Transformative Moments

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
August 11, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

In life, we and everything around us are always changing, even if in sometimes imperceptible ways. Yet, there are moments that hold the potential for more transformative change. And such transformative moments contain seeds of change that can be constructive and beneficial, but that can also turn us toward destructive and harmful change. It feels as if we may be in such a moment in our world now. How can we seize the moment and reach for transformation that brings about even more creative possibilities, love, and justice in our lives and in our world?

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

We delight in the beauty of a butterfly, but rarely admit the changes is gone through to achieve that beauty.

– Maya Angelou.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

NO ORDINARY TIME, THE RISE OF SPIRITUAL INTELLIGENCE AND EVOLUTIONARY CREATIVITY
by Jan Phillips
We are attendants at the wake of the old way. And each of us through our actions, our thoughts, our work, our relationships is midwifing a new world into existence. This is our destiny, our meaning, our purpose. And when we come to our day with this awareness, when we are fully wakened to the tremendous privilege, when we sense the oak and the acorn of our being, then we will have the energy to move mountains and shift tides. It is an illusion that we are powerless. It is an illusion that someone else is responsible. It is an illusion that we cannot transcend these dualities and difficulties that are making a mockery out of our democracy. We are the people. This is our world.

Sermon

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

They were twins, sisters, born together, formed together, so much the same and yet not, perhaps the same coin but different sides. And then that day came in their late teens when the outsiders invaded their village. The outsiders burned the houses and buildings. They pillaged the supplies of grain and the other foods. They wrought death and destruction among far to many of their friends and loved ones, including massacring their father.

The sisters hid together until the outsiders left as suddenly as they had come, taking with them all that they had looted leaving the twin sisters and the remaining family and townsfolk in the smoke and ruins the stench of tribalism and hatred thickening the air and burning their lungs and she went into hiding. She became consumed with hate. She joined the group that would leave the village to inflict hatred upon hatred. She was among those who would hunt the outsiders doing to them what they had done, but she could not stop there. They moved from town to town among the outsider’s fellow clans, bringing to them the same fate her village had suffered. And eventually, she led them into skirmishes that transformed into war until both sides suffered injury upon injury, death upon death, including eventually her own.

But she – she turned to the love of her people. She turned to the work of rebuilding their village and healing their wounds. They went about the work of forgiveness and worked for peace and eventually they helped negotiate the end of war and brought reconciliation and reparations. She joined with those who created a new vision of peace and flourishing where there were no outsiders anymore.

And so in this wisdom tale, one twin emerges from a transformative moment as a butterfly that would bring more beauty to the world, pollinating more and more love and justice. And sadly, another sister becomes a wasp, losing more and more of herself with each hate and harm-filled sting until nothing is left.

Transformative moments are like this. They hold the possibility of both transformation that can be harmful and destructive as well as the creative potential for beauty and flowering. And so today we will explore how we can react to such moments more like butterfly sisters, a recently renowned subset of which have been referred to as childless cat ladies.

I think many of us are feeling like we’re in one of those transformative moments in our country’s history. Now, we have a big election going on and that is a huge part of this moment. And, as many of you know, that as a tax exempt non-profit the church cannot endorse any individual candidate nor can we endorse a political party.

We can, though, talk about issues related to our religious values. And our values around the separation of church and state mean we work against the state, mandating, endorsing, or sponsoring any particular religion, including even our own. And we can speak about how politics and eventually the public policy that will come out of it either contravene our religious values or uphold them. Values such as those of our Unitarian Universalist faith. Love held at our very center.

Love Flower Graphic

Now, you may have noticed on the slides that both our UU faith and our church have one more value we uphold. Transformation.

Our UU faith defines transformation like this.

We adapt to the changing world. We covenant to collectively transform and grow spiritually and ethically. Openess to change is fundamental to our Unitarian and Universalist heritages. Never complete and never perfect.

Here at the church we simply say that transformation means to pursue the growth that changes our lives and heals our world. Personally, I like how our church defines transformation. It’s more concise. And I think it fits this transformative moment in which we find ourselves.

Because again, as our story earlier shows us, transformative times can lead to change that is healing, or they can lead to change that is harmful. And this transformative moment contains an element that looms even larger than the immediate election and that holds the potential to deeply violate our religious values.

A white, fundamentalist, Christian nationalist movement is alive and active in our country, and it has found political and public policy expression in a 922-page far-right conservative manifesto called Project 2025, created by the ultra-conservative lobbying and influence group, the Heritage Foundation.

Project 2025, in my opinion, would run counter to all that we value, decimate our democratic institutions and cause great harm to many, while greatly privileging, far, far fewer. Fewer who just happen to be mostly white, hetero-cis male theocratic fundamentalists.

Now, as a minister, I cannot, as part of an official church function, endorse a particular candidate either. I can, however, express what I think of their stance on particular issues, as long as I do so as only me, not on behalf of the church as a whole.

