleep under your table like that?” and the man answered, “Because she’s holy.”

It’s true. “Saint Marsha,” as she was called by folks in Greenwich Village, though poor, had no attachment to material things and would literally give the shirt off her back, or food, or money, to total strangers in need. Often harassed and brutalized, she somehow kept a genuinely cheerful disposition. She said that the P. in Marsha P. Johnson stood for “pay it no mind.”

She was spending the night of her birthday, June 27th, 1969 at the local dive bar in her neighborhood. Calling it a “dive” was correct, but calling it a “bar” was a stretch. It was illegal to operate a gay bar in New York City then. In fact, it was illegal to serve a customer if they revealed that they identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans*. Because of this, a few mafia-run establishments popped up along Christopher Street that catered to “the fairies,” without liquor licenses and the police were paid to look the other way. The gay men in most of these bars did not take too kindly to the presence of “queens,” so the Stonewall Inn became the place with a clientele made up mostly of young, gender variant and poor people of color. The Stonewall bar became a refuge and often makeshift LGBT homeless youth shelter. Kids who had to run away or were kicked out because of who they were could panhandle during the day to get the $3 entrance fee and spend the whole night inside and out of the cold. In a place with no running water, just a tub behind the bar to rinse and reuse glasses, no one monitored whether everyone inside was a paying customer.

No one who was there remembers exactly how it all started, but that night, the police raided the Stonewall Inn in the wee hours of the morning of June 28th, arresting 13 people for being caught either with three or more items of clothing that did not match their assigned gender or dancing with someone of the same gender. Everyone who was there agreed that Marsha and her friend and fellow queen, Silvia Rivera, were among the first to fight back. Someone threw something. Some say it was Marsha who through a shot glass and yelled, “I got my human rights, too!” at the police. Within minutes, the Stonewall Inn was fighting back in a full riot and the LGBT Rights Movement was born.

The riot went on for six days. At one point, a can-can line of queens formed and confronted the police with a song as they kicked their legs, Rockettes style, “We are the Stonewall Girls, we wear our hair in curls… ” It was this courage and daring by people who had very little to lose, like Marsha and Sylvia, that inspired such resistance. The amazing this about these riots is that yes, there was violence as these people fought back against years of subhuman treatment, but they also used camp humor, sarcasm, song, and dance. They didn’t lose themselves in the violence, but rather used the very essence of their community as an act of resistance. It reminds me of one of my favorite lines from the musical Rent, “the opposite of war isn’t peace, it’s creation!”

A year after the riots, New York’s queer community gathered for an anniversary march from the Stonewall Inn to Central Park. The organizers remember that they were so terrified or being attacked or arrested (or both) that first year, that it was more of a run than a march. But, when they arrived at Central Park and looked back at the crowd, it had grown to hundreds. This is how Pride marches and parades were born.

Today, Pride celebrations still employ the use of creative resistance. There are queer cable networks, well-recognized & well-funded LGBTQ rights advocacy organizations, there are LGBTQ Chambers of Commerce, softball leagues, legal firms, youth centers, you name it. When I was growing up, I did not know of one single out and successful celebrity. These days, it’s not completely without occasional serious professional consequences (remember Michael Sam’s NFL career), but it’s no longer shocking news when a major celebrity comes out of the closet. In fact, if a celebrity chooses to keep their personal lives private, as Jodie Foster did for so many years, they are negatively judged by the public as self-loathing and cowardly.

Of course, there are legal battles that have been won through our efforts, as well. We now enjoy the right to marry in all 50 states. We can adopt children. We can openly serve in the military. Our queer culture has saturated the arts so thoroughly that those among us who identify as straight no longer bat an eye to see a queer character on their favorite primetime TV shows.

Pride is about being celebratory, yet cognizant of the footsteps we travel in. A way has certainly been paved, by Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera and many other forgotten heroes of the Stonewall Rebellion. Hollywood depictions of the event emphasize white male characters, even though veterans of the event all agree that the LGBTQ rights movement was begun by trans women of color. Our predecessors laid their lives on the line, yet there is still so much work yet to do. Marriage equality did not do anything to ensure proper healthcare for LGBTQ people, or protection from employment and housing discrimination, and many other rights still denied us.

Our greater community, including our straight allies, is still shocked with grief over the Pulse nightclub shooting, which left 50 dead, the majority of which were queer people of color. I include in these numbers the shooter, who himself was a casualty of homophobic, hyper-masculinity that has arisen as a result of our LGBTQ community’s recent gains. As much as we would like to attribute 100% of the assassin’s actions to affiliation with a terrorist organization across the sea, such violence against queer people is historically as American as apple pie.

As society swings left on acceptance, there are those whose bigotry has not been given time to accept these new standards, though it has been almost fifty years since the Stonewall Rebellion. Such hatred has seen an increase in recent years, and trans women of color have borne the brunt of it. Last I checked, a few days ago, the death toll for trans women killed in 2016 had climbed up to 19. Almost all of them were trans women of color.

The majority of violence against the most vulnerable in our community goes unreported and/or unprosecuted. In fact, Marsha P. Johnson’s death by drowning in 1992 was quickly ruled a suicide, though her friends suspect foul play to this day.

To exist, and especially to exist joyfully, as a queer person, continues to be a radical act of defiance in a world and in a time that still tells us that we are not meant to survive. This Saturday, we will participate in the Pride Festival and Parade, as we have done the past several years. As a community of faith, we are unique positioned to demonstrate that celebration of life (ours and those of the dead) can coexist alongside the grief that we continue to hold. Our float is themed, “In Memoriam,” and will be a moving tribute to our gratitude to those who dared to live life as fully and authentically as possible and are no longer with us. We will be dancing, celebrating their fierceness, as well as carrying candles and signs that read the names of the victims of the Orlando shooting. Please consider showing up in great number, making a sign of your own, or carrying one that our middle schoolers are working on, and creating this important space for our community to hold the reality of the pain of grief and the joy of love.

It’s fitting that this will be my last act with this church community & such a holy act at that to march alongside you in this way. If UUs held “sacraments,” I’d like to think that this would be among them. Our participation in Pride is an act of humility around how little of this struggle we can attribute to ourselves, alone, as well as a commitment and show of our resolve to continue in the struggle that did not begin and will not end with us. It has been my honor to minister to you and beside you, and a blessing that I will complete my service here next Saturday on the revolution’s parade route. It is a deeply religious act to realize that we were not meant to survive, and yet here we stand.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.