Living the Creative, Non-fiction Life

January 14, 2025 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
January 12, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

As humans, we make sense of our world by creating stories. Essentially, both as individuals and as groups, we construct ourselves through constructing narratives about ourselves. And those stories not only determine how we feel about ourselves and our world, but they also drive who we are, what we do, and who we are becoming. In effect, they are self-perpetuating. But what if the story we are telling ourselves is harmful and untrue? Can we rewrite or at least reinterpret it in order to create a more life-fulfilling, whole-hearted narrative?

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

EVERYTHING THAT WAS BROKEN
by Mary Oliver Everything that was broken
has forgotten its brokenness. I live
now in a sky-house, through every
window, the sun. Also your presence.
Our touching, our stories. Earthy
and holy both. How can this be, but
it is. Every day has something in
it whose name is forever.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

HOW INVISIBLE STORIES HOLD YOU BACK
by Ozan Virol

We all have stories that we live by that aren’t fixed truths. They’re just old scripts we’ve been following without realizing it. If you tell yourself travel is exhausting, you’ll only notice the hassles, the delayed flights, the cramped seats, and you’ll miss the little joys along the way. If you tell yourself you’re awkward in social settings, you’ll tense up before conversations even begin, missing moments that could have been easy and fun.

The point isn’t to force yourself to love every rainy day or magically turn into an extrovert. It’s about creating space. Space to question the stories you’ve been living by and experiment with something new. You’re not committing to anything forever, you’re just saying, “What if?” When you play with the stories you’ve been telling yourself, you realize they’re just that. They’re stories. And if you don’t like the story, you can change the story.

Sermon

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

There’s at least one story you tell yourself about yourself that isn’t helpful. May even be harmful and probably isn’t even true.” At least if you’re like the vast majority of folks, that’s the case, that’s how the story goes.

What title would you give your not helpful, maybe even harmful, probably fictional story?
If you could change or reinterpret the story, what would you like the new title to be?

I’ll let you ponder all that as we explore the power that the stories we tell ourselves have over our lives, our emotions, behaviors, even our futures.

A field called narrative psychology has found that we humans make meaning of our lives and our world. In essence, we construct ourselves, our very personalities and our perspectives on the world through creating these narratives. And what’s fascinating is that we construct these self-stories with the structure of a novel. We give them chapters, birth, school, first love, et cetera. And we give them a beginning, middle, and end. This helps explain their power to affect not only our present, but also our future. If we’re always trying to give our stories an end even while we’re still in the middle of them, we’re likely to work toward an end that fits with the current story, even if that story is inaccurate, limiting, or harmful.

And the research has shown that our stories even affect the very neurochemistry of our brains. So if, for instance, I read about someone kicking a soccer ball. I don’t just create an image of that in my mind. It actually activates the motor cortex area of my brain as if I were actually kicking the soccer ball myself. The same is true for stories we tell ourselves involving our emotions, values, self-worth, capacity in life and on and on and on. Our stories are actually molding our brains to fit the very stories our brains are telling us. That’s why they can be so hard to change sometimes. So in a way we live as stories. They have this huge power in our lives.

Even religion and spiritual practices are filled with ways of creating narrative metaphor that allows us to explore ultimate understandings that are sometimes inaccessible through everyday language and the current limits of scientific inquiry.

Here is how one narrative psychologist puts it. Our lives and their pathways are not fixed in stone. Instead, they’re shaped by story. The ways in which we understand and share the stories of our lives therefore make all the difference. If we tell stories that emphasize only desolation, then we become weaker. If we tell our stories in ways that make us stronger, we can soothe our losses and ease our sorrows.

Learning how to re-envision the stories we tell ourselves can make an enormous difference in the way that we live our lives. And I would submit that this is not just psychological, it is also what spirituality is all about.

As I mentioned earlier in the service I’ll share how this has played out very powerfully in my life recently. Again what I share may be may bring up difficult circumstances and feelings. Tony and I are available after the service should you need to process something.

I’ve written the story out in case I need the words to hang onto emotionally while I tell it. Many of you know that my spouse of over 30 years, Wayne, died last year after an extended period of time on home hospice. In his final days, Wayne’s disease process resulted in some cognitive decline, he would get confused. And out of that confusion, the panic attacks that had plagued him when he was much younger, but that he had worked to resolve, began to come back sometimes. I ended up needing to manage his medical and hospice appointments, as well as his pain and other necessary medication, of which there were many on a large variety of different schedules, I would sit with him through the panic until it subsided.

Eventually his disease progressed to where he weakened and began to fall a lot. He was no longer strong enough to make it to the bathroom or to shower by himself So I had to learn to lift them without injuring myself. I would help them with these basic necessities of life. And though we brought in some home care help so that I could continue to perform a few church function and take care of household needs like getting groceries, most afternoons and evenings they would leave as soon as I returned. and it would be just the two of us and our pups for the rest of the day and evening. I’d set alarms each night so that I could get up and give him his medications on schedule and put on his mask for the breathing treatment that opened his airways and helped him to respirate more easily.

Eventually, Wayne declined to the point where he began to think about going into an institutional hospice setting called Christopher House, where he would receive the trained nursing care I couldn’t provide and which couldn’t be provided around the clock through home hospice.

We set up an appointment with this hospice doctor for Tuesday, September 3 to discuss that On the Friday before that, while I was making a run to the grocery store, he had a bad fall and couldn’t get back up. I returned to find him that way. I got him back into bed and called for help from the hospice nurses who came right away. They helped me clean up everything where he had fallen and they bandaged the wounds that I didn’t have the knowledge to know how to tend. They told us though that there might be internal bleeding.

Wayne opted to continue only pain management and palliative care. Soon though, He discovered he was no longer able to swallow anything solid, so another hospice nurse came over and showed me how to grind up his medications, dissolve them in water, and then give them to him slowly by flowing the medicated water into his mouth from a syringe. She also had me increase his pain medication and his treatments for anxiety and panic attacks. The nurses offered to go ahead and move him to Christopher House, but Wayne panicked at the idea of not having me and his pups, and so he never went.

The rest of that weekend is still kind of a blur in my memory. I remember having to pick him up and carry him several times. I remember getting up throughout the night to dissolve the medications and administer them to him and give him his breathing treatments. I remember home care workers coming a couple of times so I could take care of some duties here at the church or some household needs and wondering whether I should leave it all, even though they were there. I can remember bringing him the phone several times because he wanted to talk to the hospice folks himself about his own care needs. That Sunday evening he had another panic attack and they increased his meds even more. I remember getting up throughout the night in the early morning hours to check on him and give him his meds.

Early Labor Day morning, Monday, September 2, I got up and put on the mask to start his breathing treatment and went upstairs to make a cup of coffee. When I came back to check on the breathing treatment, he had died.

At first, the story I told myself about those final days was one of difficulty and trauma and self-doubt. I wasn’t trained to provide that level and kind of care, I told myself. Should I have been more insistent that he go to Christopher house, did not going, mean he went through more pain or discomfort. Should I have stayed with him, even when home care was there? The moments of administering his drugs with that syringe or lifting him to go to the bathroom played over and over through my mind as a story of trauma, caught in that story of trauma at first there was no way I could process my grief.

With time and work though, a lot of therapy, help from some wonderful, wonderful professionals and friends, the God of my understanding. I was eventually able to recast the story to one that I think is not only more healthy, I think it is more true.

Here’s how I understand our story of those times now. What a blessing that it was me who picked him up when he fell or needed to go to the restroom that I was the last one who held him that way, that I was the one who loved him through the moments of panic and fear. What a holy act I got to engage in with him, giving him his medications through the syringe, that most intimate of acts of holding it to his lips. It was me who came back to check on his breathing treatment only to discover that he no longer needed it because he had drawn his last breath. I didn’t get a phone call telling me he was gone. I was there for that hallowed moment, and I am so grateful. Wayne didn’t want to die at Christopher House. He wanted to die in the house that he shared with Christopher, and he did.

And so the story has moved from one of trauma and doubt to a story about sacred love that endures all and that is with me always and everywhere. My beloveds, we can rewrite, recast, reinterpret our self-stories.

Now, I wanted to share some tips from narrative psychology about how we might go about doing all that, but my sermon got so long that I had to give you those handouts that you have on the pews.

To summarize very briefly, though, when reviewing yourself’s story, unlike I just did, Get on with it. Be willing to question it and test it with others. Journal about it. See if you can recast it as a story of ongoing redemption. Seeking counseling and treatment when the story is just too strong and won’t let go is more than okay.

I’ll close with inviting you two during the postlude or after the service. Right down on the index cards, we’ve given you the answers to the two questions with which we began. What title would you give an unhelpful, maybe even harmful, probably fictional self-story? If you could change or reinterpret that self -story, what would you like the new title to be? Then I encourage you to spend some time in the days to come on how you might rewrite the story from one of trauma to one that is holy. Or at least from drama to something wholly more heart-centered and life-fulfilling. Rewrite it, then – Go tell it on the mountain.

Amen.

CHANGING OUR STORY HANDOUT

Ask, is it true? Is it the whole truth or only part of it? Is it a story that helps you live a fulfilled life or does it hold you back? Might it even be harmful?
What is your emotional state? For instance, depression can strongly influence the stories we tell ourselves, most often turning them toward the negative and self-criticizing. This of course, can further deepen the depression! Studies have found Un!: simply asking ourselves, “is this the depression talking”, can help us halt our negative stories. Therapies for the depression or other negative emotions can help also. Treatments such as ketamine, may help us ‘rewire” our brains with more affirming stories.
Daily Journaling as a practice can help us uncover self-stories about which we may not have been fully aware. Then, writing down, journaling a story we think is more accurate and/or more helpful can help us activate it within the neurobiology of our minds.
Rewrite it as story of Redemption. Research has shown that folks who call formulate their stories in ways that are redemptive tend to lead more generative, self-fulfilled lives – for instance, someone who was bullied as child and comes to view the story as about how they learned to set boundaries and protect themselves.
Cast the self-negative aspects as the villains of the story. The person who was told they were clumsy and unathletic as a child might cast the “clumsy and unathletic” label as the “Clumsy Monster” – “I am going to capture the Clumsy Monster and make it go to the gym with me, where I’ll show that monster exactly what I’m made of!”
Venting isn’t helpful. Studies have shown that venting about our story with a friend or loved one may actually amp up our nervous system, which in turn may only “further neurologically harden whatever story we are telling ourselves. Asking our loved one to help us process our story instead may be more helpful. Processing involves, rather than retelling the content of our story over and over again (venting), expressing our feelings and judgments about it. Processing also means asking others to help us question our assumptions about our stories.
Test self-stories only with those whom you know you can trust. This is tricky because it means we need loved ones who we can trust to both be honest and have our best interests at heart. They cannot be invested in our continuing a self-story in some way themselves. With such folks and/or professionals though, testing the accuracy of the stories we are telling ourselves by seeking another perspective can be very helpful and powerful.

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

Fairytales are true not because they tell us monsters exist, But because they tell us monsters can be vanquished.
Amen.

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

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

2025 Sermon Index

January 6, 2025 by tom Posted in Indexes

2025 Sermons

Sermon Topic	Speaker	Date

Living the Creative, Non-Fiction Life	Rev Chris Jimmerson	1-12-25
2025 Burning Bowl	Rev Chris Jimmerson and Rev Michelle LaGrange	1-5-25

Sermon Archives Index

Sermon Indexes by Year	Principal Speakers
2024 Sermon Index	Chris Jimmerson, Michelle LaGrave, Erin Walter
2023 Sermon Index	Chris Jimmerson, Michelle LaGrave, Erin Walter, Jonalu Johnstone
2022 Sermon Index	Meg Barnhouse, Chris Jimmerson, Erin Walter, Jonalu Johnstone, Lee Legault, John Buehrens
2021 Sermon Index	Meg Barnhouse, Chris Jimmerson
2020 Sermon Index	Meg Barnhouse, Chris Jimmerson
2019 Sermon Index	Meg Barnhouse, Chris Jimmerson, Lee Legault
2018 Sermon Index	Meg Barnhouse, Chris Jimmerson
2017 Sermon Index	Meg Barnhouse, Chris Jimmerson, Susan Yarbrough
2016 Sermon Index	Meg Barnhouse, Chris Jimmerson, Marisol Caballero
2015 Sermon Index	Meg Barnhouse, Marisol Caballero
2014 Sermon Index	Meg Barnhouse, Marisol Caballero
2013 Sermon Index	Meg Barnhouse, Marisol Caballero
2012 Sermon Index	Meg Barnhouse, Marisol Caballero
2011 Sermon Index	Meg Barnhouse, Ed Brock
2010 Sermon Index	Janet Newman, Ed Brock,
2009 Sermon Index	Janet Newman
2008 Sermon Index	Davidson Loehr, Aaron White, Brian Ferguson
2007 Sermon Index	Davidson Loehr, Jack Harris Bonham
2006 Sermon Index	Davidson Loehr, Jack Harris Bonham
2005 Sermon Index	Davidson Loehr, Jack Harris Bonham
2004 Sermon Index	Davidson Loehr, Victoria Shepherd Rao
The Jesus Seminar	Davidson Loehr
2003 Sermon Index	Davidson Loehr, Hannah Wells
2002 Sermon Index	Davidson Loehr, Cathy Herrington
2001 Sermon Index	Davidson Loehr
2000 Sermon Index	Davidson Loehr

2025 Burning Bowl

January 6, 2025 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Michelle LaGrave, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson and Rev. Michelle LaGrave
January 5, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

For New Year’s Day, we will hold our annual burning bowl service. We contemplate what we would like to let go so that we may more easily find our center. Then we whisper that which we would like to let go into pieces of flash paper, toss them into a fire, and watch them burn away.

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

We bid you welcome on this first Sunday of the new year.

Like Janus, we gather with part of us looking backward and part of us looking forward. We gather on the edge of the new year, saddened by our losses, cherishing our joys, aware of our failures, mindful of days gone by.

We gather on the cusp of this new year, eager to begin a new, hopeful for what lies ahead, promising to make changes, anticipating tomorrows and tomorrows.

We invite you to join our celebration of life, knowing that life includes both good and bad endings and beginnings.

We bid you welcome.

– Sylvia L Howe

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

Now the work of Christmas begins.
When the song of the angels is stilled,
when the star in the sky is gone,
when the kings and princes are home,
when the shepherds are back with their flocks,
the work of Christmas begins.
To find the lost,
to heal the broken,
to feed the hungry,
to release the prisoner,
to rebuild the nations,
to bring peace among the people
to make music in the heart.

– Howard Thurman

Sermon

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

Rev. Michelle’s Homily

LOOKING BACK

Here we are on the first Sunday of the new year 2025. We’ve celebrated the winter solstice and Christmas and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa and probably a few other things. We’ve sung fast away the old year passes and now we find ourselves preparing for the annual Burning Bowl ritual.