So, let me just say, not speaking on behalf of the church, he who was always white until a number of years ago when he happened to discover spray tanning and his running mate, J.D. Vanceypants have tried to distance themselves from Project 2025 and claim to know very little about it. Yet, J.D. Vance wrote the foreword for a book about it by the primary author of Project 2025, and more than 30 Trump associates helped create the document.

Trump has said of the Heritage Foundation, and I quote:

“They’re going to lay the groundwork and detailed plans for exactly what our movement will look like.”

But, I don’t know. Speaking only as me, maybe they’re not being entirely honest about this issue. That’s the pastoral way of saying they’re lying. Another more recent lie, as Project 2025 proves highly unpopular, the more people find out about it, is that they try to say that it has been put back on a shelf, as if they can’t take it right back off the shelf depending on how the election goes. And church member David Overton recently put together an excellent comparison of the party platforms in Texas. The legislation and policy proposals of one of those party platforms are derivative from and, if anything, more extreme than Project 2025 itself.

So what exactly is this Project 2025? Well, basically, it’s a blueprint for forming a theocratic authoritarian administration. As I said, it’s over 900 pages, so it’s impossible to cover all of their plans for every federal department this morning. Here, though, are just a few examples of what a presidential administration following Project 2025 would do, much of it within their first 180 days.

Eliminate job protections for and fire experienced qualified civil servants and replace them with partisans whose only job qualification would be loyalty to the conservative president.

They have already established a database of people who would serve in these positions.

Gut the Environmental Protection Agency.
End climate research.
Eliminate the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which includes the National Weather Service.
Reverse all LGBTQ plus federal protections and end all transgender health care under Medicare and Medicaid
Expel trans folks from the military as well as anyone requiring treatment for HIV.
Eliminate the Department of Education.
Revoke the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Policy that prevents raids on churches.
Convert the Department of Health and Human Services to the Department of Life, tying benefits to traditional family structures,
Eliminating abortion as health care,
Utilizing the federal bureaucracy to effectively prevent access to abortion nationwide as well as to
severely limit access to contraceptives.
Restructure the Justice Department and the FBI to serve the aims of the presidential administration and
End enforcement of voting rights.

Well, these are just a few. It goes on and on and on. God, guns, and gays is back with a vengeance. And if anyone claims it is an overreaction to call Project 2025, a detailed plan for establishing a permanent white nationalist, Christo-fascist state. Listen to what Trump said just recently to a group of fundamentalists.

“Christians, get out and vote. Just this time, You won’t have to do it any more. You know what? Four more years, it’ll be fixed. It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore.”

Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, was even more direct, saying, quote,

“We are in the process of the Second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it.”

To paraphrase Maya Angelou, when people tell you who they are, believe them the first time.

Interdependence
Equity
Generosity
Pluralism
Community
Courage
Compassion
Justice
Transcendence
Love

The kind of transformation we seek in our lives and our world, these are under seige by the wasp stings of a white suprimacist nationalism theocratic facist institutionalized patriarchy that has arisen during this Chrysalis time.

And so we, we must also raise up our religious values in the public square. We must become the pollinators of love and justice in our world, the butterfly siblings that dismantle all Project 2025 seeks to fortify and build in its place the beloved community.

So how do we do that? I don’t have all the answers. But right now, as Carrie mentioned in the announcements, we UU the Vote. Because when people vote, our religious values tend to become more actualized in public policy. So after the service today, join us in sending postcards, encouraging folks to vote. Consider serving as a poll worker during the election. Right now, we educate ourselves about Project 2025 And we inform and educate others about it because polling shows that even fairly conservative folks oppose it when they find out what is in it.

And right now, if you so choose, you can work for those who you believe are most likely to pursue laws and policies consistent with your values, values centered in love. Perhaps most importantly though, we must know that this transformative time will continue beyond this particular election. It will require more of us. Project 2025 will just try to become Project 2029 and so on.

So we take the long view. And one of the ways that we do that is by living our values in our daily lives. We build communities of love, joy, and justice such as this religious community. As our reading earlier said,

“We are attendants at the wake of the old way, and each of us through our actions, our thoughts, our work, and relationships is midwifing a new world into existence.”

And so in our lives, our actions small and large, our communities, our ways of being, we breathe our values into the world. We build a new way. We join with others bound for a new land of freedom and justice singing come and go with me along the way.

Author and activist Adrian Marie Brown writes,

How we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale. The patterns of the universe repeat at scale. There is a structural echo that suggests two things.

One, that there are shapes and patterns fundamental to our universe.

And two, that what we practice at a small scale can reverberate to the largest scale.

Remember, my beloveds, we do what we can. How we live matters. How we live makes a difference. How we respond in transformitive moments has the potential to build the world about which we dream. This is our project.

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

I leave you with words from Octavia Butler.

All that you touch, you change.
All that you change changes you.
The only lasting truth is change.
God is change.

May the change we bring builds the beloved community.
Amen and Blessed be. Go in peace.

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