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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
August 9, 2026
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
As we continue this second in a series of services on the ways (called “ends”) we have prioritized for living our mission as a religious community, we will explore our second end, “We are an intergenerational church that invests in and prioritizes spiritual nourishment for all.” As we live out the part of our mission that says we ‘nourish souls’, this end encourages us to both embrace difference and celebrate unity in order to do so.
Welcome
Prelude: “The Girl With the Flaxen Hair”
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
WE UNITE IN OUR DIFFERENCES
Rev. David BreedenWe unite in our differences in background & belief;
We unite with gratitude and hope:
Hope for a world of differences;
Hope for a world that honors difference;
We unite in community
With gratitude for difference.
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Anthem
“The Call” (Vaughn Williams)
Reading
Our soul does not grow only in solitude.
We find our faith in community; our spirit in relationship –
When a child expresses wisdom we had forgotten.
When an elder shares stories that remind us from whence we came.
When our youth rouse our faith toward action.
When a beloved from a different culture opens a window for us that allows a gust of new perspective on our world to blow through us.
Then, do our individual uniquenesses nourish one another’s souls.
Then, does our collective unity invite each of our spirits to soar,
As together, we move one another toward knowing God.by anonymous author
Centering
Music for Meditation: “Bach Prelude in C”
Sermon
THE INTERDEPENDENT WEB OF UU FAITH
Rev. Chris Jimmerson
Imagine for a moment that on every wall of the fellowship hall here at the church, and all down the hallways to the very back of the church through our religious education wing and over every empty space in every classroom and every nook and cranny in the church, hung sections of a giant handmade quilt that had been stitched together by every single person since the founding of this church, one quilt square representing each and every one of us.
Of course, even all of that space would not be enough to display such an enormous quilt in a church whose ancestors go back for more than a century.
Imagine if it were possible though – on this quilt, might be carefully embroidered pieces with intricate patterns, simple scraps of denim, bits of flannel, babies pajamas and more.
One square might be from the work shirt an original founder wore when breaking ground for our first sanctuary.
Another might be from the bright purple dress someone wore as a teenager when she participated in the coming of age service, yet another might contain an inlay of drawings that our children made just last year for the stewardship campaign.
There would be pieces representing different cultures, languages, life experiences – perhaps a rainbow flag on one square and a Black Lives Matter emblem on another.
It would be an ever-growing quilt, the older pieces reminding us where we come from, the newer squares continually expanding our spiritual horizons, the multitude of cultures, races and life experiences represented within the patchwork forming a rich and dazzling array of shapes and colors, anchoring us in the understanding that we can only realize the full depth and breath of our Unitarian Universalist faith through embracing the beautiful diversity of our differences.
The individual pieces of this perpetually expanding patchwork of souls representing each of our divine uniquenesses; the quilt as a whole powerfully holding our combined unity and interconnectedness.
This was an image I got as I meditated on the second of four priorities (or ends statements) that folks in this religious community have established recently for how we will live out the mission that we say together every Sunday.
Today, we will be exploring the second of those ends statements,
“We are an intergenerational church that invests in and prioritizes spiritual nourishment for all.”
If you are visiting with us today, I hope this exploration will reveal at least some of who we are as a religious community and a faith movement.
Now, last Sunday, Rev. Carrie began demonstrating the whole church activities and programs we might undertake to implement this end, when she had folks participate in various activities of church life throughout different areas of the church building for our Sunday service.
And you’ll hear even more next Sunday, when she addresses our religious education programs and small group ministries.
For today, I’d like us to reflect for a while on why this end is so vital to our values and mission as a faith community.
I want to delve into this because I think the congregation expressing this end involves a profound shift in mindset concerning how we think about religious education and how we do church more broadly.
If we say that we invest in and prioritize spiritual nourishment for all, that means that, yes, we invest financially in religious education, nourishing souls, transforming lives, for people of all ages, backgrounds, life experiences, including differing experiences with race and culture.
We invest in not only restoring the staffing cuts we’ve had to make in recent years in our religious education department, but also the staffing we will need to grow our faith and our church into the future.
However, investing and prioritizing means more than just doing so financially.
It means we invest in all of this as a way of being in the entirety of our church life.
It means that we form a mindset that religious education, spiritual nourishment, faith formation is not just something that happens over there in that wing at back of the church where the classrooms and nursery are.
It means redefining what we consider religious education to invest in it beyond traditional classroom activities – it mean including in it, worship, spiritual practices, doing justice, all the faith activities of this church, including for our children and youth – sometimes engaged in as separate age groups and at other times done with all of our generations together.
So, your children’s RE one Sunday morning might involve children’s chapel, or age-appropriate spiritual practices, rather than classic classroom activities.
And speaking of our children and youth, and even though I know we UUs are normally opposed to censorship, one mindset I want to propose that we ban is that thing those of us well beyond our youth or childhood sometimes blithely like to say, “the children and youth are our future.”
As theological professor and faith educator Rev. Dr. Rodger Nishioka wrote,
while they may be a part of the future of the church, more importantly, our children and youth are “… the church today… the church right now.”
We risk diminishing our investment in the children and youth of today if relegate their value to being instruments of some future church legacy. Their inherent worthiness already exists and invites their current, full, active participation in the whole of this religious community right now.
Oh, and while I am proposing bans, let’s also ban shushing other people’s children.
