Revolutionary Inclusion in the ways of Rabbi Jesus

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
February 9, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught inclusion so rooted in love that it would become liberatory for all. Perhaps reclaiming the collective love and liberation that is at the heart of our UU Christian heritage is how we best counter an ideology of exclusion that has arisen in our state and our country.

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

It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.

– Audrey Lorde

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

A BLESSING CALLED SANCTUARY
by Jan Richardson

You hardly knew
how hungry you were to be gathered in,
to receive the welcome that invited you to enter entirely
nothing of you found foreign or strange,
nothing of your life that you were asked
to leave behind or to carry in silence or in shame.

Tentative steps became settling in,
leaning into the blessing
that enfolded you, taking your place in the circle that stunned you
with its unimagined grace.

You began to breathe again,
to move without fear, to speak with abandon
the words you carried in your bones, that echoed in your being.
You learned to sing.

But the deal with this blessing is that it will not leave you alone,
will not let you linger in safety, in stasis.

The time will come when this blessing
will ask you to leave,
not because it has tired of you,
but because it desires for you to become the sanctuary that you have found-
to speak your word into the world, to tell what you have heard
with your own ears, seen with your own eyes, known in your own heart:

Sermon

- Blessed are we when we seek spiritual truths; questions more profound than answers; revelation that is continuous rather than stagnate; mystery over certitude; a sense of our vast and sacred interconnectedness, eschewing the false and shallow reassurances of privilege through the exclusion of difference; the false idol of power through division.

- Blessed are we when we love beyond our own group – that which is familiar. For though the cost of such boundless love is greater loss, even as we mourn such greater loss, we know a love that sustains and comforts even against injustice, despair, even against death.

- Blessed are we when we are humble; when we embrace and share our vulnerabilities. This is how we find the courage to truly know others; we live wholeheartedly; we sense our place in the great web of all existence.

Blessed are we when we hunger and thirst for justice, not just for ourselves and our closest kindred, but for all. For this is how we know the fullness of love and the flourishing of our own spirits. It is how we become tributaries of the divine river of love that flows through our universe and washes away the sorrow of our world.

These are the waters that carry us toward liberation for us all.

- Blessed are we when we show mercy with no expectation of reward or return, for this is how we seed showers of compassion and empathy for one another and for all.

- Blessed are we when we allow that divine river of love to flow through and occupy our hearts because this is how we experience the divine within ourselves.

- Blessed are we when we work for peace, as peace for all is the only way through which each of us will know peace.

Blessed are we when we risk persecution by the forces of division and exclusion, oppression and injustice, because the Beloved Community we build together is more than worth such risk.

Because we shall overcome.

We must shine the light of justice out into our world and among all beings, allow the love that is God and the God that is love to find physical expression through us.

The words I just spoke are a modernization of “The Beatitudes” from the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount found in Matthew 5 though 7 in the New Testament of the Christian Bible.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus delivers a message of love, compassion, and selflessness. He encourages us to love our enemies, to forgive others. He urges care and justice for the poor and marginalized.

Jesus delivers a message of inclusion and a warning against exclusion and division.

The kind of exclusion and division we are witnessing in the halls of government in Washington, DC and the capitol building right here in Austin, TX.

At the federal level, we are seeing the implementation of Project 2025, a white, Christian Nationalist manifesto and plan created by the extremist right wing organization called the Heritage Foundation – a plan that aims to entirely restructure the levers and systems of our federal government to vest immense power in a cadre of ultra-wealthy, mostly white, mostly cis-gendered heterosexual males who call themselves Christians or at least stake claim to what they falsely call Christian tenets.

They are bent on exclusion – making women second class citizens once more, erasing the rights and existence of LGBTQ+ folks, particularly our trans siblings, destroying all of the rights and protections that had been put in place to try to break apart systems of white supremacy and racism embedded within governmental and societal institutions.

Make no mistake, in our current societal political context, “Make America Great Again”, means take America back to an era when BIPOC folks, LTBTQ folks, women, non-Christians, and so many more suffered even greater inequity, exclusions and oppression than now.

And even though we have yet to see true equity in America, even the gains that have been made are too much, too inclusive, too threatening to an ideology of white supremacy culture, hetero-cis-patriarchy, radical-capitalistic, caste-structured, fundamentalist Christian nationalism.

All in the name of Jesus, praise God!

I don’t need to go through the havoc they have been reeking upon our governmental systems intended to help and protect people, particularly those now targeted for exclusion – the mechanisms being put into place to concentrate wealth and power within a small plutocracy and its enablers, the only folks intended for inclusion.

You all have been watching, and I refuse to add to sense of overwhelm being intentionally created.

