2024 Commitment Sunday

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson and Rev. Michelle LaGrave
October 13, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

We join together with love, joy, and a sense of belonging to express our commitment to our mission. Join us on this special Sunday when we explore building the Beloved Community and all that we are and dream of becoming as a religious community. Together, we make our pledges for 2025 so that we may live that commitment into the future.

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

REACHING FOR THE SUN
by Rev. Angela Herrera

Don’t leave your broken heart at the door;
bring it to the altar of life.
Don’t leave your anger behind;
it has high standards
and the world needs your vision.
Bring them with you, and your joy
and your passion.

Bring your loving,
and your courage
and your conviction.
Bring your need for healing,
and your power to heal.
There is work to do
and you have all that you need to do it
right here in this room.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Centering

ALL THAT YOU NEED LIES WITHIN YOU
by the Rev. Angela Herrera

Consider this an invitation
to you.
Yes – you
with all your happiness
and your burdens,
your hopes and regrets.

An invitation if you feel good today,
and an invitation if you do not,
if you are aching –
and there are so many ways to ache.

Whoever you are, however you are,
wherever you are in your journey,
this is an invitation into peace.
Peace in your heart,
and peace in your heart,
and – with every breath
peace in your heart.

Maybe your heart is heavy
or hardened.
Maybe it’s troubled
and peace can take up residence
only in a small corner,
only on the edge,
with all that is going on in the world,
and in your life. Ni modo. It doesn’t matter.
All that you need
for a deep and comforting peace to grow
lies within you.
Once it is in your heart
let it spread into your life,
let it pour thru your life into the world
and once it is in the world,
let it shine upon all beings.

Sermon

NOTE: This is an edited ai generated transcript.
Please forgive any omissions or errors.

MICHELLE’S HOMILY

I love this congregation. My favorite part of it is on Sunday morning when I walk in and I feel all of this energy and vitality as people are gathering and entering into the sanctuary and I can feel, I know, that this church is alive, that is doing things, that is going somewhere, that feeling is palpable. You know your mission, you recite it, you believe in it, you live it, you refer to it, you are so curious, you have this great immense love of learning, an ability to change and grow and transform both yourselves and your congregation.

You have resilience, so much resilience, which we can see even in the story of the last dozen years or so. When you went from a time a really painful conflict with the congregation voting to dismiss a minister to doing the work of an interim work that you really did. Then calling Reverend Meg Barnhouse, your minister emerita, doing the work of rebuilding healthy relationships, covenanting together as a congregation, surviving the pandemic together as a congregation, and then coming out of it ready to rebuild, ready to grow in spirit and in numbers. Not every congregation did that. Some are still faltering, some are still recovering. And yet we come in here, and most Sundays, we’re almost overcrowded.

There’s a retreat going on at UBARU this Sunday, so we’re a little lighter for people on retreat. But still, you’re all here, and I can feel your presence, your love of being here, your joy in being here, the ways in which you are comforted by being here.

You went through the news of Reverend Meg’s devastating illness. You supported her through her need for an early medical retirement. You are going through the interim process again. You are working, you worked through the decision to go to co-ministry, you called Reverend Chris, you learned the departure of your DRE, went through another healthy transition process, moving the fabulous Kinsey into managing the RE program, Religious Education program, and now you are going in to search again. And still, the energy is there. And sometimes the staff struggles to keep up with all of you. Often we struggle to keep up with all of you. We talk about this a lot. It’s the opposite problem a lot of congregations have. You are amazing. And that’s just the brief story of what you’ve done and what you’ve been through in recent years. You’ve also done so much more than that. And still, you come out ready to thrive, ready to grow, ready to do, to nourish souls, to transform lives, and to do justice. That is truly amazing. This is my job as an interim to reflect your story back to you.

