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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
January 19, 2020
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Remaining true to our whole selves, as well as our religious principles and values, is integral to practicing our faith and nourishing our spirits. Indeed, our integrity is a soul matter.
Chalice Lighting
We light the fire of Truth and ask to be clear, wise, and humble enough to admit when we don’t know. We kindle the warmth of community and ask for open heartedness and patience. We are grateful to the Spirit of Life and ask to learn the secret to loving and being loved.
Call to Worship
We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to 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.
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Meditation Reading
KITCHEN TABLE WISDOM Rachel Naomi Remen
Wholeness is never lost, it is only forgotten. Integrity rarely means that we need to add something to ourselves; it is more an undoing than a doing, a freeing ourselves from beliefs we have about who we are and ways we have been persuaded to “fix” ourselves to know who we genuinely are. Even after many years of seeing, thinking, and living one way, we are able to reach past all that to claim our integrity and live in a way we may never have expected to live.
Being with peiple at such times is like waching them pat their pockets trying to remember where they have put their soul. Often in reclaiming the freedom to be who we are we remember some basic human quality, an unsusptected capacity for love or compassion or some other part of our common birthright as hman beings. What we find is allmost always a surpirse but it is also familiar like something we have put in the back of a drawer, lost long ago. Once we see we know it as our own.
Sermon
Lately, I have been remembering again the sometimes nightmarish time some of you have heard me talk about before – the earlier days of AIDS, when we had no effective treatments for HIV, nor for the many, often fatal infections associated with it.
During those times, I was working as the director of a non-profit that tried to bring clinical trials of potential treatments for HIV and these associated infections, to folks struggling with these HIV in our community.
Our purpose in expanding these studies beyond academic settings and into community clinics was twofold.
First, we wanted to get more people enrolled into them more quickly so that the science could advance more quickly. Secondly, we wanted to provide access to these potentially effective, experimental treatments, to folks for whom there were no good treatment options and who faced dire and often imminent consequences. That’s a euphemism for “they were dying”.
Our folks who were so desperate to get into one of these studies and our doctors often faced a difficult dilemma though.
Clinical research studies have inclusion criteria – a list of medical and other conditions one must meet to be included in the study. They also have exclusion criteria, which is a list of conditions that prevent a person from enrolling.
There are good reasons for these criteria involving the scientific study design, as well as patient safety concerns.
Too often however, the entry criteria for the studies were unnecessarily stringent. This was most often due to an overly cautious Food and Drug Administration, not used to dealing with so many people in such a desperate situation.
So, were our patients to bend the rules, hide parts of their medical history that might exclude them?
Were our physicians, who might suspect or even know, to have looked the other way? Would doing so risk the validity of the study results?
Would these folks and these physicians be acting with integrity if they bent these unreasonable and unjust rules?
I can tell you that they did. People were desperate. People’s live were at stake.
Eventually, this became such an issue nationwide that the entry criteria for studies began to get loosened.
The FDA also began allowing large, open access trials. These were generally just safety studies that had very flexible criteria to allow many more people to enroll.
Open access studies became a model that is still used today for cancer and other life-threatening diseases.
I particularly remember one of the physicians who provided care for some of our sickest, hospitalized folks.
So often, the drugs available for treating their life-threatening, HIV-associated infections were simply failing.
This physician kept up on all of the most recent science on treating such infections and would often know of compound treatments – mixtures of several drugs administered at once – that were showing great promise.
The problem was though, that these compounded drugs were most often not available in our area, even through clinical trials, and the pharmacist at the hospital refused to do the compounding to create them.
Understandably – the pharmacist could have lost their license by doing so and it would have quite possibly been, oh a little illegal.
So this physician would sneak down to the pharmacy at night, mix the compound treatment themself, and then take it up to their patient’s room and administer it themself, no nurses involved.
And time after time after time, though not every time, but so, so many times, their patients survived because of it.
It worked. They lived, at least for a while longer.
And yet, there were also unknown safety risks – potential interactions between such compounded drugs that could have caused possibly severe side-effects.
And it was, as I said, probably at least testing the boundaries of legality.
Was this acting with integrity? I’ve been reminded of all of this by the current, hellish situation at our border and within our immigration catastrophe that pretends to be a just system.
Immigrants and their advocates face unjust laws, unjust interpretation and administration of laws – sometimes just outright lawbreaking by a bigoted and racist administration.
Recently, the federal government tried twice to send one of our fellow Unitarian Universalists to prison simply for giving water to migrants trying to cross the desert. I’m pleased to say the Feds failed.
And so immigrants in desperate situations, sometimes at threat for their very lives, and their supporters, are choosing to defy these immigration laws in some cases.
And yet, then the administration and the forces of hate take examples of these cases and exaggerate them to paint all immigrants as criminals and law breakers.
So, is breaking a law we consider unjust acting with integrity? Who gets to decide which laws are just and which are not?
My friends, I can tell you that my perspective is that in both the cases of people with HIV and their doctors breaking the rules and the actions of immigrants and their supporters, I believe that they were acting with profound integrity.
Human lives were and are at stake.
I believe that all of these folks reached down to where a deep well of integrity resided within them, and, faced with no good choices, made the most live-giving, the most soul affirming decision available to them.
They brought pockets of wholeness into broken and morally incoherent systems that were shattering people’s lives.
This month, as a religious community, we are exploring what it means to be a people of integrity.
