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Rev. Chris Jimmerson and Rev. Carrie Holley-Hurt
August 24, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Rev. Chris and Rev. Carrie will answer your questions about the church, life, the universe, and everything (though neither will pretend to have the answers to all that).

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

LABYRINTH
By Rev. Leslie Takahashi

Walk the maze within your heart: guide your steps into its questioning curves.
This labyrinth is a puzzle leading you deeper into your own truths.
Listen in the twists and turns.
Listen in the openness within all searching.
Listen: a wisdom within you calls to a wisdom beyond you and in that dialogue lies peace.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Anthem

CONCERNING THE UFO SIGHTING NEAR HIGHLAND ILLINOIS

When the revenant came down
We couldn’t imagine what it was
In the spirit of three stars
The alien thing that took its form
Then to Lebanon, oh, God
The flashing at night, the sirens grow and grow
(Oh history involved itself)
Mysterious shade that took its form (or what it was)
Incarnation, three stars
Delivering signs and dusting from their eyes

Reading

SOME QUESTIONS YOU MIGHT ASK
by Mary Oliver

Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?
Who has it, and who doesn’t?
I keep looking around me.
The face of the moose is as sad
as the face of Jesus.
The swan opens her white wings slowly.
In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.
One question leads to another.
Does it have a shape?
Like an iceberg?
Like the eye of a hummingbird?
Does It have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?
Why should I have it, and not the anteater
who loves her children?
Why should t have it, and not the camel?
Come to think of it, what about the maple trees?
What about the blue iris?
What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?
What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?
What about the grass?

Sermon

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

HOW DO YOU LIVE HERE WITHOUT THINKING THAT YOU’RE BETTER THAN EVERYONE ELSE?

Chris: I think that one can believe that one’s belief and one’s heart are in the right place without believing that that makes us better than someone else. We can believe, for instance, that our religious or political ideology is one rooted in love that then benefits more people than one that is not. That doesn’t make me better than anyone else. In fact, if I love everyone, I have to love them equally.

Carrie: So some of y ‘all know I grew up as a fundamentalist, and when I was a little kid, I really loved people and I thought the best way I could love them was to share the good news of hell. [ Laughter ] And let me tell you, I was pure of heart, right?

But I grew up and I met people and I had experiences and my world opened up. And so, I’m no better than that little girl. I just have a wider lens in which to look through the world.

And so we are no better than those people who have a narrow lens. We just have more information and probably more access to cooler people. [laughter]

WHY DO BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE?

Carrie: Why? Because that’s the nature of things, you know. I mean, why do good things happen to really not great people, right? We could ask either question. Why do people who are willing to cause harm seem to hoard all the wealth and have all the privilege? It is it is just the way of the world and also those people (the people that have everything) cannot be protected from heartache just as much as we cannot be protected from heartache.

I don’t believe in an interventionist God that would protect certain people and not others. I Think bad things happen because our bodies are fragile and kind of tending toward chaos and because we live in a system that is controlled by supremacist thinking and bad things happen because of those things and we can do one thing about one of those things which is to work for a more beautiful and just world for everyone.

Chris: Yeah I think that’s pretty much the way I would Answer that also, I think that some of you may have heard me say that My personal experience of God is also not of an interventionist God. It is a God that is a fierce Loving presence that is with us even when those random terrible things happen in our lives lives. And so I think of God as a comforting presence, not as a presence that causes good or bad things to happen to us.

SO I’D LIKE TO HEAR MORE ABOUT GETTING GROUNDED IN SPIRITUALITY DURING SERMONS. WHAT WOULD YOU THINK ABOUT GIVING MORE SERMONS ON THAT TOPIC?

Yes? Okay. (audience laughing)

Yes. (audience laughing) – Well, that one was easy. (audience laughing)

HOW DO YOU DEFINE GOD? – WHAT ARE THE SACRED TEXTS OF UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISM?

Carrie: I brought props. (audience laughing) So, how do i define God? [ Barry Taylor] the guitar tech for AC/DC. (I studied lots of theology – just so you know) said: “God is the name of the blanket that we lay on the mystery.”