This is a season of ritual and celebration and a time of sorting, a time of sorting our feelings, our thoughts, our hopes, our dreams, thinking about the things we want to leave behind and the things we want to bring with us. So before we say goodbye finally, to the old year.

Before we let go of whatever it is that needs letting go, I have a few thoughts to share about why we do what we do and why it’s important. The first one comes from the Hebrew Bible and the book of Psalms. I tend to be a little bit of a Bible geek. I studied Hebrew in seminary even though it was optional. I’m not at all an expert about it. However, enough to have learned some really interesting things about the Bible. And from the book of Psalms, there is a verse which I suspect most of you will have heard and find familiar. It is “Be still and know that I am God.” Be still and know that I am God.

So the Bible was originally spoken and then written down in Hebrew. In English, when we read and hear this verse, we hear “be still,” which has a connotation of stopping action, relaxing, being quiet. It’s a passive verb, the way that it’s been translated. So be passive, be still, be quiet, and know that I am God. However, in Hebrew, the word, the verb that we use is actually an active verb, and it means something probably closer to unclench. So imagine that your hands are clenched, grasped around something that you’re holding onto, your body is tense, you’re thinking about whatever it is that makes you a little stressed out, right? So to unclench, take some action. You have to let go of those muscles. You have to open your hands. Unclench and know. Let go of those old ideas about who and what God is or isn’t. Open yourselves to new ideas. Open yourselves to knowing.

And the second thought comes from Buddhism and the first three of the four noble truths. Buddhism teaches us that attachment is the root of all suffering, right? When we are attached to things too much, too strongly, that is when and how we suffer. So when we’re looking back at the old year and we’re thinking about the things that were attached to you, the way we wished things were, the way we wished the world was, the way we wished things had happened or not happened, and we’re attached to what we had wanted, what our desires were, right?

So in order to end the suffering, we have to let go of those attachments to what it is that we had wanted or wished for. We have to detach and let go of what it is that we wish our lives should have been or would have been.

And so, whatever it is that your theological or philosophical perspective is, Whether it’s Judaism or Christianity or Buddhism or something completely different, I invite you to take a few moments to ponder what it is in your life, your world, your reality that needs sorting, unclenching, detaching, or letting go.

May it be so. Amen and bless it be.

Rev. Chris’ Homily

LOOKING FORWARD

All blessings on all that we have just released this morning.

One of the reasons that we do this ritual at the beginning of each year is that by letting go of that which may not be serving us well or is just not necessary in our lives, we open up a spaciousness within an openness to all that life has to offer. And this we hope will allow us to live more fully into our highest values and our greatest creative potential. And we are going to need that spaciousness in the weeks and months to come.

Tomorrow is January 6th, the day that Congress will likely certify the electoral vote making Donald Trump our president once again. Of course, it’s also the anniversary of when four years ago a violent mob overran our capital in an attempt to overturn, prevent the certification of that duly and fairly held election.

Now the person who incited that insurrection will be returning to the White House and we do not yet know what will happen. We do know that we will be called to counter an ideology of division and harm with a public-facing theology of love and radical interconnectedness. We’ll talk more about exactly how we might do that in the days to come.

I know that this morning, though, so many of us are feeling fear about what is to come and particularly for those among us who are immigrants or who follow the spiritual call to love the stranger among us, those who are LGBTQ, particularly our trans-siblings, those who make up the over 50% of our populations that call themselves female.

For all of these folks and more, that fear is unfortunately well-founded. And those forces of division and harm are quite successfully using fear to succeed in driving their ideology forward in public life, and we, we will never counter fear with more fear. So we are going to need to let our fear warn and inform us about what may be required of us and then we’re gonna have to let it go. Let it burn away in the flames of love and justice to create the spaciousness we will need to think and act in new ways that can ignite even more love and joy and justice in our lives and in our world.

So, for instance this morning I whispered into my paper that I am letting go of the fake fights we sometimes have amongst ourselves. I’m not engaging anymore over whether the church newsletter should be digital to save on paper or printed on paper to save on energy. An actual argument that has occurred in this and other churches. I’m not invested in arguing over what musical styles are suitable for worship or whether we start at 10:45 or 11:00.

I am invested in creating the beloved community of care and support among us so that we can go out and join with others to create even more of the same, and I am letting go of any and all allergies that I might still have around Bible or God language so that I can proclaim in the public square that which Jesus actually said, which offers up a God of inclusion, love and justice, not the white Christian Nationalist God, the false idol, the anti-Christ being offered up by that ideology of division and harm that is currently ascendant and is winning the political God war. We’re going to talk about that more too.

So, starting this morning, now, in this very moment in place, may we burn away all that is false and frightens and distracts us so that we can open up such spaciousness that love may truly overcome emergent and ascendant instead.

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

Having let go, set our intentions, named our curiosity, committed our energies, and given ourselves over to lives of balance, purpose, and meaning. Let us begin again in love. May the congregation say amen.

Amen and blessed be. Go in peace.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

The End

January 3, 2025 by tom Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Bis Thornton
December 29, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

As 2024 enters its final few days, many of us are thinking about endings. How do we keep loving when loving is what makes saying goodbye so hard? And how can we stay focused on joy in the present when we fear the suffering the future holds? Join guest preacher Bis Thornton on a journey into the Gospel of John to see what its stories can tell us about love and loss in our lives today.

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

YOU CONTAIN THE HOLY
by Gwen Matthews

Whomever you are, Wherever you are from, whomever you love, whatever it is you have done, you are welcome here. You are welcome to this time, this space, this moment that we carve out of often busy and chaotic weeks. You are welcome to this time for collective breaths, for words, for music, for lighting candles, and for us to simply exist here together.

The essence that is you, that spark of life, is in your body, is of your body, and it is you are divine. In other words, you contain the holy within you right now.

And now, I invite you to take a breath as we enter into this time of worship in body, mind, and spirit.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

WHILE EVERYTHING ELSE WAS FALLING APART
Ada Limón

In the Union Square subway station nearly fifteen
years ago now, the L train came clanking by
where someone had fat-Sharpied a black heart
on the yellow pillar you leaned on during a bleak day,
(brittle and no notes from anyone you crushed upon).
Above ground, the spring sun was the saddest one,
(doing work but also none). What were you wearing?
Something hopeful to show the world you hoped?
A tall man was learning from a vendor how to pronounce
churro. High in the sticky clouds of time, he kept
repeating churro while eating a churro. How to say
this made you want to live? No hand to hold
still hear it was: Someone giving someone comfort
and someone memorizing hard how to ask for it again.

Sermon

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

Good morning again. And I’m still this, and it’s still wonderful to see you. We’re heading for the end of the year, and I think We’re all heading towards a lot of endings, and we are experiencing them at the same time as we’re heading towards other ones.

Here in the congregation, we just got hit pretty hard together. And we are at the end of Kinsey’s time with us. Ends are all around us in the world too. However, we may feel about it in the particularities, we are all facing the end of our current presidential administration. I also know a lot of people who are experiencing the end of their old physical capacity, the end of a loved one’s life, the end of their own. Many of us are watching our friends move out of state, maybe even out of the country. There are a lot of endings right now for many of us, all around us, and it’s true that those endings may come with some new beginnings, but they’re still endings. And that’s what I want to spend some time with today.

If you’ve heard me preach before, this probably will not surprise you, but I’m here in the pulpit today to tell you some stories. First, I’m going to start with something from one of the sacred texts that’s nearest to my heart, which is the Bible. Specifically, I want to tell you a story from the end of the Gospel of John, which is one of the four versions of the life of Jesus Christ that you can find in your typical Christian Bible.

Before I start, I want to say that I feel a little bad telling a story from this part of Jesus’ life because it was just his birthday. He’s still a baby. So glad that got a laugh. I got to be real with y ‘all. Thank you. He’s still a baby, and I’m up here like, Okay, it’s time to talk about how he died and then some other stuff happened and it sucked and it was really sad That seems crummy. I Love Christmas and I really love celebrating his birthday. So how could I do this to him? How could I jump to the end? That’s crummy of me.

I Wondered about this a lot. I chose this sermon weeks ago to preach it and it was hounding me It felt like it was calling out to me to tell it to y ‘all today. And I think the answer to that question is this, I’m worried and I’m scared and I’m sad. I think about the coming months and the coming years and I feel dread. I look at new things and I feel like I can already see the terrible end that they’re hurtling towards, or in other words, Even new things these days throw me towards an anticipatory grief. That’s the dread that I feel, and maybe you feel a little bit of that too. And if we’re stuck here together, I figure why won’t we get together in the sanctuary that we love and move towards that feeling and take off our shoes and see what holy things we might find there.

The other thing I want to say is this. This is like an unnecessary, I feel like caveat, but I’ll say it anyway. I’m not asking you to believe anything in particular about this story. I’m also not asking you to know anything in particular about this story. I just want to tell it to you as I know it, and I hope you’ll enjoy the telling.

So let’s try sitting down, inside of the story, and feeling around. Feel free to close your eyes If it helps, sometimes when I’m at church, I close my eyes throughout the entire sermon. It helps me concentrate. So please feel free to do that if it helps you.

And if you’re gonna be inside of this story, you might be wondering who you are. For now, imagine this. Jesus is your teacher and you love him very much. You are his disciple, you learn from him. He has been teaching you freedom and love. And so you follow him because he has given you this gift and you want to learn more and maybe even make the world into a place where everyone finds the freedom and the love that you did. So he travels around teaching and wherever he goes, you go and you’ve left your life as a fisherman behind to come join him.

He is not a stained glass window or an idea in a book. He is a man who lives in the world. He has eyes and a smile and hair that he keeps in a particular way. You’ve watched him eat bread. You saw him trip on a rock, one time. One time. Yes, just the one. You’ve heard his voice belting out over a crowd or speaking softly at a table. You’ve had the same sand on your legs and stood beneath the same oppressive sunbeam He’s maybe one of the strangest people you’ve ever met in your life He has a funny way of speaking that’s very distinctive and it’s so distinctive in fact that you can imitate it Sometimes before he says something really important. He says truly truly I say to you You know you imagine Being with your friends and imitating this when you’re imitating him you’re like remember that time truly truly I’d say to you You know this man You’ve built your life around him and around your friends who also follow him everywhere He goes.

And one day this man that you knew and loved died. It seemed like he knew he was gonna go You looked at him one day, and he seemed to be a sailor, standing on the deck of a ship that you couldn’t board, facing away from you and towards the sea, towards the horizon. And he didn’t pass away gently. He died by a violence so present and so unspeakable that you can hardly bear to think of it at all. It was an act of violence by the state that surrounds you at every moment, and yet somehow you always slipped out of its fingers until you didn’t. And it cut down your friend, your strange, lovely, wise, funny friend.

And then you saw him again after he died, and you thought that maybe he was visiting you to say goodbye the way that ghosts sometimes do. But then your friend saw him too, and he told you to tell each other that you had seen him. And then he appeared before one of you with all of his wounds on display. And when you reached for him, your arms didn’t swing through the air, they met his familiar frame, his warm body, that body that you know because you know him. You can’t believe what’s happening, he’s back. But he still has that look like he’s going away that you had assumed was about his death He looks at you sometimes now that he’s back and he sees you so hard. It’s like he’s holding you with his eyes and Then he turns away and there’s that look again and he becomes distant And after a while none of you see him for longer and longer periods of time and you can’t bear to lose him again but somehow you know it’s ending and he has to go.

So one day you’re out with your friends on a boat fishing like the old days. The water is sloshing up against the boat. You feel the gentle rocking and the wet nets against your palms. Your outer clothes are folded in the boat so that you don’t get them wet And so the sunbeams are hitting you directly, you feel their heat. The old familiar sensations of your life. You used to do this before you knew Jesus, but it’s different now. You’ve been changed. A hero can never go home again, and fishing doesn’t feel like it used to. But still, you have to eat. And you do love your friends. You are always good at fishing, so you might as well fish together.

Here’s a reveal. You are someone specific in this story. Maybe you wanna know who you are? I do, I feel like I’m asking it constantly. Well, you could be anyone in this story, but for now, you are a disciple whose name is Peter. You’re in the boat with six other people. You’re in the boat with six of your friends. You’re in the boat with Thomas, who demanded to see Jesus’ wounds when he returned from his death. And you’re in the boat with Nathaniel, who initially laughed when he heard where Jesus was from, saying, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” But he agreed to find out. And you’re also with the sons of Zebedee and two other disciples. And one of the disciples in the boat is a man who the gospel never names. It only calls him the beloved disciple.

So you’re Peter and you’re with your friends and you’re all throwing your nets over the side of the boat and you aren’t catching a thing. The day turns into night and there’s still no fish. Maybe fishing is too different now. Maybe everything’s too different. How do you get into the flow when you know that your dead friend is back but he’s fading like the light of this wasted day and Soon he’ll be going somewhere that you can’t go. The dark oppresses you, like those sunbeams you shared with him, but this time he isn’t here.

Dawn starts breaking over the hills. On the shore, someone shouts at you, “Children, you haven’t caught anything, have you?” One of you, maybe a little mad, shouts back, “No, we haven’t.” And the stranger on the shore says, “Try the right side of the boat.” So since nothing’s going right anyway, and you might as well listen to a stranger who is maybe making fun of you, you all throw your nets over the right side of the boat. And you can’t believe it. A flurry of splashes, the sea is boiling over in just one spot. Your net is too heavy to lift into the boat. Your day was not wasted at all. The net is full of fish. And before your heart is completely sure, you hear the beloved disciple begin to speak and his confidence lights you on fire as he says “It’s him.”

In a burst of confused energy you put all your clothes back on and you throw yourself into the sea splashing wildly as you scramble for the shore while everyone else pulls the net into the boat. You don’t care about the fish, this is the end. You know it is and in your heart you’re so happy and you’re so scared. You can’t wait for the boat to reach him. You can’t waste the time. You have to throw yourself towards him instead. And as you swim, you can see him. Each time your head comes back up into the air, something sparkles on the beach. He’s lit a fire. Scrambling onto the shore, you see him smiling at you and your ridiculous behavior and your clothes completely soaked, and he’s so radiant like the dawn, maybe more like sunset. You realize he’s already cooked some fish, and he’s already got some bread. He’s always feeding you, and you love him more than you can stand, and you hate it a little bit, because loving him is what’s going to make this next part hurt so bad.

He has always seemed to know what you were thinking, and this time it’s no different. While everyone is on shore with you. Jesus says to you, “Do you love me more than these?” And he gestures at all of your friends and without hesitation or stopping to wonder what he might have meant by that, you blurt out, “Yes, you know I love you.” And he seems to think that’s a little funny. And he says, “Feed my lamps.” He waits a while sitting quietly by the crackling fire, the crackling fire. And then he turns to you again and says, “Do you love me?” With less shock, you respond in a more measured tone. “Yes, you know that I love you.” He nods and says, “Tend to my shoe.”

