2025 Flower Communion

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
and Michelle LaGrange
May 11, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Join with us in this much-loved Unitarian Universalist ritual where we bring flowers to add to the large bouquet we create and take a different flower with you, symbolizing both the unique, sacred beauty of each of us and the even greater beauty we create when we share that sacred uniqueness with one another.

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

FOR ALL THE MOTHERS
Lindasusan Ulrich

For all the mothers and mother figures
The grandmothers, aunts, and extended family members who mother
The soon-to-be mothers,
the wish-they-were mothers,
the never-wanted-to-be mothers,
the “it’s complicated” mothers
The birth mothers, foster mothers, adoptive mothers, stepmother
The “used to be Dad” mothers and “more than one Mom” mothers
The single mothers, separated mothers, stay-at-home mothers, unhoused mothers
The grieving mothers, those who grieve their mothers, and those whose grief is complex
For all the communities that mother
And for all who depend on the Great Mother
You are held – and beloved.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Special Offering for May

ONLINE ABORTION RESOURCE SQUAD (OARS)
Elizabeth Gray

Good morning. I’m Elizabeth Gray, co-lead of the reproductive justice team. I’m here to talk about our monthly service offering.

Many of us recently have had our focus on big picture, state, and national issues. And as we struggle with the big stuff, it’s easy to overlook, the personal daily challenges that people face just to keep going. One of those challenges is the reality of unintended pregnancy. With many desperately seeking solutions every day, let us not normalize the heartbreaking truth that women and girls are being forced to carry and bear children they do not want with little or no access to accurate, compassionate and timely information to guide them.

But there is hope. There is trustworthy, non-stigmatized, peer-based information available for people seeking information and guidance on abortion. It’s found on the internet. There’s a social media site called Reddit with a collection of communities or online forums called sub-Reddit. And one of those sub-Reddit is our abortion.

AbortionSquad.org
r/abortion

People gather here by the millions, I kid you not, and from across the entire globe to ask questions, share their experiences, and support one another as they navigate abortion.

Here are some conversations at the top of the list from a few days ago. This is not highly curated. Each of these subject lines is followed by a personal, passionate, compelling stories with pleas for help or information.

Pregnant and not sure if I want to keep it.

Pregnant at 15 can’t pay for the pills in Texas.

My experience using the pill.

How long does bleeding last after a medical abortion?

My current experience five weeks,

abortion tomorrow and I’m scared.

He left me after I decided to abort. Please help.

How to have an abortion.

And these just this random sample that I grabbed are posted from Asia, Africa, Canada, Europe, and the Middle East as well as the United States.

But what ensures that this space remains safe and supportive? especially when so much online content about abortion is steeped in shame, stigma, or intentionally misleading information.

The Online Abortion Resource Squad (OARS) is what keeps the space safe and supportive for the people who need and share their information. The OARS moderators manage the site. They maintain the order and the quality of the content. This is a huge task given the extremely high volume of posts and comments, and they are volunteers. So they need our help to keep doing what they do.

Imagine you need a medical procedure, but you don’t have any access to information, support, or guidance. Imagine you’ve heard a lot of things about the procedure that are wrong or inaccurate or intentionally misleading. Imagine that without that procedure, your whole life will be turned upside down. Your future will not be the one you planned and hoped for. And add to that a procedure that has been stigmatized, even made illegal in many parts of the country. What an incredibly stressful, sad situation, but OARS has your back. No matter who you are, where you live, or what you need regarding your abortion, you can write a post on the Our Abortion sub-Reddit any day, at any time, and you’ll receive a quick, thorough, accurate and compassionate personal response.

When people have trouble getting the abortion information and support they need, they head to the internet or meets them there. We have agency here in this church or online and we can help support OARS to ensure that the our abortion sub-Reddit is there for the women girls and pregnant people when there literally is nowhere else for them to go.

Thank you very much for your support.

Reading

WELCOMING SPIRIT HOME
by Sobonfu Somé

Sobonfu Somé was one of the foremost voices in African spirituality to come to the West. Destined from birth to teach the ancient wisdom, ritual, and practices of her ancestors to those in the West, Sobonfu, whose name means “keeper of the rituals” traveled the world on a healing mission, sharing the rich spiritual life and culture of her people, the Dagara Tribe of Burkina Faso, which ranks as one of the world’s richest countries in spiritual life and custom.

“A ritual is a ceremony in which we call in spirit to be the driving force, the overseer of our activities. It is a way for us to find our way to wholeness, peace, self-acceptance, and acceptance of others. Ritual allows us to connect with the self, the community, and the natural forces around us. Ritual helps us remove blocks between us and our true spirit.

“The purpose of rituals is to take us to a place of self-discovery and mastery. In this sense ritual is to the soul what food is to the physical body … Rituals are participatory activities that involve the whole being: body, spirit, mind, and soul. In our rituals we call in spirits, ancestors … to guide us each step of the way. Rituals are a form of continuous prayer. They help us to consciously incorporate healthy, genuine spiritual evolution and to dwell in the sacred in a way that truly heals us.”

Sermon

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

Flower Communion is one of the many shared rituals that we live out together each year. Other examples include Water Communion, the Christmas Pageant, and our Christmas Eve service, Burning Bowl, the Pet Blessing, the Baby Parade, and several others.