I’ve been around the block a bit. I’ve served congregations in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Illinois, Nebraska, and Texas. And it is being here in Austin, in this city, in this congregation that gives me faith in the future of our liberal religious tradition as a whole. Faith that we can and we will not just survive, but thrive, post-pandemic. That other congregations can learn how to do what you are doing and have been doing. That in this new world that is all too quickly emerging with its immense needs, including the needs for spiritual nourishment and transformation and justice building that it can be done. You all have, you already have a very long history of supporting and integrating the LGBTQ + community and working to integrate and support the local BIPOC community. You’ve passed the eighth principle, which is about anti-racism for those of you who haven’t heard of it yet, who might be new. You’ve worked through a congregational process of supporting the UUA’s Article 2 bylaws change, and now, as you heard last week from Celeste Padilla, you have more to do. Yes, there is more to do, both internally and externally. Internally, there is more to be done in the process of dismantling a culture of privilege that is embedded in not just all of our congregations, but all of our nation’s institutions. More to be done to become truly radically welcoming to all people, including BIPOC folks, non-binary folks, and disabled folks, keeping in mind that some of us are the same people. So many of us have intersecting backgrounds identities and needs and you will do it You will do it. It’ll be challenging and I have faith that you will do it.

These are some of the reasons why I believe in this congregation. I hope that you do too And I hope you will show that you believe in this congregation too, by increasing your commitment to it in all the ways, by working to grow yourself spiritually, by working to transform the culture of this congregation, I should say continue to transform the culture of this transformation of this congregation, and by increasing your financial commitment to do all that we are here to do. One of the things that we ministers and staff have been hearing lately, and we do listen, is that you like to make the Church’s covenant more prominent in the life of the congregation. You’d like to see it more, hear about it more, read it more. So let us begin by doing that now.

Let us begin by making it even more clear how it is that we aspire to be together as we do the work of fulfilling the mission of this congregation. So will you rejoin me in recommitting to this congregation, to its mission, and to each other by reading or listening to the Covenant together now.

FIRST UU CHURCH OF AUSTIN COVENANT OF HEALTHY RELATIONS

As a religious community, we promise:

To Welcome and Serve by

Being intentionally hospitable to all people of good will
Celebrating all aspects of diversity
Treating other as we want to be treated
Being present with one another through life’s transitions
Encouraging the spiritual growth of people of all ages

To Nurture and Protect by

Communicating with one another directly in a spirit of compassion and good will
Enshuring those who wish to communicate are heard and understood
Speaking when silence would inhibit progress
Disagreeing from a place of curiosity and respect
Interrupting hurtful interactions when we witness them
Expressing our appreciation to each other

To Sustain and Build by

Affirming our gratitude with generous gifts of time, talent and money for our beloved community
Honoring our commitments to ourselves and one another for the sake of our own integrity and that of our congregation
Forgiving ourselves and others when we fall short of expectations, showing good humor and the optimism required for moving forward

Thus do we covenant with one another.

So we are covenanted, so we are committed.

CHRIS’S HOMILY

Thus do we covenant. These promises we make. This is our great commitment to center ourselves in love and right relationship together.

Last Sunday, as Michelle mentioned, Celeste Padilla so eloquently reminded us that the commitment we make is not just to who we are now, but it is also to building the beloved community of our dreams and aspirations. I just lost my spouse Wayne a little over a month ago, and so, of course, as we have approached this commitment Sunday, I haven’t been able to help but think about the commitment he and I made to one another, and how we came to realize that that commitment was not just to who we are and the love we have at any moment, but also to acting for that love, doing the work to keep that love growing stronger and larger.

So I have to share with you all a story about that commitment we had to becoming together. So to start, you have to know that Wayne absolutely loved dogs. You’ll see why in a little bit. Now some of you have heard the first part of the story before. Wayne and I first got legally married in Vancouver, Canada. We got married in this beautiful house on the bay by this wonderful woman who happened to be babysitting a dog named Marley who she thought she had locked away for the time of doing our nuptials but Marley broke free and came in and that turned out to be a good thing because when we got to the point where we were to say our vows both Wayne and I got unexpectedly emotional and couldn’t really speak and Wayne was able to make before he got too sick to travel was to go back to Vancouver. And unbeknownst to me, while he was there, he fell in love with the work of a gay Ukrainian artist and bought this large piece of art that I didn’t know about. And in the weeks leading up to his death, he started to kind of sheepishly tell me about this because that was kind of against the rules of our relationship to buy a big piece we were gonna hang in our house without talking to each other about it. But he hoped I would love it as much as him and he had even picked out where he hoped I would frame it and hang it in the house.

