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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
June 14, 2026
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Building the Beloved Community and living into our full potential as individuals are far from exclusive pursuits – each requires the other. Our ability to flourish as individuals is bound up in creating communities and societies rooted in a fierce love that recognizes our sacred interdependence.
Welcome
Prelude: from Coast to Coast (Hiroya Tsukamo)
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 we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.
Call to Worship
from LOVE AS THE PRACTICE OF FREEDOM
Bell HooksThe moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others. That action is the testimony of love as the practice of freedom.
Anthem
“Another Great Day to Be Alive” (Hiroya Tsukamo)
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Offertory Music
“Dawn” (Hiroya Tsukamo)
Reading
BELONGING
Rosemary Wahtola TrommerAnd if it’s true we are alone,
we are alone together,
the way blades of grass
are alone, but exist as a field.
Sometimes I feel it,
the green fuse that ignites us,
the wild thrum that unites us,
an inner hum that reminds us
of our shared humanity.
Just as thirty-five trillion
red blood cells join in one body
to become one blood.
Just as one hundred thirty-six thousand
notes make up one symphony.
Alone as we are, our small voices
weave into the one big conversation.
Our actions are essential
to the one infinite story of what it is
to be alive. When we feel alone,
we belong to the grand communion
of those who sometimes feel alone-
we are the dust, the dust that hopes,
a rising of dust, a thrill of dust,
the dust that dances in the light
with all other dust, the dust
that makes the world.
Centering
Music for Meditation: “Takibi” (Hiroya Tsukamo)
Sermon
FLOURISHING TOGETHER IN THE WAYS OF LOVE
Rev. Chris Jimmerson
Video
The story of Juneteenth starts on June 19, 1865. Two and a half years after the Emancipation Act ended slavery in Confederate states Major General Gordon Granger and Union soldiers delivered the news that slavery had ended to 250,000 people who were still enslaved in Texas.
Black Americans celebrated. Freedom brought huge progress in the years after the war. Literacy rates jumped 70 percent in the subsequent 40 years and 22 black americans were elected to federal government. But when reconstruction ended in 1877 attempts to build communities were met with violent attempts to restore the power imbalance of the pre-civil right years throughout the 1900s. Juneteenth celebrations continued highlighting advancements within the family and community and honoring ancestors.
In 2016 Opal Lee, an activist in Fort Worth, Texas, set out to make Juneteenth an official holiday by walking from her home in Texas to Washington, D.C. She reached Washington by walking two and a half miles a day, representing the number of years it took for news of emancipation to reach Texas.
In 2021, Lee’s campaign was successful. President Biden signed legislation making Juneteenth a federal holiday. Today Juneteenth is an opportunity to celebrate Black Americans’ contribution to American culture and honor the continuing quest for freedom, justice and equality.
Chris
This coming Friday is Juneteenth this year Today’s service contemplates flourishing together through building communities of fierce love and ultimately a society of Beloved Community.
And it seems to me that participating in one or more of the communal observations of Juneteenth that will be happening is one way of building such community.
Its history and celebration of Black America’s vital contributions – Juneteenth’s ongoing call to dismantle systems of white supremacy and racism – these move us to act in the ways of bell hook’s “Love as the Practice of Freedom” from our call to worship earlier.
As I was thinking about this, I found myself re-experiencing a trip I made back in March 2015, to join over 500 hundred other Unitarian Universalists in Selma, Alabama in support of the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the voting rights marches from Selma to Montgomery in 1965.
Several members of this church also went to the commemoration.
These voting rights marches and the often violent and bloody events surrounding them lead to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, protecting the vote of black Americans. (And thereby all of our votes, it should be mentioned).
So it is heartbreaking that today our Supreme Court has eviscerated that Voting Rights Act that so many died and bled for during those marches.
Among those who had been killed were two of our Unitarian Universalist ancestors. Rev. James Reeb had responded to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call for white Faith leaders to come to Selma in solidarity. Rev. Reeb was murdered by a group of white supremacist while leaving dinner at a black owned restaurant in Selma.
Viola Liuzzo, a member of First Unitarian Universalist Church of Detroit had volunteered to drive marchers back to Selma from Montgomery at the end of their March. On one of her return trips to Montgomery, she was shot in the head and killed while driving down the highway.
It was with this and so much more history in my head that 50 years later, I boarded one of the buses the anniversary organizers had provided to take us from the Birmingham airport to Selma so we could participate in the commemoration and reenactment of walking over the Edmund Pettus Bridge there, where the marches had all begun all those years before.
Like all community building and forging of solidarity, it was both beautiful and terribly messy from the very beginning.
I remember the leaders and organizers having to inform the mostly white Unitarians on those buses that, no, we would not be leading the commemorative march over that bridge. We were there to support the black faith leaders and organizers who had planned the event and the folks who had been most affected by its history. They would be the first to walk over that bridge in solidarity with and gratitude for those ancestors that had gone over it before us.
We would learn to follow since this was not our time to be centered.
The buses stopped at City of Saint Jude, the Catholic Parish that had served as one of the camp stops for the marchers back in 1965. We shared a meal there at City of Saint Jude, a worship service, and then the singing of some spirituals together.
(And no white folks you will not be leading the singing of spirituals today, some folks had to be reminded.)
There was this moment though, when they were leading us in that iconic civil rights era spiritual, “We Shall Overcome” when I felt tears welling in my eyes, and I looked around the hall that we were in and saw the eyes of almost everyone else were also glistening, and we all began to reach out and take one another’s hands, some of us holding more than one hand on each side so that everyone could be connected…
And I think even a hardened atheist would’ve had to say that something akin to God entered the room in that moment.