You’re trying to enjoy the dawn, which has turned into the day. You’re staring at him, trying to make sure you remember for the rest of your life what he looks like right now. And then he turns to you and he says, “Do you love me?” You’re wounded. You can’t believe it. Of course, of course, you’re already mourning. You already know how this is going to go. You jumped into the sea for him. You shared everything with him and he’s still asking you this? You look him in the eye heart quaking and you say “My friend, you know everything You know that I love you.”

He seems satisfied in his mysterious way and he says “Feed my sheep” and then as you wonder how you’re going to find the strength to feed his sheep when he leaves, he says, “truly, truly, I say to you,” and your heart snaps to attention, you’re ready for this. He says, “when you were new, you would dress yourself and go where you wanted. When you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you, and you will go where you do not want to go.”

You know that he’s describing your aging and your death. And as you’ve been staring at him, trying to memorize every line of his face and movement of his hands, because you know he’s leaving, he has been holding the shape of your death close to his heart, like a child, like a lamb, carrying it to and fro until the time comes to set it down and let it walk on its own.

He has been mourning you too, you are both creatures with endings and you love him more than anything and you love your friends who love him and love you and love each other. Your death is coming behind you and one day you will die and you will love him the whole time and you will light fires on the shore and when your friends reach you, you will have already started cooking them breakfast.

You turn and see the beloved disciple. Sometimes he looks so fragile to you and you say to Jesus, “What about him? What about that guy?” The beloved disciple? He seems like the wind might take him away. He seems like sometimes he stares far away too, like he and Jesus are two travelers going the same place.

Jesus looks at the beloved disciple and then he looks back at you and he smiles at you and he says, “If it is my will that he remain until I come back, what is it to you? What do you care? You follow me.” And that’s the last thing he ever says to you. And you die before you see him again.

What does it mean to see the end before it comes and somehow withstand it. How can we see the end and stay without buckling under the grief and fleeing? How can we survive when things around us end?

I want to tell you all about my grandmothers. Just before my maternal grandmother died, I spoke to her on the phone. I knew it was the end. I hated that I was on the phone instead of beside her, but those were the cards that we were dealt. She didn’t ask me, “Do you love me?” But everything I said, I felt like I was telling her over and over again, “I love you. I love you. I love you. You know that I love you.” I was so scared I would forget to tell her something I was grateful for, but I knew that she already knew. We loved each other. It didn’t matter if I forgot to say something. We both knew.

Before my paternal grandmother died, I visited her in the hospital. There was a lot of difficulty between us, but when we saw each other, it didn’t go away, but it changed. It was the end. I remember When I came into her hospital room and stood next to her bed, and she opened her eyes and saw me for the first time in six or seven years. The first thing she said to me was, “Am I dead?” That’s how surprised she was to see me.

In life, she loved to go on adventures. And after she died, I had a dream. We were on vacation together by the sea. The water was so beautiful I begged her to come swimming with me, and eventually she did, but the waves got choppy and I got scared. As I swam back to shore she was swimming out into the sea and we passed each other, and for one moment we locked eyes. I wondered if I should tell her to come back, but I didn’t. When she swam out into the sea never to return, a traveler going somewhere I couldn’t follow. Maybe like Peter, she jumped into the sea with all her clothes on, just went towards someone she loved, someone who taught her freedom long ago.

After my maternal grandmother died, I saw her in a dream too. I was standing inside of her house and looking out the window. In life, she loved to host holiday meals, and she was an incredible cook. And in my dream, as I looked out the window, I saw a long table glowing with golden light, and all along it were seated countless people, and my grandmother was walking up and down it, serving everyone something to eat. When I think of Jesus on the shore waiting for the disciples, a fire already lit, I think of her.

Endings recur and echo into one another. They are unique and common all at once. I too am a traveler and someday I will go where my loved ones cannot follow. Before I go, I hope I too will light a fire and feed them breakfast. Because of my love for my grandmothers, I carry something of them with me into my life. And perhaps I will carry something of them too into my death. Perhaps it can’t be helped as humans living on this earth death is something we have in common. Endings are something we have in common.

Walking into this story I have searched for what is holy. I’d love to hear what you might have found there but I’ll tell you what I did. The sea. Dark and infinite. Life bubbles up in one location or another. A ship sails across it and on the shore a fire. The sea is more vast than any of us. Surrounding us, creating us, calling us up into the air into existence, calling us down into the darkness again. We emerge and we dissolve and everything that we love, ebbs and flows and the waves of the sea, but the sea never goes away.

And so the endings come and come and come. And I will try not to be hurt when the voice rises up from the depths to ask me again and again, “Do you love me?” All I have to do is tell the truth. Thank you.

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

BLESSING FOR THE BROKEN-HEARTED
by Jan Richardson

“There is no remedy for love, but to love more.”
Let us agree for now that we will not say the breaking makes us stronger
or that it is better to have this pain than to have done without this love.
Let us promise we will not tell ourselves time will heal the wound
when every day our waking opens it anew.

Perhaps for now it can be enough to simply marvel at the mystery
of how a heart so broken can go on beating,
as if it were made for precisely this.
As if it knows the only cure for love is more of it,
as if it sees the heart’s sole remedy for breaking is to love still,
as if it trusts that its own persistent pulse
is the rhythm of a blessing we cannot begin to fathom,
but will save us nonetheless.

Amen, Thank you. Blessed be.

SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 24 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

2024 Christmas Pageant

December 23, 2024 by tom Posted in Audio available, Michelle LaGrave, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Michelle LaGrave
December 22, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

We join together for this annual tradition of song and holiday merriment.

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

WHAT ARE YOU HERE FOR?
by Quinn G. Caldwell

If you came to this place expecting a tame story, you came to the wrong place.

If you came for a story that does not threaten you, you came for a different story than the one we tell.

If you came to hear of the coming of a God who only showed up so that you could have a nice day with your loved ones, then you came for a God whom we do not worship here.

For even a regular baby is not a tame thing. And goodness that cannot threaten complacency and evil is not much good at all, and a God who would choose to give up power and invincibility to become an infant for you, certainly didn’t do it just you could have dinner.

But.

If you came because you think that unwed teenage mothers are some of the strongest people in the world.

If you came because you think that the kind of people who work third shift doing stuff you’d rather not do might attract an angel’s attention before you, snoring comfortably in your bed, would.

If you came because you think there are wise men and women to be found among undocumented travelers from far lands and that they might be able to show you God.

If you came to hear a story of tyrants trembling while heaven comes to peasants.

If you came because you believe that God loves the animals as much as the people and so made them the first witnesses to the saving of the world.

If you came for a story of reversals that might end up reversing you.

If you came for a tale of adventure and bravery, where strong and gentle people win, and the powerful and violent go down to dust, where the rich lose their money but find their lives and the poor are raised up like kings.

If you came to be reminded that God loves you too much to leave you unchanged.

If you came to follow the light even if it blinds you.

If you came for salvation and not safety, then: ah, my friends, you are in the right place.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

THE INNKEEPER
by Anne Dilenschneider

The innkeeper isn’t part of most Nativity sets. No one sings carols about innkeepers. There don’t seem to be any paintings that include them. But we can imagine the scene:

Bethlehem is crowded with people coming home for the census. It’s late at night when the innkeeper responds to a knock on the door and finds a young couple standing there. The woman is very pregnant. She and her spouse look exhausted.They’ve walked a hundred miles over rough, rocky terrain to get here from Nazareth.

The innkeeper is confronted with a dilemma. The inn is full; there just isn’t any more room. At the same time, the innkeeper knows that offering hospitality is part of being God’s people, because they had been sojourners and strangers in Egypt. That’s why the innkeeper has always made sure there’s an empty chair for an unexpected guest at the annual seder meal celebrating Passover.

What to do?

As a child, the innkeeper had learned the story of Abraham and Sarah welcoming three strangers into their home. After they made the strangers a lavish feast, the couple discovered their guests were messengers (“angels”) sent to bring great news: as laughable as it seemed, the elderly Sarah was going to have a baby. So, the innkeeper knows the tradition of entertaining strangers; the innkeeper knows strangers are messengers (“angels”) from God. Tonight there is a bedraggled and weary couple on this very doorstep.

What to do?

The innkeeper pulls the door to a bit, hastily assessing the situation. Is there any space, anywhere? The beds are all taken. There are even people sleeping on the floor. What to do? Is there any possible solution?

In a moment of inspiration, the innkeeper remembers the stable out behind the inn. It’s not much, but it’s some protection from the wind. No matter how bitter the weather may become, the heat from the animals will keep these guests warm.

The innkeeper flings open the door and welcomes the couple with a broad smile. There’s not much, but there’s a possibility. A stable. Will it suffice?

It does.

And the innkeeper saves the day.

Our Annual No Rehearsal Christmas Pageant

OPENING WORDS

The season of the winter solstice has been celebrated in one form or another for thousands of years.

A hundred different cultures have told stories about how the birth of their gods took place at this time of year.

In the Northern Hemisphere, we tell stories about how light, hope and life are returning to the world.

Darkness is good for rest and for root growth, but we also need light for growth and setting a direction, so, while we revere darkness, we humans also celebrate light.

Today we will present the Christian faith story, as Christianity is one of the sources of our UU faith.

It is the story of a special baby, a child of God as all babies are, a child called Jesus who became one of humanity’s great teachers.

As UUs, we know that we do not have to believe that the stories of our sacred texts are literally true to embrace the metaphorical wisdom that may be found within them.

In this way, we are able to reclaim such stories and retell them in ways that reflect our living tradition, for which revelation is not sealed.

Today this story is wrapped not only in swaddling clothes, but also in wonderful carols, which also contain some Earth-based Solstice elements.

THE CHRISTMAS STORY

Here is the Christmas story. It happened a very long time ago in a land far away. A couple named Joseph and Mary had to make a journey to the city of Bethlehem, because there was a new law that said everyone had to return to the city of their birth in order to pay their taxes.

Joseph was worried about Mary taking this trip as she was going to have a baby very soon, but Mary wanted to be with her husband for the birth of their first child. It was a long trip to Bethlehem, three full days of walking. Mary was glad when they could see the rooftops of Bethlehem in the distance.

“Joseph,” she said, “Let’s stay at the first inn we come to. I think our baby is almost ready to be born.”

But when they got to Bethlehem, they found the little town crowded with people. They stopped at the first inn they came to and knocked on the door. But the innkeeper told them, “I’m sorry, there is no more room here.” At the next inn the innkeeper said, “We’re full. Try the place three streets over. It’s bigger.” Joseph tried another place and another place, but everywhere it was the same story: “Sorry, no room for you here.”

Finally, when it was almost night, they saw a house at the edge of town with a light in the window. Joseph knocked at the door, and told the innkeeper, “Please help us. We need a place for the night. My wife is going to have a baby soon and I don’t think she can travel any farther.”

And the innkeeper said, “There’s no room in the inn, but don’t worry, we’ll find someplace for you.” The innkeeper showed Mary and Joseph to a quiet little barn where the animals were. It was clean and warm and smelled like sweet hay.

And on that very night in that barn in Bethlehem, their little baby was born. They named him Jesus. Mary and Joseph wrapped him in the soft swaddling cloth and made a little bed for him in the hay. That night, like every night, there were shepherds in the fields outside Bethlehem, watching the flocks of sheep. The shepherds were surprised and amazed by a very bright light in the sky and a strange song coming from nowhere and everywhere, all at once. It was angels and they were glorious!

After sharing the joyous news, the angels went to see the baby born in a stable in the city of Bethlehem to tell him hello. What a beautiful baby!

After the angels had gone away, the shepherds remembered what they had said, that a wonderful baby had been born and that they could find him by following the brightest star in the sky. So the shepherds all said to each other, “Let’s go look for that baby.” They had no trouble finding the stable, because of the bright star, and sure enough, there inside were Mary and Joseph, watching over their little baby, Jesus. And the shepherds saw that Jesus was just stunning. “Oh! What a beautiful baby!” Then the shepherds went away and told everyone what they had seen.

On this same night, three wise ones saw the bright star and said to each other, “Look at the amazing star! It must be shining for something very special!” The wise ones loaded up their camels with treasures and traveling supplies and followed the star all the way to Bethlehem. Jesus was very young when the wise ones found him, but they knew he was special. “What a wonderful child. This child will be our teacher.” And they gave their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, and other gifts useful for babies.

Mary and Joseph wondered for a long time about all of these things that happened when their child was born. “lt’s astonishing that all these people would come to see our baby and give us presents for him. They don’t even know him.”

When Jesus grew up, he was a courageous teacher, just like the wise ones said. And one of the most important things he tried to teach people was to love each other and to treat all people, even strangers, with kindness and care. And people who have tried to follow his best teachings have become better people, and have spread light through their world, which is what we are here to do.

Tonight we shared the Christmas Story about one special baby. But this baby isn’t the only special one. Every child is a treasure, a wonder and a miracle. And as they grow up, they are always and forever a treasure, a wonder and a miracle.

READING

“EACH NIGHT A CHILD IS BORN”
by Sophia Lyon Fahs, Excerpted and adapted

For so the children come
and so they have been coming.
Always in the same way they came-
Born of the seed of man and woman.

No angels herald their beginnings.
No prophets predict their future courses.
no wise man see a star to show where to find
The babe that will save humankind.
Yet each night a child is born is a holy night.
Fathers and mothers
Sitting beside their children’s cribs-
Feel glory in the sight of a new beginning.
They ask “Where and how will this new life end?
Or will it ever end?”

Each night a child is born is a holy night
A time for singing-
A time for wondering
A time for worshipping.

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

In this season and throughout the year:

May you know the wonder of a new born child.

May you experience the eager anticipation of the shepherds. May you be blessed with the resilience of Mary and Joseph. May the peace of that night long ago be with you through even life’s times of challenge.

May the love of angels be a constant in your life.

May the congregation say “Amen” and “Blessed Be”

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

Unwrapping Gifts of Presence

December 18, 2024 by tom Posted in Audio available, Erin Walter, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Erin Walter and Rev. Michelle LaGrave
December 15, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Join us for a fun and festive service where the congregation will “unwrap” gifts of presence.

Our theme today is the gifts of presence, so we’re unwrapping the gifts of presence. That is a gift for those of you who like puns and a lump of coal for those of you who don’t.

(There are lots of wrapped packages on the stage.
Rev. Erin starts by unwraping the first one.)

This one says “Open First” so I’m going to find out. All right, It says “Today we are literally going to unwrap this service.” I’m going to invite volunteers to come up, open a present, and each box or bag will have some part of the service in it. One box has the opening hymn wrapped inside, another has the offertory, and so forth.

