Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Jonalu Johnstone
January 8, 2023
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

The past has shaped us. We rest in the present. We look forward to the future. How do they interact together to help us find our center?

Chalice Lighting

This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.

Call to Worship

LET ASTONISHMENT BE POSSIBLE
by Rev. Gretchen Haley

Whatever you have come in
anticipating
Whatever you expect
Or worry
For our world, for the future
For our lives-
Let it go

Make space in your heart to be surprised
Make room in your soul
For a new story to take shape
Let astonishment be possible

At this life that remains a miracle
Imagine here the bursting of joy
Relentless and resilient
Coming in waves
Washing over us
with music,
and story
silence,

and still this dreaming together
Being hope for each other
and courage
to believe
in this new day dawning
for us all.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Meditation Reading

WE ARE ABLE
by Vijaya Balan

Things happen, moments are created, faces are remembered and feelings are tightly grasped within the dry skin of our cracked hands,
Cracked hearts too maybe?

Where do we go but forward,
Remembering absent friends, lost loves, broken dreams and a hope to bury it all in that dark backyard behind our weathered but sturdy home,

We will move on, forge new paths, break new barriers, repeat a thing or two,
but oh well,

We all have some familiar cycles in our life right?
We are resilience built on the foundation of faith and belief, We are unwritten pages, with past chapters that can fill a library, a library that none might visit,
And we will still go ahead and do everything that we want to, regardless of what anyone else ever said,

We are beings with a field of uncertainty surrounded by determination at the most unexpected moments,
Love and let go, love and cherish, love and be broken, love and not expect anything in return, love and be loved back a 1000 times,

We are the sum of billions of atoms,
We are the moments we create and the things that happen, We are the beliefs of more than thousands of faiths in this world,

We are the tragedies of past, the conundrums of the present and the triumphs of tomorrow,
We are able,
We are capable of all of them,
We are capable and able.

---

Austin UU History Lesson

WHERE DO WE COME FROM?
– Leo Collas

Unitarianism was brought to Austin by the Reverend Edwin Miller Wheelock in 1868.

Wheelock was a Harvard educated lawyer who also graduated from Harvard Divinity School as a Unitarian minister. He was a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and was even open to Transcendentalism.

He served in the Civil War as a chaplain in the Union army, and afterward worked with the Freedmen’s Bureau in the gulf coast area of Louisiana and Texas. He was married and had 2 children.

His specialty was in education. He developed curriculums to teach formerly enslaved children how to read. His work was very effective, and in 1868, the governor of Texas moved him to Austin and appointed him as the first Superintendent of Schools. This may just sound like a nice, progressive career path, but there is a really interesting backstory to all of this that makes it a really amazing story.

Wheelock was a devoted abolitionist. He was passionate about what we now call “human rights” and was outspoken about the immoral institution of slavery. Here is the story about that.

Soon after he got his first Unitarian ministerial appointment, in Dover Massachusetts, he delivered a stirring sermon supporting the raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry Virginia by fellow abolitionist John Brown. Brown, in October 1859, raided the Federal Armory intending to start a slave liberation movement that would spread to the southern states. It wasn’t well planned, and the enslaved people it was meant to liberate didn’t exactly know what was going on, so it failed. Brown was tried for treason and was hanged on December 2, 1859, the first person executed for treason in the history of the United States.

Wheelock’s sermon made him kinda famous. He was asked to speak in Boston, and his sermon was printed in newspapers.

Wheelock’s sermon didn’t pull any punches on the topic of slavery: “withholding the key of knowledge, abrogating the marriage relation, rending families asunder at the auction block, makes the State that protects it a band of pirates, and the church that enshrines it a baptized brothel.” The State of Virginia put a $1500 bounty on his capture – dead or alive – for treason. Luckily for Wheelock, the civil war broke out in 1861. He immediately enlisted and became a chaplain in the Union Army.

