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Rev. Chris Jimmerson and Rev. Michelle LaGrave
October 27, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Each year, we celebrate the differences we make in our world together, and the joy that comes from being a part of and supporting this religious community. Join us for an uplifting service followed by a joyful celebration of building the Beloved Community together.
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
Today we celebrate a dream awakening.
Today we worship with renewed hope in our hearts.
Today we act on an audacity of hopes and dreams for the future.
Today we begin the hard work for justice, equity and compassion in all human relations, for today is a day like no other and it is ours to shape with vision and action.
Let us worship together and celebrate a dream awakening.
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Reading
Once a traveler came across three bricklayers.
She asked each one of them, “What are you doing”?
The first answered gruffly, “I’m laying bricks,” and returned sullenly to his work.
The second replied, “I’m putting up a wall,” and continued with the task at hand, growing wearier and slower with each brick.
But the third aid enthusiastically and with pride, “I’m building a cathedral.” And not so long after, it came to be, and was more magnificent than anyone could have possibly imagined.
– Anonymous
Sermon
Chris’ Homily
Happy Celebration Sunday!
On this, the last Sunday of October, last year, I was preaching the last of two sermons of a full ministerial candidating week, and then everyone went off to vote on whether I would be called as the next settled minister (while I waited nervously at a coffee shop one block away).
So, I am celebrating that I’m not doing that again on this Sunday this year!
And a year later, we have much to celebrate!
Today, we celebrate you, and the commitments, the pledges you have made or will make to keep this church and its mission alive and going strong in our world.
Your pledges make so much possible.
We have built an ever-growing culture of caring at First Unitarian Universalist (or UU), launching our Caring Companions lay pastoral support ministry and are planning for even more organized ways of supporting one another in the months to come.
Your pledges make a thriving social action ministry at the church possible.
This church year, we have committed more time and resources to dedicated church-wide social justice events and worship services than ever before, on topics like reproductive justice, climate justice, democracy and voting and more.
We are also working to make sure we live our social justice values here first, by exploring how we can become ever more inclusive and welcoming, finding ways to offer accessibility across all areas of church life, and taking steps to dismantle vestiges of white supremacy culture in our own ways of doing things.
Fare the well, Roberts Rules of Order, we bless and release you. Now, we have an election coming up in a little over a week, and no matter what the result, this church will be called upon to do justice and build the Beloved Community more than ever.
Depending upon the result of the election, those in control of our state government during the upcoming legislative session will either feel empowered and unchecked by the next Presidential administration or, if it goes the other way, they will do their best to undermine and run as counter to it as possible.
So, either way, as the large UU Church nearest the state capital, we will be there to demand love and justice, our voices raised and on occasion, I suspect, our fists in solidarity with so many of our partners.
Let us celebrate today that because of your pledges, that strong and faithful voice for love and justice will be showing up and stirring up!
Your pledges are also making it possible for this church to playa larger and larger role in our greater UU faith movement.
We’ve become a virtual birthing center for mentoring and supporting new ministers. I’ve lost count of how many ministers have come out of this church and how many of our current folks are at various stages of becoming UU ministers.
In the months to come we will also again become an internship site.
Folks from throughout the church are serving in several leadership capacities within our larger faith, and we continue to explore partnerships with other local UU churches, TXUUJM, and our UU Southern Region.
More and more folks are visiting the church and joining as members. We’re growing, not just in numbers, but in our spiritual development and our presence in each others lives and in our world.
This too is happening because your commitment is providing that spiritual home so many are seeking.
Well, I could go on and on about the future and vision your pledges make possible – a future and vision that will no doubt be extremely appealing to potential co-lead ministers out there!
I will close with this though.
When this church called me around this time last year, I had no way of knowing that my own personal calling would be altered so drastically only a few months later, when I would be called to become first caregiver and then mourner for the love of my life.
Because of that, I have witnessed in a very personal way the very real difference this church and our UU faith makes in people’s lives.
In the last months, they saved mine.
So, I celebrate you today for creating a religious community that I could not be prouder to say I serve as a minister.
I celebrate you.
Thank you for being First UU.
Michelle’s Homily
NOTE: This is an edited ai generated transcript.
Please forgive any omissions or errors.
I’d like to tell you a little story. It’s a story about three people named Aubrey, Sasha, and Kinsey. Sasha is your administrator, Aubrey is your kitchen manager, and Kinsey is your manager of religious education.
They came up with an idea. I imagine it was a little idea at first but then as they talked and planned it grew and grew and grew. There were requests for recycled materials to come into the church. Cardboard tubes and boxes and paper towel rolls. There were searches on Facebook Marketplace looking for reused and repurposed materials for their project. There was sorting through and culling out of large storage closets. There was requests of volunteers to donate time and materials. And the project, the idea, grew and grew. It was definitely a project, not an idea anymore.
And I inserted myself every so often and asked if they needed some more of this or something of that and mostly they said that they were good and I wasn’t quite sure how it was gonna turn out because last night was the big reveal of their project. Have you all figured out what I’m talking about yet? Haunted Howson Hall.
I know not all of you have seen it yet. And it’s mostly still there. Last night it was much darker and much spookier and had more candy and had some games that aren’t there right now. But even so, the next few days it will remain up and you can be able to go through it and explore it and experience it.
