Faithful Expectation

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
September 15, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Our religious values are aspirational expressions of our highest expectations for ourselves. Expectations can provide powerful inspiration and help us live out our Unitarian Universalist faith and reach for our best selves. So too though, sometimes the unexpected and letting go of expectations that are not serving us well can also bring enrichment to our lives. We will explore the intricacies and paradoxical nature of expectation.

Chalice Lighting

We light this chalice, the flame of our heritage, in solidarity with Unitarian Universalists and all the peoples of the world lighting candles of planetary hope. May it ignite a spirit of solidarity and enthusiasm for the new world we can create, together.

Call to Worship

Now let us celebrate our highest values. Now let us worship together.

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

Now we raise up that which we hold as ultimate and larger than ourselves. Now we worship, together.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Meditation Reading

TRUST YOURSELF TO THE WATER
By Alan Watts

Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is like when you trust yourself to the water.

You don’t grab hold of the water when you swim, because if you do, you will become stiff and tight in the water, and sink.

You have to relax, and the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging and holding on.

In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe becomes a person who has no faith at all. Instead they are holding tight.

But the attitude of faith is to let go and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.

Sermon

All of this month, our religious education classes and activities are exploring expectation as a spiritual topic, so today, we will also spend some time considering expectation as it relates to our Unitarian Universalist faith.

To begin this morning, I thought we would start with a reflection on expectation taken from one of our great Unitarian Universalist sacred scriptures, National Public Radio.

Power of Expectations video

I loved that chapter from our NPR sacred texts because it captures so many of the conundrums we encounter when we examine our expectations, especially from a spiritual or faith-based perspective.

So, for example, we set expectations for ourselves, and yet, as the video demonstrated, other folks also place expectations upon us. On top of that, we quite often internalize the expectations placed upon us by others without even realizing that we are doing it, and so they become unconscious self-expectations.

Our expectations and those of others toward us can be greatly beneficial to us.

Studies have shown that positive expectations can beneficially influence everything from health outcomes to psychological well-being to career and sports performance, and on and on.

Yet, expectations can also limit us when they are set so high as to be unachievable, or our life situation changes such that what was once possible for us can no longer remain a reasonable expectation.

Conversely, expectations that are too low can also adversely influence us. For example, many studies have shown that teachers having lower expectations towards students of color or with disabilities greatly disadvantages such students.

So sometimes we have to learn to let go of unreasonable or harmful expectations, and sometimes we try to defy expectations that would otherwise limit us.

Interestingly, our expectations not only impact our behavior and that of others toward us, as pointed out in the video, now research indicates that expectations can have actual physiological effects upon us.

My favorite study I found about this involved drinking beer.

The researchers randomized people into two groups. Both groups were asked to taste test two different beer samples. One sample was just plain beer. The other was the same beer to which the researchers had secretly added balsamic vinegar.

The researchers did not tell the first group the difference between the two beer samples.

The folks in this group overwhelming preferred the taste of the balsamic vinaigrette infused beer.

The researchers told the second group the difference between the two beer samples before they tasted them.

Almost to a person, the second group hated the beer with the vinaigrette in it – many going so far as to spit it out and exclaim something like, “this is terrible.”

The expectation that adding the vinaigrette to beer would ruin the taste caused them to experience exactly that.

Subsequent tests showed that it was not just mental perception. Telling the second group up front about the balsamic poisoning of their beer had subtly altered the physiology of the second group’s taste buds compared to that of the first group.

Other research has identified physiological effects from our expectations that are much more potentially life altering than the tase of our beer.

Other research has also found that our expectations can draw our attention and focus so strongly that we may miss other important information.

This probably had a survival advantage at one time by, for instance, allowing us to focus on what we expected a potential predator might do and not get distracted by less life threatening things.

Today though, that focus itself can sometimes become the distraction.

Let’s watch an example of this phenomenon.

As you watch the next video, following the instructions at the beginning of it, please try not to express any verbal reactions so as not to break the concentration of your fellow congregants.

Ball Passing Video

How many of you saw the man in the gorilla suit before they played it back a second time?