We’ll take a moment to breathe together as they come, and even if it means that our opening words happen at the end, or our closing hymn is first, it’s okay. We’re gonna have some fun today, and we’re gonna learn some things from it.

Benediction

MYSTERY OF BEING HERE
by John Donahue.

May you awaken to the mystery of being here
and enter the quiet immensity of your own presence.
May you have joy and peace in the temple of your senses.
May you receive great encouragement when new frontiers beckon.
May you respond to the call of your gift
and find the courage to follow its path.
May the flame of anger free you from falsity.
May warmth of heart keep your presence of flame and anxiety
never linger about you.
May your outer dignity mirror an inner dignity of soul.
May you take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention.
May you be consoled in the secret symmetry of your soul.
May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder.
May it be so and Amen.

Reading

MYSTERIES
by Mary Oliver

Truly we live with mysteries
too marvelous to be understood.
How grass can be nourishing in the mouths of lambs,
how rivers and stones are
forever in allegiance with gravity,
while we ourselves dream of rising,
how two hands touch and the bonds will never be broken,
how people come from delight
or the scars of damage
to the comfort of a poem.
Let me keep my distance always
from those who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with those who say,
Look and laugh in astonishment
and bow their heads.

Story for all ages

THE SHORTEST DAY
by Susan Cooper

So the shortest day came, and the year died,
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive,
And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us – Listen!!
All the long echoes sing the same delight,
This shortest day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, fest, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!

Affirming Our Mission

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

Sermon

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

So a couple of weeks ago Reverend Michelle and I were in the minister’s office commiserating and catching up on the life of the church and that is one of the best things about being on a ministerial team is you’re in it together and just being together in those moments of sharing about our struggles, about our joys, instead of over email or text, but to really be together. And it’s in those luxurious moments when something magical might sneak in. In this case, I said to Well, in seminary, I used to be so creative about worship planning, walking meditations around the sanctuary, dancing. I just don’t have the energy for that kind of creativity these days, and that’s okay. We do what we can do.

We do what we can do is one of my favorite mantras, and I believe it, But of course the universe heard me and sent the unwrapped service through a colleague’s Facebook post. And here we are. A few days later we found ourselves gift wrapping, making a party of it in the minister’s office. Now gifts aren’t really my love language and I’m terrible about waiting until the last minute to shop and I find myself wrapping presents usually alone in my room on Christmas Eve muttering to myself and looking for the tape and feeling resentful mostly toward myself that I did this to myself. So it was with incredible gratitude that Reverend Michelle, her spouse Reverend Micah, Reverend Michelle’s mom Nancy and Kinsey all offered to wrap gifts for this day together. Yes.

It’s hard when a team member leaves, so I want to say a special note of how nice it was to have Kinsey in the room. She wrapped one present and then she said, “Is it okay if I just sit and get some work done while y ‘all are wrapping? Just be here?” And absolutely yes. And we learned in that time that we have a shared favorite song, so we got to dance around a little bit, and now I have that memory. I also want to thank Brent and the musicians and the tech team again for being a part of this unwrapped service, which is a particular curveball for you. Thank you for your talent, your openness, and the clarity of when it really isn’t going to work, to just wing it. Great.

So, friends, you never know what your presence may offer someone, what a gift it may be. And you never know what staying open and present to the mystery of the universe might bring you. In this holiday season, presence and the corresponding word “absence” can be a challenging thing. I find myself often torn, wanting to be a bunch of places at once, which of course I can’t do. And you may find yourself aching over those you have lost, whether to death or family estrangement or simply moving away. Our challenge in the hustle and bustle is to acknowledge those feelings, to not push them away, but to somehow also ground ourselves into being present to the joys and loves around us.

Vietnamese monk and peace activist, Tich Nhat Hanh, known as the father of mindfulness, said this,

“When you love someone, the best thing you can offer is your presence. How can you love if you are not there? The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they bloom like flowers.”

Today’s service is intended to give us a chance to not just talk about mindfulness, but to practice it together, to pay attention because we cannot autopilot this one. It gives us a chance to breathe while we wait for the slides or when a hymn is opened out of place, a chance to hear sacred words in new voices, young and old. And while for some of us not Knowing whether and which hymn is coming next, I admit, may be stressful. If we can let go of control even a little and know that whatever is in the box, it’ll be okay. I hope that that knowledge will serve you well during the holiday season and what’s to come in our world in January and beyond.

And this call to live in the moment is not just modern spirituality or self-help but ancient wisdom. The Chinese philosopher Lao Su, born in 571 BC, wrote,

“If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.”

That may be an oversimplification given what we know about the body and chemicals and the brain, but still I think those are wise words. So I hope you’ve been paying attention to where the service might be affecting you and giving yourself a chance to ponder now or later why you might be delighted in some spots or stressed in others and how you might apply that knowledge to your daily life. If you’ve been delighted by something different, something a little silly at times, perhaps seeking more silliness or spontaneity or difference in your daily life would bring you joy.

If you feel frustrated, angry or anxious, I’m sure you’re not alone, and perhaps you could have the kind of conversation with a friend, the way I’m so thankful to be able to have with Reverend Michelle when I need to, and talk about what might be underneath what you might be feeling. We can ask ourselves, how would I like to feel when faced with something different, unusual, or beyond my control. What would my best self be in this situation? These are also good questions, not just for inevitable holiday curveballs that happen at the airport or when family gets together, but for our life in this church. First UU is expected to call a second co-lead minister next year and who knows what kind of creative or theological differences or ways of doing things they might bring. So my prayer for you as your sabbatical minister and someone who loves this congregation so much is that you can meet those unknowns with at the very least calm curiosity or even better a spirit of delight and wonder.

When I told one first UU staffer about this service, they said, “I love it. Bring the chaos.” And I frankly was not expecting that from you, Shannon. I love it. And my favorite song on KUTX right now is a song called “Little Chaos,” and there’s a lyric in the verse that goes, “Is the room in your life for a little chaos.” And the thing is, you have to have some room to be able to welcome change or the unexpected, be it a miracle or an emergency. And so in my life as a parent, my husband and I talk a lot about trying to leave room in the Google Calendar for the unexpected. And I remind that today to myself and to all of us.

Lastly, I can’t talk about presence without sharing a story that’s been on my heart about what it is to be present with each other. Recently I sat with an elder from our congregation who was in the last days of hospice care. She could not open her eyes or speak to me. So I sat with her for a while, gently put my hand on her hands, not knowing how that would feel to her. Sometimes I sang songs quietly, “Amazing Grace,” “The Lord blessed you and keep you”, Spirit of life.” Not sure if she was aware of my presence. I wasn’t sure what to say because I didn’t know her well. But I leaned in and I said, “Your church family loves you so much. We love you, we love you.” And to my surprise, she nodded very clearly, twice, at those words, the only movement in my visit.

The poet Maya Angelou famously said that people will not remember what you say or do, but they will remember how you make them feel. I know from this church member in that experience that your presence matters. The love you bring to each other matters. If this is a challenging season for you, I want you to know your church loves you so much, and we are here for you. May this be a time of great joy in the ways that it can be, and may we be present to each other in everything else.

Blessed be.

Opening Words

FORGED IN THE FIRE OF OUR COMING TOGETHER
by Reverend Gretchen Haley

What’s going to happen?
Will everything be okay?
What can I do?
In these days,
we find ourselves too often, stuck with these questions on repeat.
What’s going to happen? Will everything be okay? What can I do?

We grasp at signs and markers, articles of news and analysis,
Facebook memes and forwarded emails,
as if the new Zodiac
is capable of forecasting all that life may yet bring our way
as if we could prepare,
as if life had ever made any promises of making
sense, or turning out the way we thought.
As if we are not also actors in this still unfolding story

for this hour we gather
to surrender to the mystery,
to release ourselves from the needing to know,
the yearning to have it already figured out.
and also the burden of believing we either have all the control or none

Here in our song and our silence
our stories and our sharing
We make space for a new breath a new healing a new possibility
to take root
That is courage
forged in the fire of our coming together
and felt in the Spirit that comes alive in this act of faith.
And that we believe still a new world is possible,
that we are creating it already, here and now.

Come, let us worship together.

Thank you for being present to the mystery of the season, the mystery of our very lives and existence and co-creating this service with us. Your presence today has truly been a gift. We saved this box for last because it would be awkward to extinguish the chalice before it was lit. And because we always have our words of blessing ringing in our ears and hearts as we leave this place. I don’t think we lit it. So we’re going to light it, and then we’ll extinguish it, and thank you so much for being a part of this. The first time we ever did an unwrapped service here. Go in peace, go in love, blessed it be.

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.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

How to Prepare for the Zombie Apocalypse

December 10, 2024 by tom Posted in Audio available, Michelle LaGrave, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Michelle LaGrave
December 8, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Rev Michelle offers us survival tips for the spiritual work that we can learn and follow to prepare for the new administration coming in January. She uses the term Zombie Apocalypse as a metaphor because the circumstances we face are so extreme, so out of the ordinary, so out of control, that they seem unreal.

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

Our call to worship this morning is from Kalidasa. Kalidasa was an Indian poet and playwright who lived around the turn of the fifth century and wrote in Sanskrit. His works have been translated into many languages and read the world over and throughout the centuries since his death.

Look to this day,
for it is life,
the very life of life.
In its brief course lie all the verities and realities of your existence.
The bliss of growth,
the glory of action,
the splendor of achievement
are but experiences of time.

For yesterday is but a dream
And tomorrow is only a vision;
And today well-lived, makes
Yestarday a dream of hapiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope
Look well therefore to this day;
Such is the salutation to the ever-new dawn.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

Our reading today is from Lao Tzu. He was an ancient Chinese philosopher who wrote the Tao Te Ching and is considered the founder of Taoism.

If you are depressed, you are living in the past.
If you are anxious, you are living in the future.
If you are at peace, you are living in the present.

Sermon

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

Let’s begin with some definitions.

ZOMBIE, a person who is deceased, a member of the undead, a person whose body is dead but acts as if it is living, often known to walk with a very slow shuffle, although in more recent stereotypes can move more quickly and in many different ways. Often with a decayed look about their faces.

Definition: APOCALYPSE, In the tradition, this comes from the book of Revelation and is about the end of the world. In more common terminology, apocalypse can refer to any event which is radically changing the world and might feel like the end of the world.

Definition: SURREAL, The feeling that one’s current circumstances are so out of the ordinary that they must be a dream, or one feels like one is in a dream-like state because the current context is so unusual, so different, so extreme, so out of control that it feels like it can’t really quite possibly actually be real.

The date of the zombie apocalypse is January 20th, 2025. Yes, this is a metaphor.

That said there are some survival tips about the spiritual work that is before us that we can learn and follow. I’ve come up with seven. There may be many, many more. And I could go on much longer than a sermon length about all the things we could or maybe should do. But we’ll stick with seven for today.

• NUMBER ONE: FIND A HIDEOUT.
Praying in your closet is actually a long time spiritual practice of our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors on these lands. It was in what is now known as the United States, but at that time was referred to colonial times. Our Pilgrim and Puritan ancestors had a critical spiritual practice of going into a closet, going into a private space to pray and to examine themselves and to look for signs of good works in their lives. So we have a long tradition, a long long tradition of doing this.

Jesus himself in Matthew 6:6 taught his followers to pray in secret and he also went off into the wilderness frequently away even from his own disciples to pray and to commune with his God whom he referred to as his father. In the coming zombie apocalypse, you will need a place of spiritual refuge, free from the distractions of other people. Find it, prepare for it, get it ready now. Start using it now.

• NUMBER TWO: PAY ATTENTION.
There is an old Zen story about a student who said to Master Ichu,

“Please write for me something of great wisdom.” Master Ichu picked up his brush and wrote one word – “Attention”. The student said, “Is that all?” The master wrote, “Attention, attention.” The student became irritable. That doesn’t seem profound or subtle to me. In response, master Ichu wrote simply, “Attention, attention, attention.” In frustration, the student demanded, “What does this word attention mean?” Master Ichu replied, “Attention means attention.”

Pay attention. Pay attention to the beauty that is in this world. Pay attention to your family, pay attention to your community, pay attention to your body, pay attention to yourself.

Pay attention to those who are different from you, to those who have different abilities or disabilities, to those who have different heritages, to those who have different experiences of racism in the world. Pay attention to those who are LGBTQ+. Pay attention to how they are experiencing these current times and learn from people who are different from you. We all have different skills and strengths and challenges. I’m not saying steal from other people or other cultures. I’m saying learn from each other through authentic relationships and having real true deep heartfelt conversations with each other.

Learn about what it means to be a person of color who knows all about resourcing and what resourcing is. Pay attention to people who are black and talk about black joy and how that is possible. Pay attention. Pay spiritual attention. Also pay attention to the news about what is happening, but not all the time.

Take the news in small, but regular doses. Do not be caught sleeping through the apocalypse. It will be too late by the time the zombies come for you. Pay attention. And do not allow yourself to become like a zombie going on autopilot throughout your world and without a care for anyone else.

You may or may not be experiencing the coming months and years in a way that is very different from people who are around you. There are some of us who are needing to consult lawyers at this time and make plans in preparations for how our legal statuses of marriage or citizenry or refugee status may change. So pay attention.

• NUMBER THREE: LIVE IN THE MOMENT.
Living in the moment does help with number two, paying attention.

Lao Tzu said, “Do not live in the past. You will become depressed. Do not live in the future. You will become anxious. Do live in the present and you will find peace.

Be present in the present and you will find peace. You will be able to see that beauty in the natural world. You will be able to see how you and your own body is experiencing what is going on in our world. You will be able to see others who are different from you, who are part of this beloved community and out into the larger worlds and what they are facing. The past cannot be changed. It is in the past. Remaining attached to how we wish the past might have gone is a point of suffering. This is Buddhism now. We’re moving from Taoism to Buddhism all within the same number three. The future cannot be predicted.

Listening to news about what is actually happening is one thing. Listening to hours and hours and hours about what people who are anxious or are trying to sell sensationalist headlines are saying is not helpful, it is anxiety producing, and it may or may not be true. No one can prophesy the future. We will move forward on our best educated guesses by what is happening now.

Focus on what is happening right before you, right now. Act on what is happening in the world right now. It’s not just paying attention and listening and hearing, this is also about acting. We will need everyone to act in different ways. And part of your spiritual work will to be to go deep inside and assess what your level of risk is and will be and what you are willing to put out there. That will be different for each person, and we will need to accept and respect those risk tolerances that are different from our own.

And by the way, we are working with the social justice folks beginning to have some conversations about how to make social justice work more accessible and what people who cannot physically go down to the capital or march in the streets can do instead within their own abilities. It will need all of us.

Act on what is happening in the world right now, the one thing you can do, the one thing you can do right now. If you make a list of all of the things that need to be done, you’re likely to become overwhelmed or anxious. Do the one thing right now that you can do. And when you have done that, do the next one thing that you can do. And when you have done that, do the next one thing that you can do. That was number three, live in the moment.