I wanted to start this morning by revisiting that time when the AIDS epidemic left us with such difficult choices – to lift up the immigration atrocity we are witnessing now to illustrate how sometimes living with integrity is not so easy.
I think sometimes when it comes to integrity, we can tend to take this Dudley Doright approach of “just do the right thing”, when, in fact it is much more complicated than that.
Our word, integrity, stems from the latin “integer”, meaning whole and complete.
As in mathematics, wherein an integer is a number that is not divided into fractions, integrity implies that we are not divided – our actions, speech and methods are consistent with our core self, our values, our aspirations.
And this wholeness helps us to maintain our integrity even when the ethical choices we face are complex and unclear.
This more nuanced conceptualization of integrity, I believe, has profound implications for us, both as individuals and as communities.
At the individual level, author, educator and advocate, Parker Palmer, writes that integrity comes when we get in touch with our very soul.
Now, “soul” can simply mean the essence of who we are; the person we were born to be; though for some of us it may have mystical implications also.
Parker writes of observing the birth of his first grandchild, “What I saw was clear and simple: my granddaughter arrived on earth as this kind of person, rather than that, or that, or that … we are born with a seed of selfhood that contains the spiritual DNA of our uniqueness, an encoded birthright knowledge of who we are, why we are here, and how we are related to others. We may abandon that knowledge as the years go by, but it never abandons us.”
For Parker, we can sometimes get separated from our truest self because of fear, societal pressures and the like. So, regaining our integrity means reintegrating our souls, embracing that at our core we are enough.
Now, embracing that we are enough as who we are, imperfections and all, while at the same time embracing that most of us have a desire to I grow and improve can seem like a paradox.
There are two thing that I think can help move this from Paradox to a sort of both land conceptualization.
Dr. Brene Brown, author and social science researcher, encourages us to approach other people with the assumption that they are doing the best they can with the tools they have.
I think we can offer ourselves this same grace. If I am doing the best I can with the tools I have, then my efforts at self improvement can be seen not so much as changing who I am but as learning new tools for maintaining wholeness and integrity.
I think also, we tend to think of growth as always being about adding something new. However, quite often becoming more whole involves letting go of something harmful or unearthing some part of ourselves we have lost.
Here is another really cool both and acting with integrity will nourish our souls and help us be whole … AND nourishing our souls through spiritual practices and engaging in faithful community will fortify our integrity when we face difficult situations such as I was describing earlier.
I now pause for our Sunday moment of harping on the importance of spiritual practices as promised in a sermon a couple of weeks ago.
I want to return to this idea of growth often involving unearthing something we have lost.
I think for those of us who have experienced having our identity marginalized, this can be an especially important aspect of wholeness and claiming our integrity.
Actress America Ferrera, whom you may know from the movie, “Real Women have Curves” or the TV series, “Ugly Betty” has a Ted Talk called, “My Identity is My Superpower”.
In it she speaks of dreaming of becoming an actress every since she was a nine year old girl who would dance around the den of her house.
She tells of going to her first professional audition, and being asked, “Can you read the part again but sound more hispanic?”
She describes how even after having found success, she still faced casting stereotyping and being turned down for roles because, quote “you look too latino”.
She says she even began to straighten her hair, tried to loose weight, avoided the sun so her skin would not turn so brown.
Finally, she had gotten cast in a movie with a Latinx character but was told her casting could not be announced until the white lead character got cast because the movie would sell better if the white person was announced first.
She had an epiphany. She was no longer going to change herself into something she wasn’t. She was going to reclaim her true identity and work to change the system instead. Here she is describing this altered perspective.
VIDEO
I want to close by holding up that this wholeness that is so vital to our being able to live with integrity as individuals is also crucial for us as a religious community.
Our integrity as a religious community comes alive when we get in touch with the core of our faith: when we live according to those principles we read together earlier, when our ways of being are whole, consonant with the values this church has expressed – transcendence, community, compassion, courage, transformation.
I think that do to that, we have to keep our principles and values in front of us, keep them explicit in our hearts and minds.
That’s why I support the proposed 8th principle – it takes something essential to the integrity of our faith that is implicit in our other principles and makes it explicit.
And my beloveds, we face a heavy challenge in these days in which we currently live, because we cannot be consistent with our principles and values, unless we speak out and take action against the gross human rights abuses of our current administration.
We cannot claim our integrity as a religious community unless we rise up to counter with love the emboldenment of hate groups and increased hate crimes they are committing against folks who are already marginalized.
I don’t use terms like “alt right” or “white nationalists” or even “white supremacists” because those are euphemisms that soften what is at the core of these groups.
So, to know what we are really up against, I believe we must call them what they are – hate groups, even while we must resist returning the hate.
I know none of us can do all. We cannot all participate in all the rallies and marches, make all the phone calls, sign all the petitions, do all the visits with congress critters and all the things.
We can all do what we can though. Spend one day registering folks to vote, give what we can to those who are doing the work of the revolution, make what call we can help our children understand what living with integrity in the world looks like for our faith.
And this is an election year, so what’s one thing we can all do come November?
That’s right – vote! And encourage others to vote and help get folks to the polls if you have the time and ability. Parker Palmer says that to be whole, we need trustworthy relationships and tenacious communities of support.
That’s part of why I love serving this congregation so much.
I believe you are just such a trustworthy, tenacious community of support and integrity.
Amen
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