That’s how he got appointed to work with the Freedmen’s Bureau during reconstruction.

But think about it. Here is this man who was once hated throughout the South, somehow able to work with both the Southern gulf states and the Federal government to do something that the people of the South found unimaginable – teaching reading to those they had enslaved! He was able to do it, and do it successfully. And he got a high-ranking position in Texas from Governor Pease – who was a former slave owner!

Wheelock had some mighty diplomatic skills.

He served in a number of high-ranking jobs in Texas government, including as the Superintendent of the School for the Blind. Texas was not really ready for liberal religion at that time and Wheelock knew that. He went to Spokane Washington in 1887 to form the Unitarian Society of Spokane and serve as its minister for 2 years. He came back to Austin and in 1891 started a Unitarian ministry here. That ministry survived Wheelock’s death in 1901 (he was 72), and continued through WW1. Rev. Wheelock’s daughter, Emilie, carried the mantle of Unitarianism in Austin after her father’s death and for the rest of her life. From what I have gathered, she had a lot of her Father’s diplomacy and courage. Emilie was married to a British man by the name of John D. Howson, who was associated with the International Great Northern Railroad and the Austin National Bank. They had 1 child, Edwin, who died as an infant in 1889. Emilie’s great social justice passion was for getting the vote for women. She was involved in every organization that promoted women’s rights, and she was a leader of many of them. Emilie was a charter member of the Austin Woman’s Club and was involved in the formation of the Texas Federation of Women’s Clubs. After years of working toward women’s suffrage, Emilie was 59 years old when the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920.

Austin Unitarianism survived quietly, evolving after WW1 into the Community Church of Austin, which ceased in the winter of 1951 when it morphed into the Unitarian Fellowship of Austin. Services were held in people’s homes initially. Among the founding members was Emilie Wheelock Howson, who was by then 90 years old.

Emilie called in all of her favors to get things jump started for this church. I think she knew it was going to be her last hurrah. The YWCA gave the fellowship space to meet, then the Texas Federation of Women’s Clubs did. Other Women’s organizations gave equipment and administrative assistance.

Finally, in 1954, the Unitarian Fellowship of Austin had grown strong enough to call its first minister, and become incorporated as the First Unitarian Church of Austin. There were 66 families committed to the new church, with 81 members, and it continued to grow.

Sadly, in 1957, Emilie Wheelock Howson died. She was 96 years old. But she wasn’t done helping this congregation. She left this congregation a legacy of $100,000 (equivalent of about $1M today) which was used to purchase land and build a church here at this site. The building was dedicated in January of 1961 with “Howson Hall” named in Emilie’s honor.

Rev. Wheelock and his daughter Emilie played key roles in the forming of this church, but they were not the only ones. It was their spirit, their determined commitment to the spiritual practice of social justice that helped inspire others. I’m certain there were many individuals who inspired them.

After Howson Hall was built in 1961, the classroom wing was built in 1968, and in 1987 this beautiful sanctuary was added. There are many stories about all the things that have taken place here, many people who have worked toward compassion and justice in this place from racial integration, to LGBTQ rights, moral treatment of immigrants and refugees, reproductive justice, the list goes on. In 1961 when the initial church building was new, the Austin American Statesman published an article entitled “Unitarian Service Features Dancing”. I’m sure that caused a collective clutch of the pearls around the city. But little did they know, we were just getting started.

Sermon

Thank you, Leo. It’s important to hear and know the stories of our past. To find ourselves, our center, which is this month’s theme, we need to learn from the past, to rest in the present and to look to the future. Or, as the poet said earlier, “We are the tragedies of past, the conundrums of the present and the triumphs of tomorrow.” Of course, we are also the triumphs of the past, the joys of the present and the uncertainties of tomorrow.