Well a week after he died I found the cardboard tube that had the piece of art in it. So I took it to a frame shop near our house and I told the woman who was helping me, I probably can’t make it through this without breaking up because of the situation and as she unrolled it and I saw that it wasn’t the print I thought it would be but the actual piece of art, art and the actual canvas, I did totally lose it.

Well, there was a female couple in the shop with us who had a dog and the dog came running over and insisted that it love on me and I love on it and that once again rescued me so we were able to measure the piece of art and it was so large they had to ship it off to their central warehouse in order to get it framed.

Oh, and also, Wayne and I had been discussing that our oldest dog, Benjamin, turns nine years old on January one of next year, and so I should think about getting another puppy to help me through when I lose Benjamin, because that’s getting near the end of his lifespan, and it would really help our younger dog, Luisa, who has never lived without a canine companion. So I started looking into that, but it was a little too soon right now because I plan on doing travel through the end of the year.

And at the same time I was doing that, I kept trying to track the painting online and it kept saying, “We can’t wait to get started.” And a month later, I was starting to worry like, “Have they lost the painting?”

Well, yesterday was my day, the first one without Wayne, and so I was worried about how I was going to make it through that. And then partway through last week, I got an email from the woman that we bought Benjamin from saying, “You can be among the first, if you would like, to choose from the litter of puppies I’ll have in early November that we’ll be ready to adopt after the first of the year.

And then I got an email saying his ashes could be picked up. And so I got my younger brother to take me over, and we picked up the ashes and brought him home.

And then yesterday, the painting showed up. And so it kind of feels like Wayne Spirit made it back just in time for my birthday and gave me a large-framed art piece and a new puppy.

Now that’s a commitment to becoming together.

You know, people say that we Unitarian Universalists have no common theology because we have folks who range from non-theistic humanists to naturalists to Christian-oriented to folks who draw from one or more of the many world religions or philosophies, and I say they’re wrong. I say we do have a common theology because common to all of our various perspectives, we have that commitment to centering ourselves in love and right relationship. And because we have always been a living tradition, our promises and covenants we make among ourselves embrace who we are now and also include a commitment to who and what we are not yet.

We commit to all that we have been, all that we are and all that we aspire to become together, just like Wayne did with me.

Recently, I was telling Wayne’s best friend of over 40 years, Teresa, that at one point, after he had gone on hospice, we were talking, and he said to me, “I love Teresa more than anyone in the world except you, and sometimes I’m not so sure about that.”

Thanks, honey. I can tell you this. I love and am committed to this church, second only to Wayne of that I am sure. And I know, I know that so many of you love this church and are just as committed to it and your church needs you because we have been hit with almost a hundred thousand dollars in greater expenses for 2025 due to insurance and other cost increases and that means our expenses will be about thirty two hundred dollars per day even with a very cost conscious budget.

That is a big challenge. And I know, I know that this church will not only meet that challenge, but will also do so many great things in this coming year because we commit, we make promises, we make covenants about how we will grow together in the ways of love. You see, for us theologically, God is in those promises we make. And our divine promise emerges from within right relationship centered in love. And our pledges are a promise.

So my beloveds, pledge early. Pledge now. Pledge big. It makes you feel good all over. God is in the promises we make, now let us make those promises together.

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

We come to religious community from many paths and with diverse needs:
If you have come here seeking comfort, may your pain be soothed
If you have come here looking for answers, may you find new questions
If you have come here seeking purpose, may your call be awakened
If you have come here hoping to build a new way, may the path open before you
May it be so, Amen, and Blessed Be

SERMON INDEX

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