And to me, that God is the mystery, and that mystery is what calls us to justice, it’s what calls us to each other, it’s what calls us to risk, even when we do not have stakes in the game, It comforts us like Chris said, when we are in those low places the one scripture that I always think is the even in the Depths of Sheol. There you are. So that’s God for me.

Books? I have, like I said… Okay, I really am a nerd. So, and I also cheated because it said five books.

  • So you want to get the and History of Unitarian Universalism, volumes one and two, that will give you a whole, several centuries of knowledge from Unitarians and Universalists.
  • And then we go to Mark Morrison Reed’s text on the Selma Awakening, which talks about our religion getting involved in the civil rights movement. And to me, it’s a very prophetic text. It’s not just historical.
  • Then we move on to James Luther Adams, who should technically be before James Luther Adams is one of our very, to me, one of our best theologians who was dealing with fascism during the middle of the 20th century and asked great questions like can our liberal religion stand up to fascism? And his collection of essays is just phenomenal.
  • Then there’s the book Centering, which is what ministers of color put up with in Unitarian Universalist Church, which I think is very illuminating.
  • And then Widening the Circle of Concern, which also shows the work that we have to do in our own church so that we can then really do the work of building the beloved community outside our church.

 

Chris: Great, thank you Carrie. You all just heard me talk a little bit about how I experience God.

As far as the sacred text of UU, I would say that we draw from all of the sacred text of all of the world’s religions and major philosophies as well as the collected works of Mary Oliver. And Carrie and I are kind of combining another question that we got here that wanted to know also beyond the sacred text, sort of what are some of the texts that tell us about our origins, our history, our struggle, how we’re organized, what’s the intellectual basis of our faith. So I too brought five books. I didn’t actually bring the books, just the titles.

 

  • One is Our Chosen Faith by John Buehrens. It’s a little bit dated now, but I think really still goes into how we do draw from so many sources.
  • Congregational Polity by Conrad Wright, which talks about how we’re organized as a faith.
  • Love at the Center, which is by our current Unitarian Universalist president, and really gets at now that we have centered our faith in love. What does that mean, theologically.
  • A Faith Without Certainty by Paul Razer I think is really important because we are a faith that doesn’t embrace certainty as we’re doing today. In fact, we find a lot of our religious faith and our spirituality in the questions, in the uncertainty, in the mystery.
  • And then I also, as Carrie had Widening the Circle of Concern and I have copies in my office you can borrow if you would like to help widen our circle of concern at this church.

 

Carrie: I’m going to add something because I clearly was very excited to answer that question that I did not get asked and I just wanted to say yes all we also can pull from all places for our sacred texts and just this week in a pastoral care and I was able to pull from the sacred text that is the Icelandic pop sensation, “Bjork.”

So it is all around.

Chris: – And actually that makes me want to add a little more about sacred texts. I think one of the really cool things about our faith is our sacred texts can also be our experience of life and what it teaches us and it can be music and it can be great drama and poetry and art and so many things so we are we are really not limited in how we define sacred and what informs what is sacred for us.

WHO ARE OUR UU SAINTS?

Chris: Unitarian universalism does not believe in hell, capital punishment or saints. I joke, I do think that while as a faith we have tended to have folks from throughout our history that we admire and respect and hold up and love some of what they did, we tend not to venerate folks.

And I actually think that that’s good that we can also criticize Ralph Waldo Emerson and say the type of individualism he was espousing at his time was in a context where communalism meant conformity and that might be too great an individualism for our time. And on and on. We can talk about how Theodore Parker fought for abolition and was in fact racist himself.

And so I think it’s actually important that we don’t hold up the almost perfection of saints because then that becomes a perfectionism standard for ourselves that we can’t live up to because we’re fallible human beings and if we try to hold ourselves up to a saint we can fall into despair and choose to do very little instead.

Carrie: That is where I landed as well. I’ve been thinking about this question all week because I really think it’s interesting and I think that’s exactly right. we have to move away from this idea of perfection so that we can actually do real work, except for maybe Mary Oliver, which is what someone told me.