I no longer believe that my biography begins with my birth. I can’t tell my personal story without also telling you about my mother and my father, who met in the military and courted going to Broadway shows on USO tickets and who gave me both my genes and a nurturing environment. My story even includes my grandparents, who shaped my parents. Would I be who I am if my mother’s parents hadn’t run a dairy in Oklahoma? If her grandparents hadn’t moved to Oklahoma from Illinois and Iowa? If my father’s father hadn’t come to Maine from Canada? If my father hadn’t been adopted? My beginnings go further back in time than I can even recount, or recall, because I only know them from the stories other people have told me.

We create our stories of ourselves. All of us have stories we tell over and over about our lives – the story of how we met our spouse, of how we chose our career, of the birth of our child, of the death of our parent. We tell our stories to reinforce our experience and so that we can understand better what has happened to us and who we are. This is true for trauma, as well as joy, failure as well as success. It’s why we tell stories of those we love after they die – we are inscribing those stories on our hearts and minds so that our loved one lives on. We really only learn from our experience when we have translated and refined our story. Without putting it into a form, it’s hard to learn from experience. We need the story to make meaning out of the experience, to understand what has happened, to learn so we can move on, whether in the same or in a different way. Commentator David Brooks has written: “If you don’t have a real story, you don’t have a real self.”

We do the same thing on communal levels. Our families have stories, our church does, as Leo shared a bit this morning, our nation does. None of these stories are idle or random. They establish the essence of the civilization, defining how life is to be, how people are to act, and what has the most value. The past is as much story as history – so it matters if and how we include the 1619 arrival of enslaved people in this country, the genocide and land-grabbing against indigenous people, the colonization, the Civil War. None of these stories is singular, they are collections of individual stories, and they always have a particular perspective.

The foundational stories of the Pilgrims coming to Massachusetts have shaped us, both as Americans and as Unitarian Universalists, since the Pilgrims are our direct religious ancestors. Since we’re so deeply influenced by such stories, we need to hear the others, like the Wampanoang people’s story, since they were there when the Pilgrims arrived.

History is never as simple as, “Look at this perfect hero,” or “That evil person ruined everything.” We’d like it to be so, yet the stories really are nuanced, full of imperfect heroes and a tug of war between good and evil where the sides cannot always be identified until much later.

White UU theologian Rebecca Parker gives us perspective on just how broken our world is – and note, she wrote this in the early days of the 21st century, long before the current crises:

We are living in a post-slavery, post-Holocaust, postVietnam, post-Hiroshima world. We are living in the aftermath of collective violence that has been severe, massive, and traumatic. The scars from slavery, genocide, and meaningless war mark our bodies. We are living in the midst of rain forest burning, the rapid death of species, the growing pollution of the air and water, and new mutations of racism and violence.

Parker’s phrase “post-slavery, post-Holocaust, postVietnam, post-Hiroshima world” reminds us of the significance of what we call history. She goes on to tell us that history has left scars. Then, she locates us in the particular context of our present. Today we would need to add post-9/11, post-Jan 6, and living amidst the spread of viruses previously unknown.

Scottish-American moral philosopher Alasdair Maclnttyre says that I can’t answer the question “What am I to do?” until “I can answer the prior question, “Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?””

As consequential, powerful and unavoidable as stories are, they can also mislead us, even trap us in a lie. That’s why we need to continually re-examine, re-tell, re-write the stories.

Have you ever been with siblings and told childhood stories, only to find that you all remember what happened differently? You could consider that problematic – if our memory was like a video-recording that we could trust to be objective. But it’s not. Our memories include our emotional responses, as well as sensory data; our judgments, as well as our observations. Which is why our sibs don’t agree with our memories of that Thanksgiving years ago. We did not live through the same experience.

The advantage to the way we encode long-term memory is that we can rewrite our stories – either to include new information that we didn’t know before or to look at our lives from a different perspective. Psychologists call it narrative therapy, a process of telling a story that grounds a particular problem, then finding new ways of seeing that story, and retelling it, so that the problem is minimized.