We sang together, witnessing a shared history of both triumph and tragedy.
We sang together feeling how far we had come and yet at the same time how very far we had yet to go together.
I think many of us had no idea how very far we had yet to go, given that in the very next year, there would be an election where a candidate would become the next President of the United States, running at least in part on an ideology founded in the supremacy, racism and bigotry we sang of overcoming.
I begin this morning with that story and that moment because it illustrates so well how the building of community in order to flourish together is so often beautiful and messy and joyous and heartbreaking and difficult and exhilarating all at the same time.
It requires that each of us recognize our own fragility – that we offer to others, our vulnerability – that we forge a fierce love grounded in the resolute awareness that each of us will only make it through this life with any chance of flourishing, together, in communities of solidarity.
Participating in the divine is a communal event.
So this morning, during a time when that presidential candidate I mentioned a moment ago is once again back in office –
During a time when that ideology we must overcome is once again, not only stifling human flourishing, but actually and intentionally doing harm –
During a time when I don’t think it is an over exaggeration to say that same ideology is putting all life on our planet at grave risk –
During this time in which we find ourselves, it is even more vital that we harken back to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s famous words about our sacred interdependence when he said,
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”
Recognizing our interdependence is the key to flourishing together. It is the only way through which we shall overcome.
Now, I suspect on at least a very abstract level, I am somewhat preaching to the choir this morning.
Embracing that we are part of an interdependent web of all existence goes back many decades in Unitarian Universalism and, really, this concept stated in other ways goes back at least to our transcendentalist ancestors in the 1800s and was present within broader Unitarian and Universalist though even before that.
The key message I want to reemphasize this morning though is that on the more concrete, lived level, embracing that interdependence, creating the Beloved Community within which all individuals may thrive to their fullest potential, can be extremely messy and difficult.
Like in that moment on the way to Selma I described earlier, it will be both joyful and heartbreaking sometimes at the same time.
And in this time of white nationalism costumed within a false Christianity that defies all that Jesus Christ taught, this congregation has recommitted ourselves to the work of anti-racism, anti-oppression, anti-supremacy of all types.
And we do so because we recognize that interdependence. We know that we can all only thrive together.
The fierce love within which we long to be a part of co-creating the divine, the Beloved Community, drives an awareness that systems of equity, love and justice are the only path to flourishing for each of us, while systems of supremacy and oppression harm us all – those who are oppressed more so, yes, but also those of us privileged by such systems.
And those of us who carry privilege have to know that we will make mistakes, sometimes just out of the naiveté that comes from privilege being the water in which we swim.
And we will have to risk such mistakes – risk and then make amends and repair when needed.
Theologian Henry Nouwen wrote, “Community is not easy. Somebody once said, ‘Community is the place where the person you least want to live with always lives.’ In Jesus’ community of twelve apostles, the last name was that of someone who was going to betray him. That person is always in your community somewhere; in the eyes of others, you might be that person.”
We will all mess up. We will have setbacks.
And we forge ahead in the ways of love anyway because of our unshakeable faith that choosing love moves us all toward freedom.
I want to share another story that I think also creates a vivid picture of this.
Some of you have heard me talk before about how in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was the director of a nonprofit that was a part of the nationwide Community Based Clinical Trials Network, a group of Organizations across the country that worked to provide access to experimental treatments for people with HIV in community settings rather than academic centers. It was a way of getting potential treatments to more terribly ill people more quickly while also accelerating the pace of research to develop better therapies.
The leaders of these groups – we got together often over the phone and at least a few times a year in person to plan together, discuss what research was needed, and figure how to fundraise jointly and support one another in other ways.
We also argued, competed, fought, disagreed, listened to ego battles between the community based researchers, and occasionally partied too much.
And, as a young man, having been raised in Texas, people in the network from certain other areas of the country often seemed to me unnecessarily verbose.
I’Il admit to taking delight in listening to them go on and on about something and then gleefully summarizing in two sentences what they had just spent many, many minutes verbalizing.
We were terrible sometimes.
And we loved each other.
And we had to be vulnerable with each other because we were all experiencing so much loss to such a terrible disease.
And we built a community based clinical trials network that helped find more successful treatments, even though we didn’t really know what the hell we were doing a lot of the time.
I thought about that story because as I was putting today’s service together, I saw a post on social media by someone whose health had stabilized while participating in one of those studies way back when.
The post said, “It’s my birthday. I can’t believe I’m a senior citizen”
Each of us only makes it through this life with any chance of flourishing, together, in communities of solidarity.
Beloved Community is hard sometimes, and beautiful, and heartbreaking, and joyous, and messy, and we won’t know what the hell we’re doing a lot of the time, and we keep doing it because of our faith that liberation and flourishing are collective acts of love.
Like the folks who answered that call to Selma so many years ago, each of us will leave a legacy.
I guess the question is, will that legacy be love in all the messiness of freedom and community it brings.
“We are the dust, the dust that hopes, a rising of dust, a thrill of dust, the dust that dances in the light with all other dust, the dust that makes the world.”
So says our poet from earlier.
We are also the dust of the divine, the fierce love that shimmers through all eternity.
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
For our benediction today, I leave you with the words of Rev. Tess Baumberger.
None of us can do this alone,
This living, this being in the world.
We know that we need one another,
Especially in such stormy times.
May we be tenders of the flame
we have kindled today.
May it light your way
And brighten the path for others.
For we are all in this, together.May the congregation say, “Amen”, and “Blessed Be”
I love you fiercely. Go in peace.
Postlude
“Going to Durango” (Hiroya Tsukamo)
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