IF SOMEONE BELIEVES IN AN AFTERLIFE WHERE INDIVIDUAL SOULS PASS INTO THAT AFTERLIFE AS A PHYSICAL LIFE, WHAT DOES THEIR INTELLIGENT AND THEIR PERSONAL SELF PASS ON?
WHAT IF THAT PERSON WAS OF HIGH INTELLIGENCE, BUT IN LATER LIFE SUFFERED FROM DEMENTIA. WHICH VERSION OF THAT PERSON PASSES ON TO THE OTHER SIDE?
WILL THEIR BEST SELF RETURN, OR WILL THEY BE LISTLESSLY WANDERING AROUND FOR ETERNITY?
FOR THAT MATTER, I AM A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PERSON THAN I WAS AT 40 YEARS OLD. WHICH VERSION OF ME CONTINUES ON?
BUT PEOPLE SUFFERING FROM DEMENTIA ARE THE MOST EXTREME EXAMPLE OF DIFFERENT PERSONS IN THE SAME BODY AND THE QUESTIONS OF LOSS AND INTELLIGENCE AND THOUGHT PROCESSES.

Carrie: Okay, so first of all this is where I get real envious of that little girl who would have a good answer for you. But my answer is, obviously I don’t know what happens when you die. I do know biologically we have always existed, and we will continue to exist because this body, these borrowed carbon molecules will go back in to the earth and have a new life. And that’s beautiful. And that’s including our brain. And my brain wants to say, and I get to keep existing, and I hope that’s right. And I’ve had experiences that made me think that there is some core, some soul, some something, some essence that is me that is totally separate from my biological process that will continue to exist. And I really hope that that’s true.

Chris: – It’s a great question and I actually come to it from a similar perspective as Carrie. And actually I was just reading some really interesting scientific research where they really are starting to see that there may be energy patterns that we both omit and receive and actually are occurring between Carrie and I, and you and all of us right now, that may kind of be an essence of us.

Like Carrie said, I would find it hard to believe that Chris, as the intellect that’s talking to you right now, or as the physical body that’s talking to you right now, goes on in that way.

My own experiences, like Carrie say that maybe something of us, a core essence, our values, the love that we feel may go on, and I talked about my experience of God as that presence of fierce love that is there for us and all around us.

I have had experiences where people who I’ve lost seem to have kind of merged into that, And so the essence of them still seemed to be there and surrounding me and with me and supporting me, but it wasn’t like I was there with them physically or that we had a conversation. It was just sort of that presence and that communication. And there’s a certain wisdom that sometimes comes from that when I’m in deep meditation that actually applies to my life. So whether that is actually my spouse, Wayne, who died communicating something to me that I need to know, or whether it’s my subconscious creating him to communicate that to me. I really don’t care because it helps either way.

IS IT RESPONSIBLE TO PROSELYTIZE FOR UUS? I WANT TO SPREAD THE WORD OF OUR FAITH AS AN ANTIDOTE TO THE NEGATIVITY OF THE WORLD, BUT I DON’T WANNA BE THAT GUY. (audience laughing)

Chris: – Be that guy. I think, especially in this day and age, Unitarian Universalism has a saving message for our world and for folks that are out there who are hungry for a spiritual home that is grounded in fierce love and does want to create more justice and more love in our world, and we ought to be out there telling people about it.

There’s a difference between being coercive about it and going out there and saying, “Hey, friend, I’m a member of this faith in this church that has changed my life for the better and I believe is changing our world for the better. Let me tell you about it. I’d love for you to come sometime.” You’re not forcing them to come. You’re just saying, “Hey, I want you to share what has meant so much to me and been so valuable to me.”

Carrie: There’s no threat of hell, right? So that’s you’re not it’s not a scary place to bring people.

But I will say I found this place because someone told me to come and sign a petition to get the school district to treat trans people better Okay, I had no idea that y ‘all existed and I could have really used y ‘all many many years before that. So I am a little upset that any Unitarian Universalist I needed to tell me about it. So it is not, you are not proselytizing, you are not selling people the good news of hell. You are giving them that is something deeply meaningful in a time where there is just so much chaos. And I know that we all benefit from that, right? So we can be that guy. Be that guy.

