Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.
Rev. Chris Jimmerson
July 13, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Over the past decade, First UU Church of Austin has twice offered immigration sanctuary to immigrants fearing unjust detention and deportation. What might being a sanctuary church look like, given the racist, police state tactics we are currently witnessing under the intentionally deceptive guise of national security and immigration enforcement?
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
“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”
– Hebrews 13:2
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Reading
WHAT DO RELIGIONS TEACH ABOUT IMMIGRANTS
by Alonzo GaskillThe majority of religious traditions teach their adherents the importance of respecting life. Many, such as the dharmic faiths, have a central teaching, the need to practice ahimsa, or non-violence in actions, but also in words and thoughts. Thus, most major faith traditions will take the position that if someone from another country or community visits your own, you have a duty to treat them with love, respect, dignity, and honor.
…the command to embrace love and even help those who immigrate or visit is consistent. Indeed, most religions teach that there are spiritual or salvific consequences for negating this sacred commandment.
Sermon
Valerie Kaur’s Movie Clip:
She clung to a jacaranda tree. When I was little, my father said to me, “If you ever get lost in the woods, hug a tree.” That’s what they teach us when we are children, that the trees will calm us, protect us, love us when we are scared and alone.
She clung to a jacaranda tree. They took her anyway, pried her fingers from the silver trunk, dragged her into an unmarked van. Bystanders shouted and cursed and cried for them to stop, but they did not stop. Masked men threw tear gas canisters behind them as they drove away, disappearing into a cloud of gas like villains in a poorly written movie script.
I can’t get the images out of my head. The masked men, the bystanders, the cloud of gas, the young woman, and the tree.
Who do I want to be in the story? Who do you want to be in the story? I want to be the jacaranda. I want to make myself so strong, so steady, so rooted that my neighbors can hold on to me, the neighbors I know, and the ones I do not know. I want to find the courage inside of me to transfigure myself, to be braver with my love than I ever have before.
You might say, “What’s the use? They took her anyway.” Here’s what I see. One jacaranda is not enough. We need hundreds of jacarandas, millions of jacarandas, so that no matter how hard they pry her away, another one of us is right there ready for her to take hold. We must all become jacarandas.
This is not pretty poetry. This is a life-and-death call to risk ourselves for others, to become that strong, that rooted, that powerful, that beautiful, to become jacarandas.
In May of 2015, First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin offered immigration sanctuary to Sulma Franco, whose life would be endangered if Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE were to deport her to her home country of Guatemala.
If you don’t know Sulma or her story, we will be celebrating her here at the church on this coming Saturday evening, July 19.
In the summer of 2017, we again offered immigration sanctuary to a young man named Alirio, whose life would also be at threat if ICE were to deport him to El Salvador.
Back then, providing church immigration sanctuary involved setting up a private, apartment-like area of the church in which Sulma and then later Alirio could live.
At the time, ICE had an internal memorandum dictating that their agents would not enter a church building to detain an immigrant and place them into the deportation process.
Because Sulma and then Alirio might have been at risk if they left the church grounds, church members also provided for meals, groceries, laundry and the like.
Along with a number of other churches and organizations, some of which have joined together to become the Austin Sanctuary Network, we also worked with Sulma and, again, then Alirio, to conduct a public advocacy campaign.
The campaign was designed to gain their freedom from the threat of detainment and deportation, as well as to shed light on a broken immigration system.
Sulma’s status is now such that she no longer requires church sanctuary.
Alirio remains in a kind of extended sanctuary, wherein he is able to spend more time with family and loved ones, while still accessing whatever safe haven the church can still provide, which I will talk more about shortly.
We have remained a part of the Austin Sanctuary Network and still consider ourselves a sanctuary church.
But then came the second Trump administration, and they rescinded that ICE memorandum about not entering, not desecrating, church spaces.
Then came the second Trump administration and the implementation of the extremist, White Christian Nationalist plan called Project 2025, and suddenly – suddenly, we find ourselves in a new and far more threatening environment in which our government is using immigrants and other vulnerable folks as targets to test how far we will allow them go toward establishing an authoritarian police state.
And if we are tempted think this is an exaggeration, we need only study the history of authoritarian states to understand that this is the playbook aspiring despots have so often used.
We need only look out how the administration co-opted the California national guard and sent them along with marines into the streets of Los Angeles on trumped up claims of riots that were in fact mostly peaceful protests in reaction to ICE raids destroying so many lives in that city.
We need only look at these photos posted by my friend, Lawrence Ingalls in Santa Ana, CA, several miles from where the supposed riots in Los Angeles were supposedly occurring.
Lawrence and his husband, my friend and colleague, Rev. Dr. Jason Cook, live just one mile from where these military personnel were deployed, fingers on the triggers of their automatic weapons, no explanation provided for their presence on the streets of an American city.
Under the false guise of national security and law enforcement, they are denying due process, violating humanitarian norms, separating families, including children from their parents, kidnapping people and flying them off to countries where they have never been and that are known internationally as the most egregious violators of human rights and dignity.