And this is the totally unbelievable part. How many of you have already seen it or experienced it? A number of you have. Would you believe all of it costs less than $200? They are amazing. I was bowled over when I walked in last night and experienced haunted housing. It was amazing and it was fun and there were little kids and there were older adults and we were all there together and there were costumes and fun to be had.
And it’s a story not just of abundance because everything this community needed to put on something as fun and amazing as haunted housing was already here. It’s also a story of transformation. That hall is just this little segment of our bigger picture as first UU community. Your staff, and some very dedicated volunteers, and even the students that go to high school here during the week helped out and transformed your hall for you for this amazing celebration Sunday.
So here is the part where I talk about being an interim and what that means. I haven’t really talked about it a whole bunch with you over the whole last year, but a key part of being an interim is intentionally coming in with an outsider’s perspective, being able to reflect back to you what it is that I see and that’s important in what I’m trying to say today on Celebration Sunday.
So you know that I’m leaving and I’ll be with you the rest of the year but I will be leaving. You know that my salary is already set I’m not invested personally in what happens with the Pledge Drive and the budget for the next several months. I’ll be going, but I am invested in the presence of this church as an amazing, thriving, vital UU community, and I want more of them all over the place, but especially in Austin, Texas.
So anyways, this Outsiders perspective is what I want to say about that is that this building that you’re doing, this building of the beloved community, it’s really all about you. It’s about you, it’s about your amazing staff. It’s about your amazing minister. It is about your amazing seminarians and newly ordained ministers, your community ministers, your musicians, your choir, your children, everybody. It’s all about you and what you are becoming.
So I kind of have this image in my head. I wish I had like two little poles right here with those red flashing lights, strobe lights that could go off, okay. So we’ve been hearing that y ‘all want some more theology, explicit theology. So theology, here we come. (audience laughing) There’s your warning sign. So, as an outsider, I am free to celebrate with you everything that you have become so far and everything you will someday become and everything you are right now.
Becoming is an ongoing theological and spiritual process. We are always becoming. We are always building on what has become before. We are always building on what is yet to come. This is process theology. I’m a process theologian in part, as is Chris. I’m also a pantheist. So I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about that, but it does go all the way back to William Ellery Channing and his preaching sermons about being a likeness to God in the 19th century theology-of-self culture and building ourselves up and always improving and becoming better. So there is some of that white stuff in there that we want to dismantle, but it’s also about God or the holy, whatever it is, the universe that you see that is bigger than any of us as individuals, is also in process, is also growing, is also changing. It’s a rejection of a static God or a static holy or static divine. So together with with whatever is greater than us, we are building. We are becoming.
I joked with Brent earlier about this old cartoon called Bob the Builder. Do any of you know it? It was popular when my nephew was a kid. And the opening song goes, I’m not going to sing it, but it’s about Bob the builder, can he build it? Yes, he can. We heard it from the choir. I sent him a YouTube video and told him that’s what we should sing today. Thankfully, he chose something else.
But the truth is that we are all Bob. I’m Bob, even as my outsider perspective, you’re Bob, you’re Bob, all of you are Bob, new people who just joined the church are Bob, the visitors who are here for the very first time are Bob, the people who’ve been here since the 1950s and helped founded this church are Bob. We are all Bob, members, friends, new folks, visitors. you have built, we are building, and you will continue to build it. All of us. So just like House and Hall has been transformed out of the abundance of resources that are already here, that are present, right here, right now, you are. We are together transforming this community both inside and outside of these physical walls. Right now you are at 85 percent of your goal after only two weeks. Let’s celebrate that.
We’re going to celebrate that today. And as careful as your staff has been with the resources that you entrust to them, Under $200, amazing experience right outside these doors, the truth is that our expenses have gone up by a lot, by a real lot. And I know that those sustaining pledges are easy to continue from year to year. So whether you haven’t pledged yet or you’re one of our amazing sustainers, remember to go in, and if you can, if you at all possibly can, increase those pledges so that we can keep up with those rising expenses. We are almost there. So let’s continue to pool those resources, let’s celebrate, let’s bring this pledge drive home. All the way, All the way, people keep telling me that you kind of usually stop at 85, 90, 95%. I’m challenging you to get to 100 % or more before the end of the drive. We have everything we already need right here in this room, out there in House and Hall, out there online. Our resources are here.
Let’s pull them together so that we can keep on doing amazing things because you are amazing and you are doing amazing things. Every dollar, every hour, given counts. Can we build it? Yes, we can.
Amen, and blessed be.
Extinguishing the Chalice
We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we hold in our hearts until we are together again.
Benediction
by Peter S. Raible
We build on foundations we did not lay. We warm ourselves by fires we did not light.
We sit in the shade of trees we did not plant We drink from wells we did not dig. M: We profit from persons we did not know
This is as it should be.
Together we are more than anyone person could be.
Together we can build across the generations.
Together we can renew our hope and faith in the life that is yet to unfold. C: Together we can heed the call to a ministry of care and justice.
We are ever bound in community.
May it always be so.
Amen and Blessed Be. Go in Peace
Most sermons during the past 24 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.
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