Chris: All right, thank you all for such great questions. I haven’t run this by Carrie yet, but I think you won’t mind. There were a bunch of really good questions that we didn’t have the time to get to. I think over time, as we’re doing sermons, where that question might be applicable, we’ll come back to some of those and tie them into whatever topic we might be preaching on that might be related as we get the opportunity.

More of Carrie’s notes:

WHAT ARE 5 KEY TEXTS THAT YOU THINK ALL UUS SHOULD READ TO LEARN ABOUT THE ORIGIN, HISTORY/STUGGLES, AND INTELLECTUAL BASIS OF OUR CHOSEN FAITH?

 

  • A Documentary History of Unitarian Universalism, Volume 1 and 2
  • Anything James Luther Adams but one of the quickest way to dive in is with the book: JLA. The Essential James Luther Adams, Select Essays
  • Rev. Dr. Mark Morrison Reed – I think of him as a prophetic historian. Read The Selma Awakening for sure, but also Black Pioneers in a White Religion
  • Centering: Navigating Race, Authenticity & Power in Ministry
  • Widening the Circle of Concern

 

ARE WE CHRISTIAN?

Yes, No, and sort of

Yes, Unitarians and Universalist were christian all the way back to the beginning of Chrisitanity, or Jesus followers. Its just theologians like Arius- who said at the Council of Nicea “the trinity doesn’t make sense” and Origin who was branded as a heretic for saying – “hell, who is she?” Pushed those movements underground for a long time and when they popped up they were suppressed until you get to America and there was just more freedom for them to thrive.

But even both of those movements started moving away from Christianity. The Unitarians because of transcendentalist and humanist, there were and still are christans Universalist in 1946, before the merger created the symbol of an off centered cross – its where we get our off centered chalice form at the time

Gordon Mckeeman wrote:

“The Circle is a symbol of infinity a figure without beginning or end. The Cross is the symbol of Christianity, It is placed off-center in the circle of infinity to indicate that Christianity is an interpretation of infinity but neither the only interpretation of the infinite nor necessarily for all people, the best one. It leaves room for other symbols and other interpretations, It is, therefore, a symbol of Universalism.”

 

So yes our roots are christian, but when we merged – there was alot of back and forth about how we were going to define ourselves, the source of who we were, in our bylaws (article 2, for those in the know) and after a lot of back and forth. They settled on “the universal truths taught by the great prophets and teachers of humanity in every age and tradition.”

From there thats what we have been. Sure some of us are Chrisitans or Jesus followers and a lot of us are humanist, atheist, buddist, or Pagan and a lot more. We do our best to grow spiritually together in those beliefs.

HOW DO YOU DEFINE GOD?

Attributed: Barry Taylor guitar tech for AC/DC and a pastor said:
“God is the name we give the blanket that we throw on the mystery.”

Mystery that pulls us together, that pulls us towards justice, that feeds a holy imagination, that exists in each one of us.

WHAT ARE THE SACRED TEXTS OF UUs?

Almost anything can be a sacred text. All sacred text can be used by us.

We have the bible which is part of our heritage and something that I wish we all were more literate in, not because it is a moral text – I don’t think it is at all…. But rather that like all good and holy text it is about people and their stories and poetry that are all circling around the same thing we are.
What is our purpose?
What is god?
What is bigger than our self?
How do we live life?
What do we owe each other?
What are we owed?
To me the bible is like the most specific library housing big questions and musings over 5000 years to a specific set of ancient people.

But also the icelandic pop musician Bjork has created some really lovely text.

WHO ARE OUR UU SAINTS? (I am obsessed)

We have martyrs- Rev. James Reeb and Viola Luzzo. If you go back in time you have Michael Servatus who was murdered by John Calvin But I don’t think we have saints.

And as I’ve been obsessing about that I think I love that about us. We have puritans roots and we are all swimming in white supremacy, both holding this idea of perfection and a move away from our humanity. The idea of sainthood, plays into that because its about purity and that’s not conducive to growth we need as people who are trying to pull out systems of supremacy within our selves and the larger world.

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 now, may we continue to explore questions more profound than answers.

And may we also find some really good answers every now and then.

May the congregation say, “Amen” and “blessed be”.

Go in peace.

SERMON INDEX

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

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