I know so many of you are doing what you can think of to try to stop the assault.

Here is something more I think we might do if we are to overcome though. What if we reclaim Jesus’ message of love, justice and inclusion that has so effectively been co-opted?

We embrace the true message of Christianity, out of which, after all, our own Unitarian and Universalist faiths arose – redefine its images and language for ourselves, knowing that we do not have to believe in superstition and irrationality to do so.

We have get over allergies to God and Christian language so many of us carry, often because of having been hurt by the misuse and desecration of that religion and its language in our pasts. Me included.

We have to be able to counter forces that are redefining the Beatitudes for themselves like this:

Blessed are we who know with certitude that God favors us.
Blessed is our own small circle of rich white dudes.
Blessed is our hubris.
Blessed is false righteousness at the expense of justice – that calls mercy the folly of fools.
Blessed are we who exclude from our hearts others who are different, even if we must use force, war, genocide and persecution to do so.

These are not the words and teachings of Jesus, and we have to be able to stand in the public square and say so.

Because right now, right now, this is the ground upon which the struggle for the soul of America is being fought.

Now, I know that I am using strong language today, both to embrace the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount and to forthrightly condemn the ideology and actions of a government that defiles those teachings.

I am using strong language because the stakes are that high – the soul of America and by extension much of the rest of our world is at stake.

Now I am not saying we have to embrace a particular theology, accept a creed, or give up a perspective based in humanism, naturalism, science or other theology or philosophy.

I am simply suggesting that we need that comfort level with the language and concepts of Christianity, adapted to our own perspectives, so they we do not exclude folks who otherwise share our values and could be allies.

So that Christianity, our heritage, cannot be co-opted by an ideology that is in direct opposition to our values of love and inclusion, and, in fact the values that Jesus himself spoke.

I wonder how it might be if we were to testify at the state legislature and say something like,

“this bill will cause great harm to trans folks and those who love them, but Jesus said that we are to keep love in our hearts and show mercy to all
– Matthew 5, verses 7 and 8.”

What if we were to call our Senators and say,

“Elon Musk was not elected by anyone and you have to stop what he is doing because he’s lying about why he is doing it.
Matthew 6: 15, “Beware of false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves.”

OK, I am being a bit angry flippant now, but I do think learning to be more open to the same values we embrace being expressed through other religious perspectives can help us be more inclusive, again including in the public square where we need lots more of those allies I mentioned.

We can turn our anger and rage at what Elon Musk and others are doing doing, not at any person, but at how we can respond in ways that refocus us and help us work with others toward healing, love, justice.

And we can begin right here, in our own religious community.

Are we inclusive enough that people with a wide variety of progressive religious perspectives feel welcomed here?

It starts with us. It starts here.

To express how what we do in our organizations can radiate out into our larger world, adrienne marie brown, in their book, Emergent Strategy; Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, uses fractals, patterns in nature that repeat at differing scales – think of ferns that stay much the same from tiny to large or the spiral patterns we see all the way from the prints of our fingertips to shapes of galaxies in our universe.

Brown writes,

“A fractal is a never-ending pattern. Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales. They are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop. How we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale

Brown continues,

“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.”

What we do here at this church and then carry beyond these walls reverberates on the larger scale.

It starts with us.

If we build a community of inclusive, love and justice, the church we create reverberates into the state, nation and world we hope to create.

The Church-For-All models for us a society for all.

May we bless the soul of America with our modern Beatitudes:

a sense of our vast and sacred interconnectedness,
a boundless love that sustains and comforts
the courage required for humbleness and vulnerability
a hunger and thirst for justice and a commitment to mercy, compassion and empathy.
hearts so large the divine river of love floods through them, washing away persecution, oppression, and injustice.

In the words of our poet earlier, beatitudes that become the genesis of a soul of America that says to each and everyone, “You are beloved, a precious child of God, beautiful to behold, and you are welcome and more than welcome here.”

Amen.

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

MARGINAL WISDOM (adapted)
by Leslie Takahashi

They teach us to read in black and white.
Truth is this-the rest false.
You are whole-or broken.
Who you love is acceptable-or not.

Life tells its truth in many hues … embraces multiple truths,
speaks of both, and ….

We are taught to see in absolutes.
Good versus evil.
Male versus female,
Old versus young,
Gay versus straight.

Let us see the fractions, the spectrum, the margins.
Let us open our hearts to the complexity of our worlds.
Let us make our lives sanctuaries, to nurture our many identities.

The day is coming when all will know

That the rainbow world is more gorgeous than monochrome,
That a river of identities can ebb and flow over the static,
stubborn rocks in its course,

That the margins hold the center

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