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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
October 19, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Each year, we make celebration a spiritual practice. We celebrate the differences we make in our world together, the joy that comes from being a part of and supporting this religious community, and our gratitude for all life has to offer.
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
People of our time are losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating, we seek to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be considered is a passive state – it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or a spectacle. Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one’s actions.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Reading
Giving is a celebration. Pledging toward something lifts up and sings out our gratitude for that which bestows beauty and meaning to our lives.
Celebration is a gift we give ourselves and one another. It moves us toward transcendence and transformation.
And when we celebrate our own gifts, those we are blessed to have been created with possessing and those which we choose to bestow upon our world, we bless ourselves more than we can know.
Our gifts of self and self-resources have the power to change our world.
Celebrating them has the power to change us.
– Anonymous
Sermon
I’m still back on, “We are family.” Now you know why Rev. Chris never did musical theatre.
Welcome to Celebration Sunday church family.
You know, I have to admit that at a certain point I was thinking about this service and writing this sermon for it and was honestly kind of going, “I don’t feel like celebrating.”
There’s so much fascism.
Any of you ever feel like that sometimes these days?
If so, it’s natural and understandable, given all that’s happening. I mean, they’re pulling little children, US citizens, out of their homes at night, half clothed, and zip tying them in the streets.
They’re shooting peacefully protesting ministers in the face with pepper balls. Something for me to look forward to, I guess.
They’re removing rainbow street crossings and Black Lives Matter murals right here in Austin – how much more loudly can they make it clear that they want to erase entire groups of us.
Well, you all know. It goes on and on. We all could list so much happening that that violates the very ideas of love and justice.
Any yet, YET love and justice continue rise up, continue to reassert themselves over and over again in our world.
Just look at yesterday, when millions upon millions showed up across the country to declare, “We will not have a king. We will not have fascism.”
Across the country, people are joining together to reclaim love, justice and democracy.
And this church, this religious community can celebrate that we have been, are, and will continue to be a vital part of that movement – that great coming together.
We are showing up. We are providing sanctuary for the weary. We are doing our part to bring fierce love to bear in our world.
Together, we ARE living love.
Together, we ARE nourishing souls, transforming lives, and doing justice to build the beloved community!
Together, we ARE religious family, and we never stop thinking about tomorrow, so as our story earlier titled “WE ARE TOGETHER” says, “If storm clouds gather, and we’re caught in the rain, let’s splash through the puddles till the sun shines again.”
Gotta use a little British there so it’ll rhyme better.
And so, my beloveds, we must still celebrate. We have much to celebrate.
Now, before I go into all that we have to celebrate today, I want to take just a moment to talk about why it is so important – why we must celebrate.
You see, to build the spiritual fortitude we need to keep living our religious values and our mission in our world up against such great challenges, we simply must allow ourselves to experience joy along the way.
We cannot possibly sustain our efforts, unless we pause to celebrate and to rest sometimes.
Celebrating has been found to boost our morale, enhance our sense of joy and emotional well-being, foster unity among groups and communities, and to cultivate gratitude for the many blessings in our lives so that we also get the multiple benefits associated with gratitude.
And we get the benefits of celebrating not only when we celebrate in community, as we are today, but also when we celebrate as individuals.
And even from celebrating seemingly small events in life.
So stop to give yourself a fist pump or celebration dance even over a small accomplishment at work or a success with parenting!
OK, so now I will get on with celebrating you, us, this religious community – First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin.
If you are new to the church and visiting with today, please bear with me as I brag a little about all of the amazing things the folks at this church are doing. I hope maybe you will hear about something that you might like to explore further.
Of course, since Celebration Sunday is intended to be the premier event of our pledge campaign for 2026, we start by celebrating all of you who are thinking about tomorrow by committing toward making sure that this church continues to live love and do justice well into the future.
As you heard, we are about 91% percent of the way toward our pledge goal, with $749,000 already committed toward supporting that mission next year!
And that truly is worth celebrating!
Even more, I believe, I celebrate, we can celebrate that we will get the rest of the way toward our goal of $825,000 – because I know how very committed this religious community is to living out our mission.