Here’s a simple example from UU minister Amanda Poppei. She writes:

I used to believe a story that I was a bad driver. I don’t like driving on highways, lance hit a parking post in a garage, I needed the examiner to explain a three-point turn during my driver’s test. All those things are true, and so the story must be true, too. But over time, I’ve worked on hearing a different story. This story is the one about how I drive all through DC, handling traffic circles like a pro. It’s about good parallel parking skills, and always wearing my seatbelt and using my blinker. It’s about passing my driver’s test the first time, since I did, after all, know how to do a three-point turn. Those things are all true, too, so the story must be true.

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/lBcdD3- HrGkRPgOIXre8mup4a7wuujQJwlkHNdsMKH4Y/edit]

The stories we tell ourselves are interpretative at least as much as reality based. We have some freedom to choose our stories. Not absolute freedom. If your stories drift far enough from real facts, then they become ridiculous fantasies, like the biography of George Santos.

“A tree, whatever the circumstances, does not become a legume, a vine, or a cow,” explains biracial Ghanian Brit Kwame Anthony Appiah in the Ethics of Identity. “The reasonable middle view is that constructing an identity isa good thing … but that the identity must make some kind of sense.”

[qtd. in https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2015/jun /12/rachel-dolezal-black-identity-civil-rights-leader

We don’t get to choose everything about our story because we are shaped by who we are born as and the people we have come from and by the people who are entangled in our lives and memories.

But — since we have stashed emotional and interpretive content in with our objective and sense-based data, we can pull the whole mess out and pull apart what’s there and ask ourselves, “Is what I believe to be true about myself, about my life, really based in truth, or have I distorted it? Have I learned something else? Do I need a new story?”

Part of the challenge is that when new facts we encounter don’t fit into our story, we tend to ignore the facts rather than reconfigure the story. That’s just how our brains are made, so we have to work to overcome that impulse to dismiss what doesn’t fit.

None of us is one thing. None of us has a single story. Your church certainly doesn’t have a single story; nor does our nation. Stories are shaped by who has the power to tell them, by the perspectives they include – and exclude – by the visions they cast and the boundaries they draw. And stories shape us, which means we need to continually examine our stories for truth, for completeness, and for how they serve – or fail to serve – us.

“Stories can break. And stories can repair,” said Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie. Indeed. Stories can break. And stories can repair.

Returning to a past that has been distorted or moving ahead to a future that has never been more than a dream. We are going through a time in our nation where the illusion of a shared national story has evaporated. Recognizing the illusion for what it is, maybe we are freed to shift into the future with the scales removed from our eyes.

We need a process of sorting out meaning. We have to see what we want to claim from the past and how to recast it to serve the future. We have to decide which relics are worn out and which fresh enthusiasms we wish to pursue. Knowing more about the past and the present allows us to make more reasonable choices for the future.

The present is more than the dividing line between past and future. Nigerian storyteller Ben Okri says:

… we live by stories, we also live in them. One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted – knowingly or unknowingly – in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.

[A Way of Being Free (London: Phoenix House, 1997), 46, qtd in King, The Truth about Stories, 153]

We hold the past in our present, and sometimes need to let it go. The great Black American writer James Baldwin writes: “It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.”

Only when we have sorted our past can we fully be present in our present and look to the future. UU’s love Utopian visions. Thumb through the hymnal sometime if you don’t believe me. We will never reach those visions – the Beloved Community — until we have better understood our past and acknowledged our present.

That’s true for us as individuals, too.

May we treasure what we can of the past, acknowledge the rest of it, rest contentedly in the present, as we move towards the future we envision together.

Benediction

THAT WHICH IS WORTHY OF DOING
By Steve J Crump

That which is worthy of doing, create with your hands.
That which is worthy of repeating, speak with a clear voice.
That which is worthy of remembering, hold in your hearts.
And that which is worthy of living, go and live it now.

SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 23 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link above to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

PODCASTS

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link above or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776