• NUMBER FOUR: PREPARE.
This lesson comes from Rev Michelle in the form of what not to do. The other day I was driving to church in my little hybrid truck, and I got this message warning in bright red flashing up on the screen saying, “You have less than 50 miles until your gas runs out.” At which point I thought, Micah did tell me I really, really need gas. And then about 10 seconds later, another message packed up on my screen saying “Your tires are low on air”, okay, but I got to get to church right now another 10 seconds pass and another bright message pops up on the screen saying “Your window washer fluid needs to be refilled.” This has never happened to me before. Do not be caught without the spiritual versions of fuel, air, and liquid soap. (Laughter)

Actually, there is not one list in terms of getting prepared. Our needs will continually change, and we’ll need to keep adapting and making new skills, learning new skills for new times. But there are some places we can start now. And now is not too soon to start building some skills like in the area of cybersecurity. So get your VPNs in order, lock down your cookies or various trackers, secure your personal info, start using encrypted messaging systems, or communicate in person with any sensitive information. If that sounds like a bunch of gibberish, welcome to the club. I’m learning too.

The ways we communicate, especially in the area of social justice, is going to change Radically, again. I’m sorry, I know we just did this with the pandemic, learning all these new skills with Zoom and live streaming and all sorts of things that we had not done much or at all before. It’s coming again.

Wired had a great recent article about how to protect yourself from governmental cyber surveillance and you should be able to find that online fairly easily if you Google it. See me in person if you would like to set up a way to communicate with me securely. We are going to be using end-to-end double encrypted secure messaging systems and I can let you know how to do that and likely people will learn how to crack that encryption and likely we’ll need to move to another version of encryption and so on.

So number four was prepare in all the ways – still fill your gas tank – still have your Go-bags, but also spiritually prepare.

• NUMBER FIVE: LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR.
We are back to Jesus’ teachings again. Love your neighbor as yourself. There are two parts to this.

The first is loving your neighbor, being kind to your neighbor, ALL of your neighbors, no matter how they voted.
And number two is loving yourself.

You cannot love your neighbor very well if you do not love yourself very well and you are trying to follow this edict to love your neighbor as yourself. So love yourself, take care of yourself. take care of your physical self, eat well, get good nutrition, exercise, go to the doctor, and take care of your mental health and your emotional health. Love is a verb. Loving your neighbor, loving yourself are action words.

Remember the story of the good Samaritan and love those with whom you disagree. There was an article recently that has been floating around online, I’m sorry I didn’t go back and try to find it and I don’t remember the author’s name, but it was about building up empathy. He wrote, He studied the brain and he wrote about the upcoming Thanksgiving holidays and how if you were part of a family that was mixed politically and things got a little fraught in the family conversations over the dinner table, to try to redirect the conversation. and to ask grandpa or whoever it is to tell a story about a time they did something good for someone else. Tell a story about how someone has done good for someone else. He said that they have studied this and found out that people aren’t just born with this one level of empathy. Empathy is actually a skill or a muscle or something like that that can be built up over time.

And if you stop, if we stop trying to change people’s minds with rational reasonable arguments and instead focus on encouraging them to build up feelings of empathy and compassion by telling these stories and then more stories and then more stories, we can begin to change the world, to ease the burdens of the world, at least a little bit, by loving each other and supporting each other in building up empathy. That’s number five, love your neighbor.

• NUMBER SIX: MAINTAIN YOUR SENSE OF HUMOR.
This ties in with your mental health, with systems theory, with all those good things. If you notice your sense of humor is decreasing or even disappearing, that is a red flag. That is a warning sign that you might want to seek out some support with your mental health, Some medication some therapy whatever it is that you might need. Pay attention to your sense of humor levels And notice if they’re changing we want them to increase you want to be playful We want to keep our senses of humor up. This will help us get through these coming times. And we can be serious and playful at the same time.

We can be playful about very serious life or death situations. It is a survival tip. These are survival tips. And for some people in the coming months, we are literally talking survival, life or death. And all of you who are not in that situation by keeping up your senses of humor and your sense of playfulness, that will help us all get through.

So, think about your favorite shows or books. NCIS, LA, the character of Heddy who’s like the super-secret super spy who knows everything all the time and no one ever knows how she knows. Think about “Get Smart” or “James Bond” or “Mission Impossible” or “Mrs. Hallafax”, the elderly recruit to the CIA because no one would guess she’s an agent with her white hair. Become your own secret social justice agent and have fun with it. Imagine yourself as a super secret social service, social justice agent. That’s number six, maintaining your sense of humor.

• NUMBER SEVEN: (back to Judaism and Christianity) KEEP THE SABBATH.
Set a regular day or evening or time to put away the news and any form of electronics. Take Take a break, rest, be with the people you love and who love you. Keeping Sabbath is an incredibly powerful spiritual tool of renewal and restoration. It doesn’t have to be on Friday night to Saturday morning. You can choose whatever time worked for you. I do do Friday night. Keep a Sabbath. Rest.

Be with those we love and those who love you. Good luck. Amen. And blessed be.

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

Your lips and compassion at your fingertips, blessing all others as you yourselvesare now blessed. Amen and blessed be.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

From Eve to us

December 4, 2024 by tom Posted in Audio available, Erin Walter, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Erin Walter
December 1, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Sexism and misogyny harm people of all genders and can affect our communities in subtle, even unnoticed ways. How can we make a spiritual practice of rooting out those prejudices in our world and ourselves? Rev. Erin Walter updates her UU Women’s Federation award-winning sermon “From Eve to Hillary.” The sermon was featured at the 2017 General Assembly in New Orleans. Today’s updated version still resonates for post-election 2024 and for this moment.

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

You are not on call for the pain of the world. I know you feel every hit of the hammer beating plowshares into swords and people into plowshares. And every time you fail to step between the blow and its target, the injustice is sewn into your bones too. And so when the hammer rises, you must rise with it, raising your voice, your eyes, your awareness, your body, whatever part of you that can, given as an offering.

You cannot stay this way forever. Sown to this cacophony of blows every movement of yours a follow until your body is owned by the drumbeat of the raising of weapons, until your days string together in a stuttering heartbreak of rage, and you can’t catch your breath.

But that is what you promised to those who don’t get to choose whether or to show up for the fight. You promised that you would hold nothing back, I know, except you cannot be on call for the pain of the world.

It is not work that can be done without sleep. When we said that people are too sacred to be beaten into plowshares or swords we met you. We need you for the fight and we need you for all the things that are less and more than fighting.

We need you to be ready to listen in the soft way earth listens to rain in the hours before dawn, to be tender, to cradle precious things, to hold the smell of dew in your hair, to hum the songs that flowers will rise up through the earth to hear.

I need you to stay in love with the world.

– Rev. Liz James

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

The lore of the conniving shrew, the cunning wench, the lying Jezabel, this embodiment of untrustworthiness in female form has been carefully crafted over history and is genius in its simplicity. Gut the credibility, remove the voice.

And in a country such as ours with stronger Judeo-Christian ties than any other westernized nation, it is particularly compelling. Eve, giving Adam the apple, is a powerful illustration of the cultural casting of a woman caught in her penchant for treachery, complete with a faith-based other worldliness that makes it irrefutable by design.

This caustic trope has been reliably reincarnated in the Salem witch, the woman’s suffragist, the second-wave feminist, the modern-day gold digger, all in an attack on veracity that deliberately seeks to cast doubt on a woman’s intentions and actions and succeeds in nullifying her words before she can even speak them.

– Katie Masa Kennedy

Sermon

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

The sermon that I get asked to preach the most was called “From Eve to Hillary.” And I wrote it in 2016, it won the UU Women’s Federation Sermon Award, and I preached it at General Assembly in New Orleans. And of course, I wrote it at a time when I hoped that my daughter and I might celebrate our first woman president. So when people started asking for it again this year, I said, “Okay, and I’ll see what I can update for this time we’re in.”

I have to tell you, I didn’t really need to update it very much, (audience laughs) which is, I have a lot of feelings about. I call it “From Eve to us” now because the call is for us. We are not outside the work. So here we go.

When I was in seminary, people were always suggesting books to me as though seminarians have time for extra books. More than once, it was “Reading the Bible Again for the First Time” by Marcus Borg. And I told these kind book recommenders, take away the word again, and that’s me. As someone who grew up humanist, Unitarian Universalist, in this congregation, where my whole memory of Jesus has to do with a sermon that one of my colleagues gave called “How Jesus is Like the Lone Ranger” and I’ve reached out to him and I want to know what he said. He doesn’t quite remember and neither do I, but I invite us all to do our own research and maybe figure out what that might have been.

But I was reading the Bible for the first time when I was in seminary and I am not proud of this. I want to be very clear. For those of us who grew up UU, and I hope for those of you who are growing up UU now, it’s important that we have literacy in sacred texts, especially if like myself in my primary role as the Executive Director of the State Justice Network for UUs, we are to minister with and work with people of diverse faith backgrounds and cultural backgrounds.

The Bible is very important to a lot of the people that we work with, even if it’s not what I was particularly raised with. And when we go, in particular, on our immigration border witness trips, I’m always so moved that some of the only things that people bring with them on these long, long journeys is the Bible and their faith.

Now, it is in all great religious traditions that we argue with our sacred texts, and that is very UU, so let’s go. We’re gonna start in Genesis chapter 3 of the People’s Bible.

God said, “You shall not eat the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it or you will die.” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die, for God knows that when you eat it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired and to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. And she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened.

God tells Eve she will die. Does she? No. No. Many of us grew up with that message, and you’ll hear some language in here from 2016, which we may have also heard this year, but that Eve ruined paradise for everyone. It was her fault that humans had to spend our lives atoning and trying to make paradise great again.

But Unitarian Universalism encourages us to question, to not just accept one story or to recognize that there may be beauty and untruth in the same story. So here are my questions. Just who is lying in this part of the Genesis story? Whose motives should arouse suspicion? The woman who chooses knowingly to seek wisdom and face good and evil? The animal who is maligned through the ages, but if you read the actual text told Eve the truth about her choices or the fear-mongering entity in power who makes a bold but hollow threat to the people to hang on to that power.

How different 2 ,000 years of Judeo-Christian history including our own UU history this is where we come from It might be if Eve were respected, admired for her choices, her willingness to seek knowledge, to take risks.

And it’s not too late to change the story and to tackle the intersectional oppressions that we see in our world which include sexism and misogyny here in this story. Another world is possible and in fact it has been written.

In the Women’s Bible commentary scholar Susan Niddich says Genesis 3 has been misunderstood. Eve is the protagonist – not her husband. This is an important point Niddich says as is the realization that to be the curious one. The seeker of knowledge, the tester of limits, is to be quintessentially human.

I read that and thought, “Wow, Eve would have made a pretty great Unitarian Universalist, or at least the curious kind that I want to be, that I aspire to be.”

In 2016, when I first wrote this, the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations of which we are a part, had just had its first female president, the Reverend Dr. Sophia Betancourt, appointed along with two men. Then we elected our first female UUA president. Let’s see, the Reverend Susan Frederick Gray followed. Now the Reverend Dr. Betancourt is our UUA president again, by election for a full term. She is the first woman of color elected to lead our faith. It was my honor to co-lead, worship, and sing with Reverend Sophia back in October at our UU The Vote service at your sibling congregation in Plano.

This is a crucial era for women, gender queer people, people of color in our movement and in our nation. The Reverend Ashley Horan who used to lead Side with Love and is now one of the vice presidents of the denomination said in her Berry Street lecture at that General Assembly in 2017, “Everything is falling apart.” This is still true. We still see it in glaring attacks on immigrants, trans and queer people, people of color, people seeking abortion care. And in the election at the time between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, we saw it in hate that was indiscriminately directed at women. The Reverend Susan Frederick Gray reported directly from Charlottesville, and she said that in between Nazi chants were peppered homophobic and sexist rants. We see that still today.

On the day before election day this year, I drove my daughter to high school. She and her best friend, assigned female at birth, in the carpool with me. And as we drove up, there were two guys who’ve been doing this for years, but predominantly since the first election that, when this was written, holding up big, hateful signs about all kinds of things. It was a grab-back of all the hateful things. And one of them was wearing a shirt that said, “Your body, my choice.”

I appreciate – I was thinking about it while they were singing Time after Time, like something’s just time, after time, after time. But I appreciate the reading that Zak gave us from Katie Massa Kennedy taking that historical view. As awful as it is, it’s a little bit of a piece of hope to me to also remember that we are not the first to be fighting and working for equality. And we didn’t invent it, I didn’t wake up to it. It’s been in our texts For centuries, it’s a lot of work to do and this idea that when you cast women or anyone in a marginalized group automatically as less trustworthy and you remove the voice then that next step is where we are now Removing the choice. “Your body, my choice.” Absolutely not.

But there are so many things the common you knew. You heard some of the list from Zak. But also in 2016 we added “Nasty Woman” to the list. Do you remember that one? We added, “Nevertheless, she persisted.” Do you remember that moment? Mitch McConnell saying to Elizabeth Warren, reading from Coretta Scott King in the Senate, McConnell said, “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.” Like this was a bad thing.

I know, I think we all know, what black women have to put up with under the characterization of being an angry black woman. We don’t know personally some of us, but we hear and I hope we’re listening. At the time, Black Lives Matter and Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism was an emerging movement and we were having to contend with who we listened to and how the tropes and dismissals nullify a woman’s words before she can even speak them, Kennedy says.

So the losing of your voice yourself because of sex or gender and expression goes directly against our UU principles. The inherent worth and dignity of every person, our values centered in Love. And the reason I’m bringing this up to you now, is because with the rise of extremeism in our politics and relition. Often times UUs want to say we’re not a religion, not really church. I beg you I beg you to claim it, to claim your role as a person of faith, to understand Unitarian Universalism as a religion that comes from somewhere and has a role to play, a very serious role to play, encountering those narratives, and helping us come together. Thank you.

It’s really important. I don’t want to talk about this. Like I would rather talk about, and sometimes we can, about how dancing feeds your spirit or any number of other topics. But it is so important that we understand that this work is ours to do. It matters that it comes from a faith place. It matters that people of all genders are involved in this work. And it’s not intellectual, Right, there is the there you can research all you want, but you know that it’s true and That it has real real life Implications shamefully unequal pay and poor conditions for women in the workplace and for all people doing so-called women’s work a United States where trans women are murdered at record rates Particularly almost all of them women of color, the loss of our reproductive rights, and the rise of this extreme Christian nationalism.

So what are we going to do? What are we going to make our spiritual practices here, whatever your gender identity? I’m asking you to think about that today, because who you are may mean that what you’re going to do about it is a little different than the person sitting next to you. And it can feel really overwhelming, this big history that we have to tackle. So I invite us to start small. I’m going to start with what are the stories that we tell. And I’ll give you an example from my house from 2016.

