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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
Ausust 25, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
This month’s Soul Matters is Emergence. We will explore how we might keep ourselves open to unexpected and creative possibilities and the potential for transformation.
Chalice Lighting
As we light the chalice may our souls become its hearth. We join our hearts to the one great flame of bright compassion, Beloved Community, and fervent justice. May our sparks become a wildfire in the world, lighting the way for all.
Call to Worship
“MERE CHRISTIANITY”
by C.S. Lewis
It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg.
We are like eggs. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Meditation Reading
“YOU CAN’T BE NEUTRAL ON A MOVING TRAIN”
by Howard Zinn
To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places – and there are so many – Where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future; The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
Sermon
Janine Shepard had dreams of competing in cross-country skying at the Olympics for her home country of Australia.
She was on a training bike ride with some of her fellow teammates headed toward the Blue Mountains outside of Sydney.
They had reached the foothills, her favorite part of the ride. She stood on her bike to allow her to pedal more strongly.
She felt the cold mountain air in her breath.
She reveled in the morning sun on her face and basked in the beautiful morning sunlight in her eyes.
And then everything went dark.
A speeding utility truck had hit her, knocking her unconscious, breaking her neck and back in six places, fracturing five ribs on her left side, crushing her right arm and leaving her with internal bleeding and a number of other life-threatening injuries.
Medics airlifted her to a hospital with a specialized spinal unit in Sydney. When she arrived at the hospital, her blood pressure was forty over zero.
As Janine Shepard herself puts it, “I was having a REALLY bad day.”
She was paralyzed from the waist down.
She spent ten days in the lCU before the internal bleeding stopped, and her doctors could do surgery on her back.
Her lower back was crushed. The surgeon spent hours removing fragments of bone from her spinal cord. They removed some of her ribs and used them to rebuild her back.
The surgery was a success in that she regained slight feeling and movement in parts of her lower body; however, she was told she would never ski again and might not ever walk again.
After some time, they were finally able to move Janine to the acute spinal unit, which would be the first step in her long attempt at rehabilitation and recovery.
Here is Janine Shepard herself, describing life in that acute spinal unit.
VIDEO
After six months, Janine’s parents were finally able to take her home, in a wheelchair, still wrapped in a plaster body cast.
Janine was depressed. She wanted her body back. She wanted her life back.
Then, she remembered her friends in the spinal ward, the connections, the hope, the courage of those fellow human beings in circumstances so like her own.
And she knew she could accept her new circumstances.
She began to think about how she might build a new life. She says, “I stopped asking myself, ‘why me’ and realized, ‘why not me’. I thought, ‘maybe rock bottom is the perfect place to start. ‘”
And in that uncertainty, she found a new creative freedom to begin imagining a new life, such that one day when she heard a plane flying overhead, she looked up through her bedroom window and thought, “Well, if I can’t walk, I might as well learn to fly.”
“Mom”, she cried out, I’m going to learn to fly.”
“That’s nice, dear,” replied her mom.
And Janine did learn to fly. She booked flight training with a nearby school. They lifted her into a plane, body cast and all, and once in the air, the instructor gave her control of the plane, as she could use her hands and arms. He pointed toward the Blue Mountains and said to fly toward them.
And so her new life began right above where her tragic accident had happened.
She eventually learned to walk again.
She eventually got, first a single engine plane license, and then several other types of licenses, leading up to her commercial license and even an aerobatics license – you know where people fly upside down and in loops and such.
Just less than 18 months after Janine Shepard left the spinal unit, she began her new calling, teaching other people to fly at the very same school where she had first learned how to take a small plane out over the Blue Mountains.
The theme we have been exploring this month in our religious education program is the spiritual theme of “emergence”. Emergence is defined as to become manifest, to rise from, the process of becoming.
I wanted to share Janine’s story with you this morning because I think it so powerfully illustrates so much of how the emergent, how transformation and change happen in our individual lives, even when it is on a much less dramatic basis than hers.
Her story demonstrates how so often, something new arises out of change that has been forced upon us, even sometimes difficult or even tragic circumstances.
Now, I want to be careful to state clearly, we are not talking about cliches such as: “God works in strange and mysterious ways,” to somehow justify tragedy as being ultimately good.
What happened to Janine was random and terrible and not part of some master plan.
It was how she responded to it that allowed the emergence of her new passion.
Janine’s story also shows how so often in order to say yes to something new, we have to let go of something else that is no longer healthy and sometimes no longer even possible for us.
And often, for transformation to emerge in our lives, we have to learn a new perspective. We gain a more complex understanding about life.
