Courage and Community

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

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

Courage and Community: These are two of our religious values at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin. How do our values of courage and community intersect and interact? In what ways do they call us to be and act in our world? Rev Chris explores how these values bring our religious community alive to meet the challenges of our times.

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

LIVING OUR VALUES

Transcendence
To connect with wonder and awe of the unity of life

Community
To connect with joy, sorrow, and service with those whose lives we touch

Compassion
To treat ourselves and others with love

Courage
To live lives of honesty, vulnerability, and beauty

Transformation
To pursue the growth that changes our lives and heals our world

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

IT IS OUR TURN TO CARRY THE WORLD
by adrian marie brown

we are each other’s safety.
right now and every day,
decide who you will protect,
yourself, your own, and who else.

it’s time to cover all that we love.
land, creature, place, person,
intertwine your roots with mine.
in this way, our lives become miracles.

there will be strangers.
they will become comrades.
we will each say our needs.
we will learn to let our community come closer.

every part of us is a shield,
our words, our trust, our hearts,
our bodies in action,
and the freedom to think for ourselves.

we are the adaptation.
no oppressor can imagine.
our love is water.
form shifting power, river, vapor, life.
we flood each other with belonging.

we are building our stamina.
we dream of the real world.
we carry god and we see god in each of our faces.
your holiness is not too heavy, not for me.

our attention and our courage show us
the next stand to take,
the next hill on which to hold each other,
and if needed, the next hiding place, survive.

our imagination and memory
from the wisdom of our ancestors,
find our future in the rubble,
find the seeds in our songs.

we choose our freedom.
we keep each other’s souls intact,
safer than any cage of empire.
we know something better is coming.

we are each other’s safety.
we see each other’s free selves.
we will hold on tight in public, in private,
over and underground.

and we will never let go.
we will never let go.
we will never let go.
we will never let go.

Sermon

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

Today’s sermon is brought to you by the letter C. Remember when people would talk about words that began with that sponsoring letter. Of course, on Sesame Street, when Cookie Monster said that, the letter C was for cookie, or COOKIE, as he would say it. Most of you remember that.

Well, here at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin, three of our five religious values also begin with the letter C, as you may have noticed when we read those values. Values are the transcendent timeless qualities our religious community strives to embody in all that we do. And out of those values our mission emerges. Our mission is our purpose as a religious community, the overarching differences we hope to make in our lives and in our world.

Well, early next year, the church board will lead us through a best practice. A best practice of periodically revisiting that mission as well as the goals that we call Ends that kind of help us know how and how well we’re living out that mission. So we’re dedicating a few services before then to delving into our values as we prepare for that process. We talked a while back about our compassion, one of our C values, so today’s sermon will be sponsored by our other two religious C values, courage and community.

Courage we define that as: To live lives of honesty, vulnerability, and beauty.

Community: To connect with joy, sorrow, and service with those whose lives we touch.

I love the way this church defines both courage and community because it’s different than the way they are often thought about and is certainly very different than how they are seen by the ideology that currently controls our national and Texas state governments.

That’s an ideology, an ideology that seems to view courage as seizing power over other people, projecting an air of invulnerability, dominance, and control, an ideology that wants to construct a society of hierarchy based on fear, division, and the subservience of the many to the very few, which is the antithesis of beloved community.

Well, for us, the courage to live our lives expressing our honest selves, our vulnerability, is the beautiful way in which we try to connect with joy, sorrow, and service with one another, and our world. And having a sense of belonging, that’s where we find the courage to embrace our true selves and thereby express our unique beauty and shine our light into the world. By these definitions courage and community are interrelated. It requires courage to forge true community within which we realize we are fragile and We need one another. And so often being in community, having that sense of deep belonging is the source of our courage to rise up against the kinds of extreme injustice and that totalitarian ideology we find ourselves confronting.

As in our poem earlier, in community, we are each other’s safety. We build each other’s stamina. We find the courage to choose our freedom. We keep each other’s souls intact.

When I was a young man, I was an early adapter of technology that would eventually become today’s smartphones. I had this personal digital assistant, a device that was only a little smaller than this hymnal called a handspring visor. You could keep your calendar in it, the contact information for friends and associates, make notes, that sort of thing. And there was this module you could get that would plug into it and allow you to use it as a basic cell phone, as well as do very rudimentary email on it. Yes, I was and still am a techno geek.

That was during the time that AIDS was ravaging the LGBTQ plus community, and there were no effective treatments. I was working in HIV-AIDS community-based research.

A few years later, I was upgrading to a new and improved device. When I realized that a bunch of the folks listed in my contacts had died, I removed 37 names that day. 37 folks who had died of AIDS not a single one was over 40 years old.

I’ve often thought since about how the communities most over run by aids in those days found the courage to not only survive that level of loss, but to also endure governmental and societal scorn and neglect while at the same time building institutions that would provide the research and services needed to protect and care for one another, to demand change, and eventually to survive the disease, at least as communities, even while we lost far too many beloved individuals.

The courage was communal. The LGBTQ plus community and the other communities so devastated by the disease found a way out of no way together by turning toward one another, both within their own communities, but also, also by forging new syblinghoods of solidarity and mutual aid between their communities and by do so forming an even larger “we” of each other’s thinking. The adaptation no oppressor could imagine.