When my daughter, Ace, then seven, asked on a drive to school with her brother, then three, in the car, how many girl presidents have we had. I choked on a lump in my throat to say her and her brother to her and her brother none. In 230 years, none.

I wish though here’s where I want to claim a role in the story. I wish that I had taken a moment though to educate her about Shirley Chisholm who in 1972 became the first Black candidate for a major party’s nomination in the US, I wish I told her about the rest of the world, about the more than 20 female heads of state or government leading countries right now. At the time, I let that America first propaganda that I abhor. The we’re so great keep me in that narrow place when I could have given her a truer answer, that there our female leaders all around the world.

So I invite us to choose knowledge and think about ways we can answer questions that inspire our kids and ourselves with the truth to do better.

I invite you also to look at the behavior in our churches. It’s not just the presidential election that has me bringing this up to you. We are in search for a co-minister. This is a chance for all of us to pay attention to our subtle biases. Not just about gender, about race, or culture, about people’s religious expression. If you felt uncomfortable today when I said God in prayer, or if you felt uncomfortable when I might have just called God a liar. You So how do you handle it when someone says something uncomfortable and do you give them more leeway if they’re a man or if they’re older or if they’re straight or cis-gender? So as our congregation seeks and goes through this process of leadership search, I ask you to think about these kind of things too.

Once, in another congregation I served, we were having a committee meeting. We were on a tight deadline and a woman spoke up. She said, “I raised this issue we’re working on months ago because I knew we needed time to get it done,” and no one responded to my email. The committee only acted when a man brought it up a few months later. She said, “I’ve dealt with this at my job, too. I’m frustrated. I’m dealing with it here at my church. No one wants to listen to older women, she said. She said, it’s only getting worse as I get older.

I’ve talked to you about the spiritual practice of reading your email. I invite you to think about it from a lens of whose emails am I reading and who am I responding to? Ageism is a part of the intersections as well. We love this woman. None of us meant to hurt her. We promised we would do better. And I tell that story to you as part of my promise to her.

So One of the things I also think about though is how sexism and misogyny affect men. I’m the mother of a son and how I raise him and the man that he grows up to be or the person that he grows up to be is a responsibility I take very seriously, especially in this age of mass shootings and so much more. So I want all the men in the room And all the people who do not identify as women, to know that you’re very much on my heart every time I think about this sermon, as it was when I wrote it and certainly still today. People of all genders need healing from sexism and misogyny. Just as people of all races, their souls are harmed in the insidious work of racism in the world, in different ways but make no mistake.

So I want to close by sharing a story with you. Again from 2016, one of your sibling, UUs at Wildflower Church in South Austin, Kurt Cadena Mitchell, I asked him to share his feelings because I knew he was a proud male feminist. He was our board vice chair and a young adult leader in the community, later the chief of staff for the city of Austin, now a seminarian at a Quaker Seminary, last I checked. In his photo, direct photo in the church directory, it said, “Women’s rights are human rights,” on Kurt’s shirt. I emailed to ask him why that shirt, why that message back in 2016. And his long reply that I wasn’t expecting, brought me to tears, and I’ll share it with you with his permission.

He said, “I’ve been thinking about why a woman’s nomination for president makes me tear up and catch my breath and wipe away happy tears in a different way. Growing up one of the biggest things that frequently made me feel out of place, a misfit, or less valuable, was around concepts of masculinity. What it meant to be a man or a boy. I didn’t usually fit that picture. I played house, dolls, dress up. I used my Star Wars action figures to set up a toy school or a hospital or a convent of nuns. I didn’t like contact sports. I preferred the company of my aunts, grandmother, and other female relatives. I knew from the media, school, and society what a little boy should be like. I wasn’t exactly that picture.

In a hometown that was majority Latino, I had ample examples of people who looked like me in positions of power. That is not to say that racism didn’t manifest in ugly ways. It did. But I had strong counter-messages that my culture, race, and heritage were something to be proud of. Being gay was more isolating. My biggest anxieties and feelings of being less than worthy were rooted in not fitting the standard of masculinity, regardless of whether the messages sent explicitly or implicitly. So when I see a woman nominated for president in one of the two major parties, I get emotional.

Now I see an example that you don’t need to be a man with all the meaning attached to that word, to be a badass, get it done, kick butt, and take names, trailblazer, who put herself in the spotlight despite the ridicule, animosity, and violence. Was Hillary Clinton my first example of this? No. Of course not. Absolutely not. My first examples were my mother, who stood up to police. My grandmother, who fought as hard as she could for her family’s future. My aunts, who never let a man define their life or their future. My female cousins, who are living proof of courage, resilience, and hard work. It doesn’t surprise me that focus on the negative of a historic presidential campaign. It was never my race that made me consider taking my own life. But it was the messages the world sent that masculinity was better than femininity. Being feminine was less valuable. And if you were feminine, you were worthless. If you were feminine, you were worthless.

This sermon was never about any particular candidate. That’s not what we do here at church. What we do here is we seek our wholeness together. We seek the truth that all of us are fully loved, fully human, beautiful, strong, needed, belonging in this world exactly the way we are. And I consider it our call as Unitarian Universalists to root out that deadly, deadly message that would tell us otherwise. Kurt is not the only one and if you’re someone who is felt that way in this room and this is emotional for you I Love you and we can talk after the service.

I Want to say we’ve come a long way since 2016 But we’ve lost some fights. I see you Elizabeth and I see all of you who’ve worked so hard for the rights that we have and what we’ve lost and we had our vice president Harris as a female presidential candidate have to spell out to people that not all women are aspiring to be humble. I’m not sometimes, sometimes it’s good to be Well, just like any other human being,

I reserve the right to live a full range of emotion and expression. So we have work to do. And I ask you just to sit with what your own work might be and how it might intersect with some other work we might have to do together. Where there might be little things every day, maybe it’s at home. I know that a lot of us who are doing the work of justice and equity are still living a very binary existence at home, some of us. So what we could do at home, in the workplace, in the church, to root out and get back to the original, original meaning of the story, that Eve is a shero, not a villain, and to understand people of all genders as protagonists in our collective liberation story. Maybe so.

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

Spirit of life and love, thank you for this community where we have the opportunity to come together each week outside of the hustle and bustle, into sacred silence and song, and into a place that calls us to our highest and best selves. May we go out into the world ready to hear the songs that bring the flowers from the earth, ready to fall in love as hard as it is sometimes, as real as the struggle to fall in love with the world all over again and share that love joyfully everywhere it is needed. Blessed be.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

You’re going to Pray for me?

November 26, 2024 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse, Minister Emerita
and Rev. Michelle LaGrave
November 24, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Some thoughts on prayer from a person who used to be really good at praying, but now has many theories and thoughts about it. Lots of people are praying for me since I am sick, and I don’t know how to feel about it.

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

“Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark.” That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.

– Rebecca Solnit

Affirming Our Mission

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

Sermon

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

Kyia and I are so thrilled to be here. It’s wonderful to see you all again. We live in Bryan College Station now. Rev Kyia is the Minister of the Brazos Valley UU church and it’s growing. It’s got about a hundred members and 33 children. And we have a lot of ex-mormons, hence all the children. It’s wonderful. That’s wonderful.

And so we used to go swimming before I got a little bit sicker. We used to go swimming at the adult rec center there, and I’m in the pool. And there are all these older ladies in there. So it’s a bunch of us older ladies in there. And it’s kind of echo-y in there, but everybody shouts. So you can hear each other. And they were talking loudly about all the different kinds of cancer they’d had. And they looked at me, and they said, “Do you have cancer?”

And I said, “Yes, ma’am, I do.”

They said, “Oh, what kind?”

And I just said, “Terminal.”

And they went, “Oh.”

I’m like, “Yeah.”

And this lady said, “I had a miracle healing.”

And I said, “You did? Tell me about it.”

And she said, “Well, I had cancer inside my belly, and the doctor said he might find it everywhere else, he didn’t know. And then when he went in to look, he just found a couple little places and he took them out and now I don’t have cancer anymore, so that’s a miracle.”

And I was like, hmm…

She said, “Can I pray for you?”

And I said, “Okay.”

So I had managed to get out of the pool so I’m sitting in my wheelchair and she comes over and she puts her hand on me, I think just on my arm, not on my head or my shoulder, which would be very irritating. So she prayed that I would have a miracle. And that’s nice, that’s nice. Yeah.

I have this neighbor who comes over, she’s a wonderful cook and she’s like a very slender yoga teacher looking person. And she uses essential oils and things like that. And she cooks for people, she’s a home chef. And so she always brings over some flowers from her yard which is gorgeous and some soup or whatever and it’s really good. And pretty far, well at the first part of our friendship, she asked if she could pray for me. Because she says to me with very intense eyes, “Jesus is real Meg. Jesus is real.”

And I’m like, “Okay, that’s it. That’s your argument, so okay. (audience laughing)

I said, “You know what? You know the parable of the sower where he’s throwing seeds to try to grow them on the ground and some ground is hard packed and the seeds don’t come up and some ground is covered with brambles and the seeds can’t come up and some ground is fertile ground and the seeds can come up.” I said, “My heart when it comes to Christianity is hard packed.” (audience laughing) Hard packed. I said, “People have been over it, and over it, and over it, and over it, and over it, and over it.” I said, “I just can’t even hear it anymore, basically.”

And then after a couple more visits, she has this neighbor that has huge Trump flags in the yard. And she said, “Oh, that’s a text from my neighbor.” And she put the phone down.

I said, “Oh, your Trump neighbor?” ‘Cause I had made assumptions, Because she was a, you know, sweet, kind of hippie-ish, cooking oils person.

She said, “I’m going to vote for Trump.”

And I was just like, I felt like I was going to throw up. And so I didn’t say anything to her about it.

And then I texted her and said, “I promise not to argue with you. If you can come over and just give me your reasoning. I promise just to sit and listen because I just want to hear why somebody I respect that I think is nice and kind is going to vote for that man.”

And so she agreed to do that and we had that talk and whatever. And so it turns out she is just a willingly under informed voter. Willingly under informed. She doesn’t watch the news. She watches YouTube news, and she just didn’t want to know about anything but pro-life. She didn’t want to know.

And so I’m just not sure this friendship is going to survive. But I hear people say, you know, you should be friends with people who just views differ from yours. I just don’t know. Kyia doesn’t want her in the house, which I think is reasonable.

She kept telling me to be open to miracles And then this Rebecca Solnit quote That Michelle, Reverend Michelle, read in the morning in the first part of the service was, she said open the door to the unknown, to darkness, and I feel guilty in myself because I think maybe she means keep the door open for miracles, and people really want me to believe in miracles. They really want it. And they keep saying, “You’re going to get better.”

And I’m just like, “What?”

It’s hard on the doctors when I do that because they’re so hopeful and they just don’t know what to do.

But I don’t think people know how painful it is to leave the door open for miracles, to think that there’s a miracle somehow just hanging over your head that could come down some time and make you well. I find it much more deepening to leave the door open and explore acceptance and living every day with as much love as I can live.

There’s a woman at our church, who used to be a nun for 14 years. She’s got a very peaceful aspect. She says she prays for me, which is okay, I love her. And I asked her the other day how she prays for me, what she means when she says she prays for me.

And she just said said, “I just,” she went like this with her hands, “I just lift you up and Kyia. I pray for you and Kyia at the same time because you’re one. I lift you up and just ask that you be surrounded with strength and courage and love.”

And I’m like, “Thank you. ’cause she’s not like, self-aggrandizing. Like, I am gonna heal you and pray for you.

I had a bad experience when I was younger, in seminary. I think I’ve told you all this story before, where my mother was very sick with cancer. She had, she was about three months from dying. and the minister from a church in Philadelphia came out and we had a prayer circle, they had a prayer circle for her with all the people that were there.

And this minister said, “If you don’t have the faith that she could be healed right now, you could ruin our prayer.”

And I, being in the middle year of seminary, where you lose your faith completely. Everybody does it. I gritted my teeth and I got up and left. I’m still mad about it. ‘Cause of course it didn’t work. It didn’t work.

Seems like there are a lot of rules like that about praying. I mean, I was a really good prayer when I was a kid. I remember one time when I was little, I was in bed, put to bed at my aunt, Mabel’s house, and there were a bunch of, you know, cousins and old adults sitting in the room, in the living room. And I had prayed and prayed and prayed for what seemed like a really long time. I just covered everybody. And I was so excited that I padded out to the living room in my nightgown, and I said, “I just prayed for an hour.”

And I was so disappointed because they were all like, “Uh-huh, okay, good, good, good, good, good, good bit.”

And I heard a lot about praying when I was growing up, Associate Reform Presbyterian, and then Presbyterian, I went to Intervarsity when I was in college, and they had rules, I mean, you had to have this much praise at the beginning of the prayer, and then you had to have adoration, and then you had to have an intercession where you prayed for other people, and then some more praise, and then you could ask for things for yourself, and then I can’t even remember all the rules.

But you had to have a pure heart, pure heart, and no doubts. And I just thought, I’m in big trouble. I don’t even know what a pure heart is. I don’t even know anybody who has one. A pure heart.

And so all those rules felt fake. And it felt like superstition. And it felt like they were praying to this God who was supposedly a God of love and who would sit up there in heaven and go, “I could heal you, but I’m not going to. Even though I love you and I am love, I’m not going to because you haven’t prayed properly. And I’m just going to wait here until you pray properly and then maybe I’ll heal you and maybe I won’t.”

And I just thought that God is not the one I want to believe in. You know, I don’t like that.

And I had a client one time who was also a Presbyterian, and she said, “I just feel like God is waiting for me to leave a loophole in my prayers. So like I pray for each of my children for each step along the way for them and I pray that you know I pray like that they would be safe going to the school bus and safe on the school bus and then safe going to class and the safe in class and then if I forget to pray for any part of their day I feel like God’s gonna use that as a loophole and hurt my child.”

I was like, Jesus, help this lady. She was really worshiping a mean, mean God. And I think a lot of people do.

I know that belief, that your belief does have a lot to do with what your body does. It can. I think if you, you know, there are certain, there are certain people in the medical field who just say, “This person got better, I don’t understand how.”

And but I don’t think it happens a lot. But I think, you know, if you believe hard enough, maybe, Maybe, I don’t know, it can help you, but that’s not available to me.

And I watched this show called Rituals Around the World, and I watched these beautiful people in a South American country, I think it was Guatemala, And they had paid a lot of money to go to this miracle lake, and they had a shaman there who was working with them. And just the hope in their eyes, and the belief in their eyes was striking. And I thought, you know, he had lots of blankets on, and then he would rattle the rattles and then he would he had a mouthful of rum that he would spit on the people and then they would go wash in the lake and I thought I really hope that the people who have that culture in their blood and bones can have enough belief so that that’ll work for them.