Later in her Ted Talk that I showed you a segment from earlier, Janine Shepard says, “I learned that I am not body and you are not yours.”
And so she says that if we learn to look beyond the superficial and help each other to try to live vulnerable, authentic lives, allow the ultimate, creative expression of who we really are to emerge, our collective liberation and bliss might just become emergent also.
We need relationship. We need belonging for beneficial emergence to occur.
After all, like the folks in that acute spinal unit, we are all interconnected by millions or billions of metaphorical straws. Non-plastic, metaphorical straws, no doubt.
That brings me to the scientific theory of emergence.
In science, emergence theory is the study of how creative and complex systems arise that are greater than the sum of their constituent parts. The system comes to hold properties that none of its individual components alone do.
Examples include how life itself first arose on our planet and then evolved from single cell entities into ever more complex life forms.
How energy transitions into matter.
How fish school and birds flock together, moving as one with such grace and coordination without an apparent leader.
And the examples go on and on.
Scientists are studying whether the natural laws, the rules by which each of the individual components of these systems adaptively interact in such ways that create something more complex and creative.
Scientist Harold J. Morowitz takes this even a step further and applies it to human social systems. Morowitz even describes a spiritual/ theological aspect of this.
For Morowitz, our ethics, the rules we follow in our interactions with each other and all that is, make us partners with the immanence of, the continuing emergence of God in our world.
Now whether we agree with Morowitz’s version of theism, it does seem that emergence theory supports Janine Shepard’s idea that our individual and communal emergences are linked and together might have the potential to result in something even greater.
I recently saw a video featuring Michelle Alexander, the author of the book, “The New Jim Crow”. Unitarian Universalists across the country read, studied and discussed her book together a few years back, as the source material for our annual “Unitarian Universalist common Read”.
In the video, she reminded me of another aspect of emergence.
We most often do not know exactly what is emerging until the full emergence has happened.
I want to share that video with you now.
VIDEO
I am intrigued by her idea that we may be the revolution – that those of us who want to struggle together with compassion and love to build the Beloved community and secure our collective liberation are creating the new emergence and that the forces of bigotry and hate are the resistance against that new emergence.
And yet, as I said before, we can’t know what will actually emerge while it is still happening, so we have to make sure that the ethical and spiritual rules we are following, our own emergence, contributes to that greater system – that Beloved community about which we dream.
I don’t know about you all, but for me that can be difficult sometimes. With the barrage of negativity and hate and half-truths and outright lies that are coming at us constantly these days – with the images of people, including children, in cages, with no where to sleep except on a concrete floors without even enough room to stretch out – with children dying while in the custody of our government – with two mass shootings in less than 24 hours recently – with almost daily reports of authorities apprehending one or more young white men with multiple weapons of war who have threatened synagogues, churches, schools, retail stores, gay bars – it can be difficult sometimes to act and feel in healthy, constructive ways.
It can be far too easy for me to want to lash back out, for anger, fear and even rage to emerge within me.
I keep wondering when one of those young guys will avoid apprehension until it is too late, and they commit the next mass killing.
So I think we have to honestly acknowledge that we are living in a time of extraordinarily elevated anxiety. We are experiencing social trauma.
No matter which side of the political spectrum one is on, to reach for our best selves, for our best selves to have any chance of emerging, we have to acknowledge these feelings. We have to find ways to talk about them with other people.
Not talking about it is not really an option, at least not a healthy, life giving option.
I believe this church is a place where we can have such honest and vulnerable conversations.
We can be there for one another. certainly, I want you to know your ministers are here for you during these times.
This church, this congregation is a place where we can both find respite and seek the emergence of our best and truest selves, the people we are called to be, both individually and communally.
I want to close by telling you how fortunate I feel, how grateful I am to get to do ministry with this congregation and with our extraordinary and just plain fun senior minister, Meg.
I am moved by what we have already become and by the church that is still emergent.
You heard earlier about the new ways of doing religious education that are emerging. Our religious education ministries are brimming with potential and filled with fantastic people.
I have no doubt that wonderful new ways of being and understanding will emerge for both our religious education learners and those leading the programs and classes.
With our beautiful new renovations and expansion, so much can now emerge that we cannot yet even fully imagine the potentialities.
New ministries are already emerging, such as a visitation program for older church members who can no longer attend church on a regular basis.
So much is already happening. So much is yet to become.
I can’t wait to witness and be a part of the emergence of all that we have only begun to dream.
Much love. All blessings. Amen.
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