This is probably an experiment that is better done in an individual versus group setting because those who see the gorilla may give off subtle reactions that clue others in the group to then see it also.

I watched it alone the first time and did not see the gorilla. The researchers have found that well over 50% of people who watch it do not see the gorilla because we are focusing so intently on our expectation about being able to correctly count how many times the folks in white pass the ball.

And I did get the count right, by the way, even if I did miss the damn gorilla.

Next, I want to introduce you to Daniel Kish, whose story I think so embodies the power of letting go of unhelpful expectations, defying expectations that limit us – keep us from claiming our full potential and humanity.

Daniel Kish Video

Daniel was born with a form of ocular cancer. His doctors had to remove one of his eyes when he was 7 months old and the other eye when he was 13 months old.

The first thing he did after waking up after his second surgery was to climb out of the crib and crawl around the nursery they had put him in at the hospital.

For whatever reason, his mother decided not to try to hold him back, even though she feared he might get hurt.

And he did a few times, but he says it was worth it.

Daniel learned to echolocate that clicking noise you heard him making in the video allows him to listen to how the noise bounces off things and determine shapes and motions around him.

It is much that same way that bats use sonar to navigate when they fly.

As you saw in the video, Daniel learned to ride a bike. By the time he entered elementary school, we was able to walk to school on his own and pretty much take care of himself through out the day.

Because his mother never enrolled him in an assistance program for the blind and let him go to a regular school, Daniel did not encounter other blind people until he got older.

He was dismayed to discover that so many blind folks he met were unable to take care of themselves in so many of the ways that he was capable.

Daniel came to believe that the well intentioned efforts of loved ones and non-profit services to help blind folks with so many aspects of daily living was creating expectations well below their potential.

So, he started the non-profit organization he discusses in the video. Through it, he teaches echolocation to others and sets expectations allowing folks to live more fully and more independently.

Researchers using MRI scans have found that people using echolocation light up the brain in the same patterns of those of us with ocular vision.

They can correctly identify and describe the shape of objects placed in front of them, as well as the direction of motion.

So, in a real since, by raising expectations through teaching echolocation, Daniel Kish is giving people of form of vision.

With that, I want to close by talking briefly about how I think expectation is such a large part of our Unitarian Universalist faith.

As Unitarian Universalists, we share 7 principals that we affirm and promote.

The inherent worth and dignity of every person;

Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;

Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;

A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;

The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;

The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;

Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

It is likely we will be adding an 8th principle regarding dismantling racism. At this church, we also have a set of religious values that you all read together earlier with Elizabeth.

Our faith principals, our religious values, they are our aspirations, the expectations we have set for ourselves concerning how we will be in our world – how we will be with each other – how we will live our lives.

And we are reaching for those expectations all of the time, in so many ways through the many ministries and programs of this church, as well as our our larger denomination.

Next Sunday, we will have the chance to live our values when we celebrate this religious community and all pledge together to support it into the future.

Our green sanctuary ministry team has been living our principle about respect for the interdependent web in so many ways, including getting the Austin City Council and the Travis County Commissioner’s Court to pass resolutions that require our city and county governments to put into high gear actions across their departments to fight the climate crises.

And this Friday, September 20, Unitarian Universalists from across the country will live out the expectations of our faith by joining in a world-wide climate strike.

Led by our youth, people from across the world will join together to demand urgent action on the climate crisis before it is too late.

And folks we do not have long. A few years at most.

Some links where you can get more information are posted on the church website.

Here in Austin, the climate strike will begin with rallies at the state capital at 10 a.m. and again at noon on Friday.

I hope as many of us who can will live our religious values by participating. Our youth are expecting us to leave them a world that is at least livable.

Our youth are expecting us to act as if our house is on fire.

Because it is.

As Unitarian Universalists, our faith has always been one of hopeful expectation.

For Unitarian Universalists, our faith expectation is that there is meaning and beauty in our world that has yet to be fully revealed.

As Unitarian Universalists, our faith tells us that we are the ones who must unveil those revelations yet to become.

May we make it so.

Amen.

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