I am a white lady from the United States in my late 60s and I just can’t wash that off. And so I worried that, you know, you put yourself in certain situations when you’re watching rituals, and where I would just put myself in there, I’d be sitting there like this. So I don’t want to go there because I don’t want to ruin it for them. And I admired that. I yearned for that kind of hope in a ritual.

And I would love to believe in a world that’s full of magic, and I kind of do. I mean, I’ve had prayers work before. I’ve had making an altar for something work before. Not always work the way I thought it was going to work, and yet this whole praying for healing thing is confusing for me.

But I feel like It goes with my view of God, and so my view of God. So I think of God as a river of love running through the universe. And I think that this is my belief, you don’t have to believe this at all. But I feel like every act of lovingness, of loving kindness between humans, between humans and animals, between humans and plants and trees, water, rocks, between animals and each other, all Love is added to that river of love and that in that way we help create God by adding love to that river of love and so I figured that I would just say Yes to being prayed for even if it’s not by someone that I love already. And I’m gonna think of it as getting a little splash from the river of love. That those people are, they mean it in a loving way, most of them, I think.

If somebody like that minister came to pray for me and said everybody had to get out, they didn’t believe, I would say you need to get out because this is ridiculous. But most people don’t do that to me. So the ones who say they wanna pray for me, I’m okay.

I’m sorry to go off on this tangent, but so I was telling one of the people at our church who’s this woman who is trans and a philosophy major so she’s like prodigious in her thinking and I said what would you do somebody said they were going to pray for you.

And she said, I would say, that’s fine. I just want to lead the prayer.

And I said, “how would you lead it? And she would say, “I’d grasp their hands and I’d go, hail Satan.” I wasn’t going to tell you about that, but now I have. I’m not going to do that to anybody.

And so this song that I wrote All Will Be Well. That is my number one hit across the UU world. I wrote it 25 years ago, a long time ago, and I’ve had people write to me about it, like how it’s helped them, or their questions about it, or things like that, which means a lot to me.

And so, excuse me, I say at the end, “love never ends.” And I see people who are listening kind of go, “Really, ’cause I’ve had love end.”

And what I’m saying, I think, I mean, Kyia will say this is true, and I’m sure Brent too, whoever of y’all writes songs. Sometimes you write a song and you just don’t know what it’s about until years later.

And so I figured out The more I thought about it, that the song was about the river of love, and how love never ends because the river is always going to be there, because people are always going to be loving each other, loving their animal companions, loving their friends, and the animals are going to be loving each other. You can just go on TikTok and see lots of animal friends. Not that I go on TikTok.

And so I’ve been having this argument with St. Julian of Norwich for a long time and love for you to sing with me. I just lay out to her all the things that are wrong in the world and she says “All will be well and all will be well and all manner of things will be well.”

So let’s sing it now.

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.

Closing Reading

To be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender…

– Rebecca Solnit

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

Soul Matters: Repair

November 18, 2024 by tom Posted in Audio available, Michelle LaGrave, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Michelle LaGrave
November 17, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

In times like these, what kind of soul work are we called to do? Can we, might we, repair our spirits?

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

LAY IT DOWN
by Joan Javier Duvall

Here, here is where you can lay it down,
lay down all that you have carried,
the weight of the world that has rounded your back,
leaving you aching and exhausted.
Here, here is where healing begins,
where burdens are set down and alongside one another’s,
their magnitude does not seem as great.
Here is where the door is thrown open
and the light can lift away the shadows
and what was hidden can now be seen.
Here, here is where you can rest,
Where nothing is expected,
but that you bring all of who you are
Into the presence of the holy
and of this loving community

Let us worship together

Affirming Our Mission

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

Sermon

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

It has been quite the week and a half, hasn’t it? I feel like I did at the beginning of the pandemic, like what we are facing in the coming months is just too big, too unknown for me to fully comprehend, to fully grasp what is or is not about to happen. And I am left with one gigantic question. How do I lead you, my people, when I don’t know where we’re going.

I am no Moses nor am I Miriam. I’ve received no divine message or instruction for how to proceed and yet I feel like we are about to enter into the wilderness for an unknown amount of time, though hopefully not 40 years. How does one, how do we prepare for such a journey? What do we pack? What do we bring with us? There are so many many questions right now.

How do any of us lead when we don’t know where we’re going? We might have some ideas. I certainly had some ideas at the beginning of the pandemic, many of which never actually happened. And so from that lesson, I need to remember, we don’t really know for sure where we’re going.

And here is the only answer that I can give right now. We prepare. We pack as best as we can and then we proceed mindfully from one moment in time, from one movement to the next, with spirits full to overflowing. When I was in seminary, preparing to finally answer my call to the ministry and at our last weekly chapel service, the professor served the graduating class a communion of milk and honey. I think most of us thought we were about to enter the promised land, the land of milk and honey, our journeys to ministry at that point complete. None of us knew that we would eventually be leading our various faith traditions through a pandemic, nor through times like this.

As it turned out, we were entering, we were actually entering the wilderness, the Promised Land, a murky vision of milk and honey still far off. But before that service, that one filled with milk and honey and promises we were taught an invaluable lesson about ministry.

Now I’m going to share it with you now. Imagine a tea cup. Imagine your body as a tea cup. It can be fine flowers and gilded edges. It can be plain white. It can be sturdy. It can be any manifestation of a teacup you would like. Imagine a teacup with a saucer underneath and a silver spoon in the saucer. The teacup is your body, is your container, and your job is not to just fill it but to fill it to overflowing. And as a minister, as a leader, as a person in these times, what we do is we serve others, we minister to others by using that little silver spoon and serving from our saucer not from our cup from our saucer so our job then becomes to fill our cups our bodies to overflowing continually again and again and again as we continue serving and serving and serving with our spoon as our saucer begins to empty we refill our cup to overflowing to overflowing to overflowing and we serve and we serve and we serve from the saucer. We need to enter these times with spirits filled to overflowing.

We all need this lesson right now. We are all leaders. We all do engage in ministry of one sort or another, and we are all called to build beloved community.

Our theme this month from the Soul Matters program is repair. So this is a big admission for a minister to make, but I’m in need of some soul work right now. How about all of you? So how do we do this? How do we repair our very spirits? How do we fill our cups? How do we prepare for another unknown journey. How do we do these things in these times?

There are more lessons from seminary. Somehow going back to the beginning is filling me with some answers, some sense of potentiality that feels helpful at the moment and during seminary one of the things that we studied was a practice of ritual which Kinsey began to speak to you about a little bit earlier this morning. Practicing ritual, engaging with ritual is an embodied experience. It is a physical experience. It is a participatory experience. It is filled with repetition upon repetition upon repetition. Whether that be words or melodies or actions, we move deeper and deeper and deeper into the sense of things, the meaning of things, the meaning of language, of poetry, of music over and over again. And we pay attention to the sensations in our bodies. We feel the vibrations in our hearts, in our chests. We feel the vibrations of those around us. We feel the vibrations of the music near us.

What we can do as individuals, as families, as a community, one of the things we can do is engage in ritual, to pay attention to those embodied experiences in a way that maybe we’re not always so mindful about and That is what we are and will continue to be doing during this service There is a lot of fear and anxiety out there right now As well as other emotions.

It is in the news. It’s all over social media. It is infecting our families, our communities, ourselves, causing conflict, division, polarization among friends, families, colleagues, congregations. People are revisiting questions they have been revisiting for some years now about how we maintain or build or create or repair relationships with people whose political views might be very different from our own, especially as we are entering in times, which are going to be extremely risky, if not actually life-threatening for many among us.

How do we do that? Yes. By filling our cups to overflowing, yes, from serving, for serving from the saucer, and also by considering generosity as a value. This is one that we newly embraced at our last General Assembly GA that we haven’t spoken about as such very much yet. Generosity of spirit. Generosity of serving from our saucers. Generosity to ourselves of filling our cups to overflowing in the first place so that we even have the ability to serve from our saucers.

In terms of our denomination, our association, the value that was chosen that we went with after many, many hours and years of listening to people was generosity. And there’s a little secret place in my heart The almost wishes, the word that we had gone with instead, was grace. So I’ll say that maybe we can think about generosity in terms of being generous and extending grace. We need to remember that what we are sensing and feeling from the world as a whole right now is not the fault of the person sitting next to me or my husband at home or my mom who’s sitting out in the pews with us right now, they should not be the targets of all those anxious feelings.

We need to really pay attention to our relationships and care for one another and realize that we all might be a little more grouchy than usual and extend grace when mistakes happen. We can be generous with grace.

But to tell you the truth, it’s kind of easy for me to be generous with grace with people that I know, with Micah and with my mom especially. There are some with whom it’s a little more challenging, with people who have very different views from my own, who may not see my life as a queer and disabled person, who is married to a trans person as worthy. So how do we do it in those circumstances?

I recently, at the end of October, went to a virtual ministers network conference. Our featured speaker was a Canadian, Dr Betty Vries. She is an expert in working with people, congregations and other organization who are experiencing conflict and polarization and how to work throught it. One of her favorite techniques is to use a mantra. The one that she favors is:

I am beautiful,
I am worthy,
I am a beloved child of God.

And then she turns that over to the other person. I am, she he they are, They are beautiful, they are worthy, they are a beloved child of God.

And when she’s about to enter a conflictual situation, in particular, she spends some time saying that mantra over and over and over and over and over again, until that space in her heart, in her body begins to shift even a little bit and she encourages she knows that that mantra I am beautiful I am worthy I am a beloved child of God is not going to work for everyone so she encourages people to create their own mantras they can be the Buddhist mantra of loving kindness, or it could be one that you make up yourself that helps you turn your spirit, repair your spirit, so that you can move into a place of greater generosity, into a place where you are able to extend grace.

These mantras, these repetitious mantras are one of the ways that we can fill our tea-cups. The why of filling our tea-cups, the theology of filling our tea-cups is one of generosity, of living out that spiritual value, of generosity of spirit, of generosity of grace in the world, in our communities, in our families, and in our relationships. But first, repair. Repair of ourselves. Repair of our own spirits. Repair is a way to prepare for what is coming in all of its unknowing.

So I’ll leave you with one final reminder that these spiritual practices are PRACTICES. None of us, even the most accomplished of clergy people is expert in them. We repeat them over and over and over again. PRACTICE them.

So I’m going to be vulnerable once again and share another story from seminary. This is a story that I had freely given to one of my best friends from seminary, Craig Nowak, who is also the my matron of honor at my wedding. Because I knew I wasn’t ready to share it with a congregation yet. So he’s been using the story for many years with me as the anonymous person in it. Today you’re gonna get to hear it and know that it’s me.

So when I was in seminary, seminary was hard. Hard in a very different way than things are hard right now. It is a 90 credit graduate degree program that takes at least three or more likely four years, it requires psychological evaluations, clinical experience, field experience, internships, a presentation of a portfolio of competencies, like a hundred or more pages long, you go before a fellowship committee and basically defend your preparation similar to doing a doctoral dissertation, similar to preparing for medical practice. Very different because it’s religious in some ways, but also some strong similarities.

So I was in my second year of seminary, which was in Boston, and I was serving as an interim director of religious education at one of the oldest congregations in the country. There’s a little bit of an argument about that, but we won’t get into that for the moment. Based on whether the congregation was formed in England or after arrival. So if you count England, it’s the oldest congregation in Boston. And I was serving as the Interim Director of Religious Education. Their first paid religious professional. There was a lot of work to be done. And I was also full-time in seminary. And I was also doing my hospital clinical experience in Connecticut. So I was literally traveling every three and a half days from Connecticut to Massachusetts and Massachusetts to Connecticut. I never knew where my shoes were. It was stressful.

And then this day, the Saturday came when we were having a workshop for the religious education folks to work through how they wanted their program to function and whose roles and responsibilities would be whose. And I was supposed to be bringing all the refreshments and the grocery store was crowded and busy and traffic was horrible and I was stressed to the max.

So I decided I needed to engage in one of my favorite spiritual practices of that time period in my life, which was singing meditation, which I did frequently in the car because nobody else could hear me. And I chose many different songs from our hymnals, songs that I had learned as a child. They varied all the time. I did it a lot in those two and a half hour rides from Connecticut to Massachusetts. But this day I decided to sing “Breathe in, Breathe Out.” Not the jaunty upbeat version that Brent has us do, the really slow meditative one and I was singing it and singing it and singing it over and over again it had probably been at least 20 minutes.

I had been singing it and I had started to be feel it settling into my soul into my spirit and all of a sudden this car cut me off and I yelled out a horrible swear And at first my reaction was, “Wow, I was just saying I breathe in peace, I breathe out love, and here I am swearing at this guy.” And then I started laughing hysterically because it was so ridiculous that that’s what I was saying and then that’s what I did in the disconnect. So in the end, so yes, it’s spiritual practice.

That’s where I’m going with this. We have to keep practicing over and over and over again. And yet, even though it didn’t work in the way it was supposed to work, it did work. It lifted my spirits because I thought that it was so funny. So with that note on practice, let us keep on practicing together so that we can keep on keeping on.

Amen and blessed be.

Reading

LECTIO DIVINA
Jamila Batchelder and Molly Housh Gordon

The strength of water takes on many, many forms. Just as each of you has a unique and necessary strength that you bring to our community and to the work of love.

Take a moment now to drop down into the deep wellspring of your own spirit and bathe yourself in the strength that is the groundwater of your person.

Are you a roaring fall wearing rock away with sheer force of will.
Are you a tiny drop of water in a crevice, breaking it open slowly,
steadily?
Are you buoyant like a great salt lake, practiced at holding others aloft?
Are you tenacious, like the mountain stream, finding your way down and around every obstacle you face.
Are you still and calm, like the pond at daybreak, offering radiant peace by your shores?
Are you in touch with hidden depths pulling from a vast well?
Do you soothe like the steam rising from a cup of tea?
Do you dissolve away stubborn muck like water left in a pot to soak.
Do you soften and smooth the edges like a creeping fog?
Do you clear away distraction like a cleansing rain?
Do you roll with the ebb and flow like the ocean waves.

Settle your minds upon the strength, the power that is yours. Draw that strength up and into your heart. Dry up into your soul. As we gather together the many waters of this community. We need each of your power, each of your resilience, each of your love to make us whole.

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

I know this rose will open,
I know my fear will burn away,
I know my soul will unfurl its wings,
I know this rose will open.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

Onwards

November 12, 2024 by tom Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Michelle LaGrave, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Jami Yandle and Rev. Michelle LaGrave
November 10, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

This is the time to lean into our faith and one another. Sunday we will have some time to talk about our collective grief, anger, desperation, and just be with one another.