And the belonging each of us found in that expanded community of shared vulnerability and combined strength helped each of us as individuals find the courage and resilience to keep going. Keep fighting, keep knowing something better was was coming.

Fast forward to today. I know what’s happening in America right now is frightening on an extremely broad scale and for so very many people and communities. It’s terrifying, and that is the intent. To keep us afraid, to wrench apart communities of potential solidarity, to rob us of any sense of being each other’s safety, to divide us, to zap our courage by attacking our faith in mutual support and belonging.

Yet, yet, my beloved’s, those C values, courage and community done with compassion are the antidote to this anti-Christ ideology that has taken hold in our country.

Now, I believe that there are two faith or wisdom stories that we too often hear in incomplete ways and that we must reclaim in their fullness in order to be able to live out those values.

And the first is that when Jesus said to love our enemies, he somehow meant that we are supposed to be nice to them, As if we’re to coddle those who would oppress us or others.

No, no. I believe that Jesus was expressing that fierce love that I called God and that simply demands we have the courage to include even the oppressor in our dream of the beloved community so we do not fall into the same exclusion and divisiveness that are the tactics of oppression.

But fierce love also demands that we offer ourselves first as shields and shelter for the oppressed and downtrodden. That we speak the Truth to those that would oppress even when it is hard, even when it is risky, even when they don’t want to hear it, that ultimately we hold them accountable, even while continuing to also hold them within the beloved community. Perhaps in a secured location where they can’t continue to do more harm to themselves or others. That was only partially a joke.

The full faith story tells us that kindness, compassion, are not the same as niceness.

The other wisdom story that we too often failed to tell in its fullness and therefore missed the wisdom contained within it is that of the hero’s journey made famous by author and scholar Joseph Campbell.

Too often though we don’t hear his version. Instead, we hear this truncated, capitalistic, individualistic version of the story where the hero goes off to the mountaintop or out into the wilderness and finds themselves, discovers their courage, and goes off all alone to slay the dragon.

But that leaves out essential elements of the story. It’s not telling the whole story. A hero comes out of a community. And yes, sometimes, sometimes we may need to go up to the mountaintop or out into the wilderness alone to dig deep within, discover our true nature and authentic self.

But the rest of the story is that we then return to the community where if anything we are now able to be even more vulnerable, more whole-hearted, more genuine with other folks. The hero’s journey begins and ends in community.

This is where we find our courage. This is how we’re able to shine our light most brightly in the world. In community. Building the beloved community, both requires and inspires bravery. That’s how courage and community are not only interconnected, they are interlocked.

And my beloveds, it is happening. The full wisdom stories are being made manifest in our world, courage, community, and compassion are ascendant. Just a few weeks ago, millions of people across the nation participated in no kings, events, and protests. Communities like Chicago, Portland, and many, many others are rising up to say no to the anti-democratic, cruel, morally bankrupt actions of ICE and other elements of this corrupt administration.

And they are doing so with humor, courage, not niceness, and a new found sense of solidarity among communities within those cities that have not always agreed with each other about everything, but no, know that we need each other to maintain our courage to first survive and then thrive.

Across the country, folks are joining together to fill up food banks and provide other forms of aid for those who are threatened by a completely unnecessary and immoral government shutdown. I am so proud of this church for participating in that community of mutual aid through the food drive we’re doing.

And just this past week, we had an election. In New York City, Virginia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, across the land. People came together to say no to divisiveness and a politics of anti-Christian, white nationalism, because I will not grace that ideology, white nationalism, with the term Christian any longer.

This is not a time for niceness, it is a time for truth-telling. And though the candidates and issues were very different, what they had in common were candidates who found the courage to campaign on their true authentic selves and beliefs and issues such as affordability, fairness, taking care of one another, in other words, the basic elements of creating and maintaining community.

Even more encouraging to me, MAGA forces spent millions running the same vile, despicable, anti-trans attack ads that had seemed to work for them in the prior election. This time though, this time those horrible ads targeting trans folks not only didn’t work, they seem to have backfired. People recoiled against the hate and bile. They realized that attacking the vulnerable isn’t courage. It is cowardice. This election chose true community over structures of dominance and hierarchy.

Now, all of this does not mean the struggle for love, justice, and democratic community is over, far from it. But what all the events I have just described do demonstrate, what people across this country are starting to discover, is that especially in these scary, challenging times, we don’t have to go it alone. We, none of us, can go it alone.

We choose our freedom together. Together, we know something better is coming. Well, that and folks are discovering Jesus never said love means play nice. The hero’s journey begins and ends in community. In community we can all be heroes we can all find our courage because courage isn’t facing our fears and hardships alone it is accepting and acknowledging that we need one another we are interconnected. We need community. We are each other’s safety, and we will never let go.
We will never let go.
We will never let go. We will never let go. Say it with me.
we will never let go.
Never.
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

As we go out in our world now may we have the courage to become the voice and spirit of God. A fierce love calling us toward the beloved community becoming. Take courage. Know you carry this religious community with you throughout your days.
May the congregation say amen. And blessed be.
I love you fiercely.

I wish you much peace and much love.

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