I think the first word in that mission may be the most important, because we know that no matter how much we try to do as individuals, we can do so much more, we have so much more power together.
This is why we support the church.
Again, as our story put it, “We may travel alone, free as birds in the sky, but flocking together, we soar and we fly.”
Here is just some of what we do together as a religious family that is more than worth supporting and celebrating.
In the past year, we have become a spiritual home and refuge for over 50 new members. We are seeing an average of 20 to 40 folks who are new to the church visit our worship services in person each week. The online version of our worship services is averaging 500 to over 1000 views per week.
We continue to expand and diversify our worship and music, both in content and style, to become more welcoming and inclusive of folks with wide varieties of life experiences.
And, our services and music videos have been picked up and rebroadcast by smaller Unitarian Universalist Communities from throughout the country.
Our children and youth religious education programs are growing and growing stronger!
We’ve added a number of adult religious education programs.
Our small group ministries and spiritual groups now have about 250 total participants, the largest number in our history.
From our story once again, “Walking all together, on paths as yet unknown, may lead us to places that feel just like home.”
To help bring us together and feel more at home, our church connections team is helping more and more folks get involved more deeply in church life, and we have revitalized our Fun and Fellowship Team to help us celebrate and have communal fun and joy more and more often.
Our Senior Lunches are going strong, and we have a number of other breakfast and dinner groups, creating even more fellowship and communal relationships.
We have a strong and active vegan group and have formed our own chapter of the Unitarian Universalist Animal Ministry.
I recently learned that our terrific Brian and Sharon Moore Art Gallery has bookings out through 2027!
AND, we have grown our culture of caring within our religious community, expanding our caring companions activities that provide lay pastoral support, our outreach program, our peer support groups, our memorial services support. In fact, all of our First UU Cares ministries are thriving.
“On our own, we’re special, and we can chase our dream, but when we join up, hand in hand, together, we’re a team.”
And together, we are bringing fierce love into our larger community and our world.
We have 159 folks in our online social action group. And these folks are extremely active, living our mission through a multitude of social justice activities and events.
Our amazing social action leader sent out over 70 rapid response requests and calls to action in the past year. Because our state legislature was often in session, many of those requests involved multiple actions, and I am so proud that for each of those actions multiple members of this Church responded.
That is living fierce love in our world!
And each of our areas of social action focus – reproductive justice, LGBTQI+ justice, immigration justice, racial justice, the climate, voting and democracy – each of these social action pillars have also been extremely active, working for love and justice!
That is building the Beloved Community.
“We can change the world with the power of words. Let’s all rock the boat, so our voices are heard!” Sol picked a great story book today, didn’t they?
Well, these are only a few of the ministries and programs of this church that we celebrate today and that your pledges make possible!
There are so many more, including, of course, Mary and our wonderful stewardship team that have made this celebration possible.
If I haven’t mentioned one of the wonderful things you’re involved with in the church, please know that we celebrate you too – it’s just if I mentioned every single terrific thing folks in this church are doing we would have to be here through next Sunday, but Mary wants me to let you go as early as possible so you can all have lunch together and a party to celebrate some more.
Please feel free to continue sharing and celebrating all of these ways we are living our faith, our values, our mission as a religious community.
So, celebrate yourselves and the good you are and do in the world.
The good we do together.
We ARE together.
We ARE family.
We ARE thinking about tomorrow, even as we ground ourselves in the present moment to meet the challenges that fierce love demands of us right now.
Thank you for your commitment.
Thank you for you. Thank you for joining together to create this amazing community of faith and fierce love that we call First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin.
This church cannot exist without you.
Together, you ARE the church.
And that is worth celebrating!
Amen. 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
Let us go out now and celebrate together.
Celebrate all we have done together.
Celebrate all we have yet to do together but will.
Celebrate lives of living love.
Celebrate the gifts with which we have been blessed and those we are blessed to be able to give.
Amen. Blessed be. Go celebrate!
Most sermons during the past 25 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 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