OK, that brings us to how being an “intergenerational church” is so central to our ability to nourish souls and transform lives, as well as how “spiritual nourishment for all” necessarily requires multiculturalism.
Several years ago now, many of us within Unitarian Universalism participated in a faith formation training on the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity.
Slide
A lot of us took a test or inventory for where we were within the model’s framework that you see here for recognizing and valuing cultural/racial differences on a continuum from denial to adaptation.
Now, we can’t go into it in detail today, and like all models, this one has its short comings. It lacks an analysis of power and may be overly linear.
One real gift it offers us though, is pathways through which we might come to value both our common humanity and important cultural differences.
Now, the majority of Unitarian Universalists fell into the minimization area of the continuum, which is not bad, especially compared to the general population.
In minimization, folks do tend to see our similarities and commonalities.
So for instance, someone in minimization would likely recognize that race is a social construct that in this country was promoted by the wealthy and powerful to keep black slaves and poor whites from joining together in common cause and shared humanity to rebel against the injustices each were suffering.
So, in minimization, we would recognize that race is a false construct and embrace that genetically we are all astoundingly similar.
What we miss, if we remain in minimization though, is that after so many years of living within this construct, false though it may be, profound cultural differences have developed depending upon a people’s lived experience of racial labels and racism, not to mention the beautiful ancestral cultures that folks have carried forward from before this false construct was forced up on us.
And embracing these differences along with our common humanity is not only necessary for reconciliation and dismantling that very construct of racism, it also offers valuable wisdom and creativity, that when shared across the cultural divides that racism has created, can help bring healing and spiritual nourishment and growth to all.
So, here, in our church, our faith development is stunted at best without the embrace and integration of antiracism, anti oppression and multiculturalõsm.
Our differences can nourish one another’s souls.
Like in the image of the church quilt we began with imagining, the multitude of cultures, races, life experiences represented within the patchwork form a rich and dazzling array of multicultural embrace vital to fulfilling our Unitarian Universalist faith.
And as our quilt image also illustrates and our new ends statement makes explicit, another aspect of this beautiful diversity lies between and among our different generations – spiritual nourishment for all is to be found within intergenerational faith activities and interactions throughout the whole church and our religious life together.
Faith formation is not simply information to be poured into our heads in classrooms. It is the sharing of wisdom. Generations exploring life’s biggest questions together – practicing justice and compassion together – renewing hope together.
And an extraordinary blessing of this intergenerational, whole church mindset and approach is that it sometimes spurs this surprising, unplanned and unexpected spiritual movement of fierce love within us all on its own – if we only let it. If we just stop shushing our neighbors’ children.
Some of you may have heard me tell this story before from a time when I witnessed this happening.
Many years ago now, when I was a ministerial intern, I was assigned to coordinate the annual Christmas pageant.
Unlike the no rehearsal pageant we do here, this one came with a complete script, pre-assigned roles, lines and songs to be learned, full costumes, props, and simple set pieces to be built representing the nativity scene for the story of Jesus’ birth.
Our cast included folks ranging in age from pre-schoolers all the way through to an amazing woman in her mid-eighties who served as a sort of makeshift stage manager and self-appointed executive producer.
One of my challenges during the several rehearsals that we did was to help the younger children playing the animals in the stable to remember that there were imaginary walls around the little platform we had constructed to represent the stable.
On several occasions, a cow or camel walked right through one of those imaginary walls, bringing the rehearsal to a temporary halt so that we could go back and reset with all humans and critters in their proper places.
On the Friday before we were scheduled to present the pageant for our Sunday service, a 20 year old gunman armed with assault weapons broke into Sandy Hook elementary and murdered 20 children ages 6 and seven, as well as six adults.
After much deliberation, we decided to begin the Sunday service with a time for addressing and grieving this horrific event and then to go forward with the pageant, given its healing message.
I could feel the intense heaviness and sense of sorrow that folks were carrying as we shared a time of silent meditation and prayer for all of the lives lost and those mourning their children and loved ones.
And after the silence, the music for the pageant began.
We got to about halfway through the pageant, when one of the children costumed as a cat in our imaginary stable, got so caught up in the pageant song we were singing, that she stood up and started dancing.
She did a sort of stumbling twirl right through one of our imaginary walls, whirling around in balletic circles right in front of our carefully staged nativity scene.
She was about the same age as the children who had been killed at Sandy Hook.
She kept dancing. The music kept playing. The people kept singing. At one point the song almost faltered – the children mesmerized by the little girl’s impromptu ballet; the adults nearly overcome with emotion.
We kept on singing, and the little girl kept her ballet afloat, and our spirits were dancing through fierce love to immense grief and back again in small, fragmentary slivers of time.
And in those small, fragmentary slivers of intergenerational worship turned unexpectedly transformative, fragmentary slivers of spiritual hope and healing began to be born. III I am so thankful that no adult tried to “such” her.
A little girl’s dancing broke the rules and broke through the fog of faith having been so severely tested.
This the power of intergenerational church that invests in and prioritizes spiritual nourishment for all.
May we make it so.
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, I leave you with the words of theologian and educator John Westeroff:
“Faith is not taught; it is caught through shared life across generations and life experiences.”
May the congregation say, “Amen” and “Blessed be”
I love you fiercely. Go in peace.
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