We also have weekly rituals such as lighting our chalice together, praying or meditating together, lighting candles together, and singing hymns together. Notice there’s a lot of “togethers” there. As well as periodic rituals such as signing the membership book and our new member welcoming ceremonies and child dedications, as well as one-time rituals that we create specific to a spiritual topic that has risen in importance at that time.

– So today, Reverend Michelle and I thought it might be good to pause and remind ourselves why we do these rituals, to discuss the role they play in our lives. – So Chris, what role do you think rituals play in our religious community, as well as more broadly? Well, Michelle, I never expected that question, so I’ll have to think for a minute.

I think rituals, as you’re reading earlier pointed out, are a way to involve our bodies, our senses, our emotions, all of ourselves, so that we can form a deeper understanding of life’s mysteries. They are a way to mark the passing of time and ground ourselves in history like Sol did for us with the Flower Communion story earlier. Rituals as a community help bind us together. They promote emotional bonding, that together word again. They transmit culture and values and they provide ways to express the sacred, the spiritual, higher metaphorical understandings. And sometimes those understandings are beyond our ability to express them in regular words. And so we need the rituals as a way to understand those things.

Also, though, we repeat these rituals like the Flower Communion every year, I’m wondering, Michelle, if you think their meaning changes over time, and if so, how they might affect us given the context in which we find ourselves in any given year.

– Yeah, all of that is true. And I think that over time, as we repeat our rituals, whether the rituals are rituals of words or actions, the meaning of the ritual deepens. For me, one repetitious phrase that we do hear frequently that has deep meaning for me, it comes with a chalice lighting with, “Our struggle becomes our salvation.” Salvation is not easy. We do struggle on our way to it, on our path to it. I think those are words that you actually wrote, and I asked Chris if I could bring them with me when I leave, because I love them so much.

Also I think that as times change and different things happen in our larger community life, in the nation, in the world, then that can impact how we experience our rituals as well. So for example, right now we’re living in a time of rising fascism. Things can be pretty scary out there. And it makes me think so much of Norbert Chopek’s story in addition to creating and sharing the flower celebration, flower communion ritual with us. Norbert, Reverend Norbert also sheltered people who were Jewish within his congregation. It was a good fit because they were Unitarian and believed in only one God.

And in that way was able to help people hide from the Nazis. But Chopec himself was actually arrested and taken to a concentration camp in Dachau actually and he Brought that ritual with him So not only are we recreating all these many almost 80 years later Ritual a flower communion in this really scary time, we’re remembering someone who lived in a similarly scary time. And to me, that just feels so much more powerful and more beautiful and the meaning is so much deeper this year than it has been in previous years.

So I think we’ve pretty much, pretty well covered a lot of the general ways in which our rituals might be of benefit to us and our spiritual lives. But do you think of any specific ways, can you think of any specific ways that the rituals can benefit us as individuals?

– Sure, again, that sense of bonding that I talked about as a community, I think benefits us as individuals. When we participate in a ritual like this with our religious community, it gives us a sense of belonging to be a part of that. Studies have also shown that participating in rituals can help us reduce anxiety. Rituals are one of the ways that help us process loss and grief, and they help us make meaning and find purpose.

And finally, rituals also, according to the research, can bring on other psychological benefits. They give us a sense of calmness. Sometimes rituals can even bring us a sense of euphoria, bliss, and joy. They give us a sense of personal empowerment by participating that we have our own agency, and studies have even shown that participating in a ritual can boost our confidence afterwards and just in general improve our mood.

So Michelle, we’ve been talking a lot about how rituals function here at First UU. What are your thoughts about how they might connect us to other Unitarian Universalists?

Well, I think they do connect us on a very deep level. We tend to be very siloed in our experience of individual UU congregations, but then we do sometimes have opportunities to come together. One of them is General Assembly, which happens every year. We send delegates to go and vote and do the business of the association, but we also have worship services and workshops and we conduct rituals, including a bridging ceremony for our youth who are moving into young adulthood.

And when we arrive, we arrive as strangers, and yet not really strangers, not completely strangers. We arrive with this shared, common understanding of the role of ritual in our lives and that means that we begin our relationships with each other in a different place. We already have something deep and important in common that we already know about each other and we start in a place of shared values and greater trust and a better ability to relate with each other.

I don’t know how many of you have ever been to General Assembly. I highly recommend it if you either have the chance to go in person when it’s in Texas or the ability to travel, walking into a place, any place, even something that seems as unsacred as a convention center with thousands of other UUs is absolutely a spiritual experience to just simply be in that space with each other before we even start doing anything. So if you have the chance, Please do so.

With that, we’re going to begin our own annual ritual of flower communion this year For those of you who have not already brought a flower forward you can do that when you come up and the only hard and fast rule here is You take a different flower from the one that you brought. Don’t bring your own flower home, even if you really, really like it.

So once you come up and exchange your flower for a new flower, I invite you to take some time to quietly reflect and meditate on the meaning of that flower, on its beauty, on the life of the person who brought it and shared it with you today. Let us begin.

For those of you joining us online we hope that you will go outdoors on this beautiful day and find some flowers to enjoy also. May not only these flowers but also the spirit of communion and the love of this religious community go with you.

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

As we go out into our world today,
Just as we carry with us the flowers we have shared,
The spiritual nourishment found only in communion.
May we also carry with us the shared meanings of our shared ritual,
Holding our history in our hearts,
We embody a new and ever more just and loving future together,

So may it be.
Go in peace.

SERMON INDEX

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