In those countries and now here in the U.S. in facilities such as the recently opened, so called “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida, the Trump administration is placing people into what can only truthfully be called concentration camps.
Trump and his supporters, including some in our government, have even made jokes literally celebrating alligators eating people who might try to escape that facility in Florida, one of them posting “Alligator Lives Matter”.
And this language is no accident. This is a racist throwback to the early 1900s when black people, especially black babies were often referred to as “alligator bait.”
The language is on purpose. It is a blatant racist appeal.
And because our government and ICE are doing all of this under the cover of lies and secrecy, behind the cowardice of wearing facial masks like the KKK of old, racists vigilantes across the country are adding to the terrorism and victimization by posing as ICE agents themselves.
Here is just one extremely disturbing example, though this fool didn’t even bother with a mask.
ICE impersonator video
So, given this racist, government sanctioned environment, what do we do?
How do we as a church continue to provide faithful sanctuary?
And make no mistake, we must continue to do this.
At the very least, we must continue to do it to halt the authoritarians from expanding their reign of terror upon even more folks.
More vitally though, we continue to do it because our values centering us in love demand this of us – because that mission we say together every Sunday demands this of us – because our humanity – the preservation of our very own souls demand this of us.
We cannot know and be a part of the divine love that flows through our universe and allow this to go on.
So, how do we continue to do it?
What does faithful church sanctuary look like in this age in which we find ourselves?
Well, I’m not sure we know all for the answers to that yet. I know I don’t. We’re still learning even as we resist the new evils being perpetrated. I began with the video from Valarie Kaur though because I think that metaphor of us all becoming jacaranda trees is so powerful and so useful.
We must all become those trees, and, as a church, we will also be called to provide more branches for more folks to hang onto.
So, for instance, there may be circumstance in which we are still called to provide a literal, physical place for someone to stay within the church.
But even when physical sanctuary is not a viable solution, we will be called to try to metaphorically shelter those whose legal and human rights, indeed their very life and wellbeing are at risk by joining in pubic advocacy campaigns – we are called to let our rogue government know we are watching and resisting – called to protest – called to demand information on the whereabouts of folks taken into ICE custody and due process for them, such as the 49 people in our community that ICE “disappeared” recently – and, yes, some of us may be called to civil disobedience and personal risk.
We are called to demand local law enforcement disengage with ICE and provide proper due process, access to legal representation, including for immigrants.
We will be called to accompany folks to court and immigration visits – leveraging our own privilege to take sanctuary into the places where ICE abuses are regularly happening.
Faithful church sanctuary may also involve detention visits when and if possible, supporting legal expenses, assisting with day to day errands of life so that folks have less exposure risk, supporting know your rights and legal presentations, and helping to set up safe havens and care for children separated from parents.
And I believe, because these gross violations of human rights are being committed within a grotesque ideology of White Christian Nationalism, we must be willing to publicly counter this by loudly proclaiming this is not religious – this is not Christian.
We have to be willing to know and use scripture from the world’s religions, especially the Christian bible, that demands the just and compassionate treatment of immigrants.
These are just a few examples. We will learn more as we go. We are fortunate to have Peggy from our Inside Amigos church immigration justice group and Austin Sanctuary Network.
Please talk with Peggy to find out how you can get involved and what you can do to help your church be that faithful sanctuary to which we are called.
My Beloveds, for me, this is personal, and it is spiritual. It is a religious calling from the very core of our Unitarian Universalist faith.
I return to where I started this sermon.
Over the years, I have gotten to know Sulma and Alirio and have come to love them both.
I love Sulma’s fieriness and her humor and compassion – her willingness to be that jacaranda tree for others even as she herself was at great personal risk.
I love Alirio’s gentle kindness and the steely strength he harbors within – his willingness to be that jacaranda tree for others even as he himself was at great personal risk.
I cannot truthfully and faithfully live out my own story without recognizing that it is inextricably interwoven with their stories and those of so many others.
And so I must try to live their example and do my best to become that jacaranda tree too – to declare in the name of that fierce love that I call God – “I will not remain silent. I will not hide away within my own privilege. I will do whatever I can to join with my beloveds and replace the injury to God that is being perpetrated by an ideology of spiritual and religious deceit with a faithful sanctuary within which all are loved, welcomed, and supported in their fullest flourishing.
That is the true fulfillment of the divine in our world.
We will close with Valarie Kaur’s closing words:
“We must all become jacarandas.
This is not pretty poetry.
This is a life and death call to risk ourselves for others.
To become that strong.
That rooted.
That powerful.
That beautiful.
To become jacarandas.”
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
Leviticus 19:33-34
“If a foreigner stays with you in your land, do not do them wrong. Rather, treat the foreigner staying with you like the native born among you. You are to love them as yourself.”
May the congregation say amen and blessed be. Go in peace.
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
