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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
and Jules Jaramillo
September 2, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org
Our spirits become most fully alive and connected to our human potential when we are able to embrace our UU faith and spirituality in our daily lives. Join Jules and Rev. Chris as we explore the wonderful possibilities of our UU Living Tradition.
Call to Worship
Now let us worship together.
Now let us celebrate this congregation’s highest religious values.
- 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. Today and all the days of our lives.
Now and in our daily lives, we nurture and cultivate these higher spiritual commitments.
Reading
by Sophia Lyon Fahs
The religious way is the deep way, the way that sees what physical eyes alone fail to see, the intangibles of the heart of every phenomenon. The religious way is the way that touches universal relationships; that goes high, wide and deep, that expands the feelings of kinship…
Life becomes religious whenever we make it so: when some new light is seen, when some deeper appreciation is felt, when some larger outlook is gained, when some nobler purpose is formed, when some task is well done.
Sermon
I was standing on an outdoor platform in Chicago, waiting for the train that would take me to my class that morning. The platform was located under a street that ran across a bridge overhead, partially blocking the morning sun.
Still, one, wide ray of sun was shining though, and it was snowing very, very lightly. Tiny, fragile snowflakes were being held aloft by a brisk wind, swirling in circles in the air.
They danced through the bright ray of sunlight, reflecting it in dazzling patterns, as if thousands of miniature mirrors were whirling and casting their own small rays of light in almost infinite directions – tiny spirits dancing and floating and spreading light into their world.
Needless to say, I was captivated, standing transfixed until the sound of my train approaching drew my attention.
I turned toward the sound of the train. As I did, I made eye contact with an elderly gentleman who was leaning on a carved wooden cane for support. He was smiling. There was a joyful glint in his eyes. I smiled back.
Without exchanging a word, we both knew that we had both been mesmerized by the beautiful ballet of sunlight and snowfall. We both knew that we had somehow been profoundly moved by it.
Riding in the train a few moments later, I could not help thinking that the potential for the religious, the possibility for transformation exists within any moment.
In that small, fragmentary sliver of time on a cold train platform in Chicago, I understood that this person I had never meet and would likely never see again, was, like me, enmeshed in all the beauty and fragility and wonder and suffering and joy that life has to offer.
I was reminded that this understanding is the place from which compassion and love flow.
This idea, that the possibility for transformation is present within every moment, has strong implications for how we think about and do faith development.
If there is transformative potential in every fragment of time, in each encounter – and if we take the work of the church to be at about spiritual growth, then that means we can carry our faith with us beyond these church walls, open ourselves to the ongoing possibility of religious experience in our daily lives Ñ both that which we create intentionally and that which occurs when we are not even expecting it.
And throughout the week, everything we do here in the church can be seen as faith development. Religious education is occurring not just in classrooms, but also throughout the life of the church. Every worship service, every ministry team and committee meeting, every conversation during the fellowship hour has the potential to be transformative.
I wonder, if we take this view, how might our church meetings change? Might they focus less on details and more upon our values and vision? Might we put our mission at the top of every meeting agenda?
Might we, from time to time, begin our ministry team meetings by reviewing our covenant of right relations?
Maybe we infuse our stewardship campaigns with our passion for living out our mission in the world and making real differences in real people’s lives!
Perhaps we pause during meetings for a reflective period or to sing a hymn together that captures our vision for creating a better world.
How about some time for dancing during that Green Sanctuary Team meeting! OK, well at least maybe time for meditation and prayer!
The way that we are together becomes paramount. The how we interact takes precedence, whether in the classroom or the boardroom.
The method is the message, as our Unitarian Universalist education forbearer, Angus McLean famously put it.
Here is another example.
When I was doing my ministerial internship, one project they gave me was to put together an intergenerational Christmas Pageant for one of our December worship services.
The pageant was a Unitarian Universalist version of the biblical nativity story. Our cast included folks ranging in age from four or five to this amazing woman in her mid-eighties who ran circles around me and kept our rehearsals on track.
Putting together a pageant, complete with costumes, props, songs and children dressed up as the animals in the stable had been quite the challenge but lots of fun too.
We had camels, cows, a donkey, some doves and at least a couple of cats.
An ongoing challenge was helping them to remember that there were imaginary stable walls around the edges of our little dais. More than once during rehearsals, a cow or camel would walk right through one of the imaginary walls, and we would have to remind them not to do that!
On the Friday before we were to do the pageant, the news broke about the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary.
On Saturday, I talked with my supervising minister. We had to decide whether to go forward with the pageant or whether it would be too light hearted given the anguishing news.
We decided to go forward; however on Sunday morning, we stood together before the congregation, and offered a prayer for the victims and their families before we be started.
I could feel a noticeable sense of shock and grief among our church members that morning.
We started the pageant.
About halfway through it, one of the children costumed as an animal in our imaginary stable, one of the cats I believe, got so wrapped up in one of the songs in the pageant, that she stood up and started dancing.
She pirouetted right through one of our imaginary walls, whirling and swirling in balletic circles in front of our carefully set up nativity scene.
She was about the same age as the youngest children who had been killed at Sandy Hook.
The woman who had helped keep our rehearsals on track and I were sitting together, and we looked at each other, both wondering if we should get up and lead our little dancing cat back into the scene.
As soon as our eyes met though, we both knew that we had to let her continue.
She was dancing. The music was playing and the people were singing. At one point the song almost faltered. The children were mesmerized by the little girl’s impromptu ballet and the adults were nearly overcome with emotion.
I looked around the sanctuary and saw that the adult’s eyes were glistening, their tears reflecting tiny pinpoints of light in almost infinite directions across our sanctuary.
We kept on singing, and the little girl kept her ballet afloat, and our spirits were dancing through joy and sorrow and back again in small, fragmentary slivers of time.
The music and the singing and the dancing were the method. That we had to continue our part in the creative co-telling of life’s grand pageant was the message.
A young girl’s dancing had transformed a congregation that morning.
I have a spiritual director who says that a key element of spiritual growth is to be always mindful of and open to the possibility of transformative experiences.
I think that’s right.
And, I believe faith formation in our churches can go a step further by helping us to actively carry our faith into our daily lives – to actively pursue transformative experience both in our lives and throughout the life of this congregation.
May we always be mindful of our capacity to transform one another.
Amen.
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Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 18 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.