Chalice Lighting

We light this flame
To ignite the sacred power of justice.
We light this flame
So that it may be a beacon of hope
In moments of uncertainty, fear, anxiety, and the unknown.
We light this flame, and are emboldened by its blaze,
Knowing our strength as a prophetic and powerful people Is rooted in the diverse ways we answer the call to love.

Call to Worship

by Rev. Rebekah Savage

Welcome beloveds, welcome!
We come to spiritual community this morning with many hopes in our hearts:
The hope for inspiration, the hope for comfort, the hope for renewal.

In this time and space, may inspiration water our thirsty souls. In this time and space, may comfort blossom in the gardens of our hearts, and bring us sweet relief.

In this time and space, may renewal course through us,
as electric as a surge of energy,
as serene as a nourishing meal,
as contagious as joy,
and bring us vitality and rejuvenation.

May our time together honor all the hopes we hold within;
May our time together bless us with the gifts of inspiration, comfort and renewal.
Let us Worship together.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Words of Solice and Lament

NOTE: This is an edited ai generated transcript.
Please forgive any omissions or errors.
Chris Jimmerson
Good morning. I’m Reverend Chris Jimmerson co-lead settled minister here at the church and I am technically out on sabbatical. How’s that for bad timing?

I wanted to come in this morning after the events of this week and be with my people. I know that so many of us have been feeling things like despair, disbelief, anger, anxiety, fear, disgust. I’ve been feeling all of that and so much more.

Right now, I’m pretty squarely centered in the anger-defiant stage of my reaction. So, it says I’m supposed to offer words of solace and lament. I’m not sure if it’s the right time for that, or maybe it’s exactly the right time for that. I don’t know.

I can offer you a few things that have been helping me. The first is that I know those emotions I mentioned can can be something that we experience as painful. I think though that they are like when we feel physical pain, they’re telling us we need to pay attention to something, something that will bring us harm unless we make change. And so if we try to not pay attention to those emotions, try to move through them too quickly, we can sort of latch on to a kind of false hope that doesn’t bring change that won’t sustain us as we go forward. By moving through them, we learn what we have to do, where we need to go next, how we find a true hope in our world.

The other thing I just read from Dr. Brene Brown was that she said that while hope is the antidote to despair, hope is not actually an emotion. It is a cognitive behavioral aspect of our life. It is the way that we think and do and be in the world. So to find that hope again we have to move through these emotions.

Here’s what I know. I know we need this religious community of love and support more than ever before.

And I know that there are a lot of people who have joined us this morning and will continue to join us this morning because they want to be part of a theology of love, joy and justice up against an ideology of hate and division, we have to be there to welcome you. And so I welcome you all this morning whether you’re here in person or online.

And finally, I know that that theology centered in love, justice, and joy is needed now more out in our community, in our state, in our nation, in our world than ever and that we have to be there. We have to show up because our world needs us to live that mission more than ever where we show up to nourish souls, transform lives, we show up to do justice, we join with others in solidarity and we build the beloved community because it is the beloved community that will move us through this ideology of hate and division back to a place of joy, of justice, of love.

Those forces want us to feel that we have no power as long as we center ourselves in love and relationship we have all the power we need.

That is the way forward.

I love you.

Reading

HOW IS IT WITH YOUR SOUL?
by Ashley Horan
How is it with your soul? This is the question that John Wesley, Anglican priest and the founder of Methodism, was known to ask of participants in small reflection groups. I ask you because, for me, this has been a hard week. So, beloveds, how is it with your souls?

If your response to that question is anything like mine, I want to invite you to pause as you read this. Take a deep breath, say a prayer, sing a song, light your chalice, feel the force of gravity pulling us all toward the same center-whatever helps you feel more rooted and less alone.

Now do it again. And again, and again.

And, once you feel that rootedness and connection, hear this:

You are loved beyond belief. You are enough, you are precious, your work and your life matter, and you are not alone. You are part of a “we,” a great cloud of witnesses living and dead who have insisted that this beautiful, broken world of ours is a blessing worthy of both deep gratitude and fierce protection.

Our ancestors and our descendants are beckoning us, compelling us onward toward greater connection, greater compassion, greater commitment to one another and to the earth. Together, we are resilient and resourceful enough to say “yes” to that call, to make it our life’s work in a thousand different ways, knowing that we can do no other than bind ourselves more tightly together, and throw ourselves into the holy work of showing up, again and again, to be part of building that world of which we dream but which we have not yet seen.

Centering and Medition

Now let us take a few moments to center ourselves in silence with these words from Harold Babcock.

Let us be quiet without and within.
Let the stillness be in us.
Let the silence hold us.
May we find the deep places of the soul and begin to let go of the distractions
which plague us.
May we let go of irritation, calm the confusion which inhibits us,
let go of fear.
The quiet is within us,
The stillness is in us,
the silence will hold us.
There are deep places in the soul.
Here, may we find peace as we enter into the silence together.

Amen, and blessed be.

Sermon

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

Rev. Jami Yandle

Unbeknownst to me, Reverend Chris said everything I was going to say and then some, but we’ll move on with my plan anyway and see how the spirit moves.

So instead of me blabbing on up here, I want to take a few minutes and hear from you. Turn to your neighbor and answer this question. Where are you feeling the events of this last week in your body?

I have felt tension in my shoulders, I found out just now Reverend Michelle has felt it in their gut. Where have you felt it? Gut. Jaws. Heart. Head. All over. Left foot. Left foot. wrist.

The reason I had you do that exercise is because generally some, some you use, particularly some white you use, are super great at two things. One, intellectualizing their feelings and two, trying to find the first actionable thing they can do to distract themselves from feeling their feelings.

Also if you are new here and you like spiritual questions and don’t respond to hypocritical fire and brimstone faith, don’t worry, you’re in the right place too. So how quickly you were able to discern what is going on in your body and or you were able to answer the question, might be different based on the color of your skin and some other key factors like how much society has intentionally silenced and oppressed you. But I’m gonna back up and explain a few things so you have some context for where we’re going with all of this.

I spent this past week, no doubt, like Many of you, feeling a bit lost, gobsmacked, sad, despair, and mostly angry. The gamut of emotions ran throughout my body and the concern I have for so many vulnerable communities. I can feel that concern seeping into my bones. It’s settling, and I don’t like that feeling, and it feels like pain all over. That concern that has become pain is full of questions, not only about my own trans community, but for our black and brown beloveds, migration, education, bodily autonomy. My kids go to public school in Texas. Maybe you are worried about that too. Is it time to move? Can I afford homeschool? What is going to happen? So many questions I have swirling in my mind.

My partner Natalie, who is also UU and a person of color, tried to bite her tongue and not say, I told you so. She was so much more relaxed this week to an almost alarming degree.

From the beginning, she watched everything go down and said, “This is not possible yet. This election will not produce the results that reflect our UU values yet.” It isn’t possible because her body knows something mine does not. As a woman, and especially as a woman of color, she knows all too well how far the hate goes. Generations worth of PTSD does not course through my veins as it does hers, reminding her how far systematic oppression goes. Something I have read about quite a bit and experienced and witnessed some, but it will never be to the same degree.

So I had more hope than she did. And for the record, I don’t feel foolish for hoping and dreaming. I refuse to stop, because everyone from Martin Luther King, Jr., to Victor Frankl, to Sylvia, Rivera, to Harvey Milk, and so many more of my personal heroes carried that same message.

So if any of you among us have a spark of hope left for God’s sake protect it with all you’ve got So you can reignite the flame in your neighbor, but I kept wondering What was Natalie’s deal? Why was I a frantic stress ball and she was so calm Unwavering she remained the anchor of the household. Meanwhile, I, like so many of my white peers, turned to documentaries, memes, poems, a John Stuart segment even. Anything to fix this. I was desperate. That was how I spent part of my Tuesday and Wednesday. Natalie watched all this quietly and on Thursday Natalie said to me, Stop it Stop trying to fix this you cannot fix it with your white anxiety Until you feel it more than that and you just need to feel it right now all of it

She took my hand and said just sit in it with me Be here with me My hand on her heart, hers on mine, a tender moment between two humans, the weight not the same in my body as hers, but nevertheless pushed to a newer place I opened up for more capacity for my feelings, instead of trying to rationalize and mobilize, we sat there. She said to me, This, too, is how we will dismantle systematic oppression. When you are with me, truly seeing and understanding me, this is when you will start to riot in the streets. The only way out is through. So we sit here until you understand how bad it actually all is.

Then, With you next to me we will go through this together But it can’t be a fad this time. It cannot be safety pins or blue bracelets performing allyship Risking nothing It has to be long lasting and daily to the point you will do anything to make the suffering stop For as long as it takes

So right now, this is what we’re gonna do Collectively we are going to sit we are going to feel this The elders and the ancestors providing a shield for us and with us we will sing songs and We will go through the rest of the service but intentionally Here with one another Be reminded about the power of humanity and the connections between and around us recharge your battery before making the next long road trip.

There will be time to physically move and to take action. And when it is time, you will know that because your deep knowing well will tell you so. Right now though, just be. Soul, connecting with soul, moving onwards by sitting still.

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

A LITANY FOR SURVIVAL
By Audre Lorde

For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children’s mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours;

For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us

For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.
And when the sun rises we are afraid it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full
we are afraid of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty
we are afraid we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone
we are afraid love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid

So it is better to speak remembering
we were never meant to survive

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

We the People Have the Power

November 5, 2024 by tom Posted in Audio available, Erin Walter, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Erin Walter
November 3, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

On the Sunday between Dia de los Muertos and Election Day, Rev. Erin Walter reflects with us on the call of our ancestors and our power, as Patti Smith sings, “to dream, to rule, to wrestle the earth from fools.” However hopeful or scared, energized or exhausted, you may be feeling in this changing season, come sing, dream, and exhale in community.

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

by Orlanda Brugnola

Flame, friend of our most ancient ancestors,
we kindle you now to make you visible in this time.
Yet, in truth, you burn always,
in the unique worth of each person,
in the imagination,
in the turning of the heart to sorrow or joy,
in the call to hope and
in the call to justice.
Burn bright before us.
Burn bright within us.
May we enter into this space,
nourished by the love and warmth of community.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

by Rev. Ashley Horan, UUA
(written just before 2016 election)

“You are loved beyond belief. You are enough, you are precious, your work and your life matter, and you are not alone. You are part of a “we,” a great cloud of witnesses living and dead who have insisted that this beautiful, broken world of ours is a blessing worthy of both deep gratitude and fierce protection. Whatever happens tomorrow, our ancestors and our descendants are beckoning us, compelling us onward toward greater connection, greater compassion, greater commitment to one another and to the earth. Together, we are resilient and resourceful enough to say “yes” to that call, to make it our life’s work in a thousand different ways, knowing that we can do no other than bind ourselves more tightly together, and throw ourselves into the holy work of showing up, again and again, to be part of building that world of which we dream but which we have not yet seen.”

Prayer and Meditation

An excerpt by Rev. Kristin Grassel Schmidt

“We have gathered this morning with gratitude for all that has brought us to this day, this moment, this breath.
Let us never forget that we serve our neighbors, our values, our free faith in the spirit of the many who have gone before us,
who made ways where there was no way,
who left legacies for us to remember, to follow, to emulate
As we prepare for the week ahead,
Let us pray that the fire of commitment, the Spirit of truth, love, and justice that was in those ancestors goes with us.
God of many names and beyond all naming, Spirit of Love,
Breath of Life,
In this time when so many stakes feel so high, help us remember that no season lasts forever,
that the days of the greedy and powerful are numbered,
that there is a force at work in our world and among us that lifts up the oppressed and fills the hungry … ”

Sermon

(Sings)
The waiting is the hardest part
Every day you get one more yard
You take it on faith, you take it to the heart
The waiting is the hardest part

-Tom Petty

I love that song but I actually disagree with the patron saint musician Tom Petty. The waiting is hard but it’s not the hardest part. The hardest part is women dying without abortion care. The hardest part is our trans families who aren’t here anymore because they had to leave the state. The hardest part is the militarization of our beautiful border communities, war, voter suppression and intimidation, mass shootings. That’s the hardest part.

And still we sing. And i want to talk about what we can do in the next couple days. Because I know we are tired. The work we do over the next two days is what we can do to stave off the hardest part. We’re going to gather our spirits this morning for the next couple days.

So on Friday I got on Zoom, in between dropping my daughter at theater practice and joining my band in the studio, and I got on the Zoom call with our UU state action network siblings in North Carolina. I am honored to lead our Texas UU Justice Ministry, and we do our work in relationship with UU the Vote, our 40 congregations, and partners around the country.

The story that my colleague Rev. Lisa Garcia-Sampson told that brought so much joy to my heart.

.. UUs from D.C., Virginia, and Maryland came down to help get out the vote in North Carolina, where Asian Americans have been experiencing harassment and intimidation at a senior center polling place. All these UUs asked themselves what was needed, what kind of resistance could they bring in the spirit that they claim. So they put together a choir of musicians, a lot like the bluegrass we heard today. And they sang and created a spirit of love and welcome at their polling place for voters.

You might need to sing at your polling place. This is not theoretical. If it gets ugly out there on Tuesday, I want to hear that our people sang!

I voted at the South Austin Community Center this week. I remember my first time voting when I was 18, and still this time, I have never felt so emotional about voting in my entire life. I teared up. ! wanted to hug every single volunteer in that rec center.

A friend also voted there Friday night and waited in line for more than an hour, on the last night of early voting. She said someone referred to her as a procrastinator. My friend is a social worker who works with people who are homeless, addicted to drugs, and HIV positive. She is not a procrastinator. She got to the polls as soon as she could.

With two days to go until the election, I come today to celebrate all the ways we as UUs are working for democracy, to hold space for the absolute Halloween caldron of emotions we are feeling right now, and to remind us that, frankly, though I know we are weary – I am weary – we must take heart, take a breath, and keep working. The work we do in the next two days can decide whether our values show up to the polls, our Supreme Court, our laws of bodily autonomy, who feels safe enough to stay in Texas or this country, whether we have a department of education or not a few months or years from now.

And I don’t know what the results will be on Tuesday, Wednesday, or any day. Last weekend, I spoke on a panel for the NY State Convention of Universalists, alongside my colleagues Rev. Julian Soto and Rev. Chris Long, about allyship across state lines, and Rev. Soto talked about Fannie Lou Hamer and how hard she worked for voting and economic rights for Black Americans and therefore all Americans. If you are struggling in your spirit about voting, please go seek out the history of Fannie Lou Hamer. She is the one who famously said, “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Hamer also said, “I feel sorry for anybody that could let hate wrap them up. Ain’t no such thing as I can hate anybody and hope to see God’s face.” Rev. Soto told the NY Universalists to remember Hamer’s work and to remember that, as people with privilege, many us, some fights are not ours to win. They are only ours to fight.

So whatever happens this week, please take heart, we can’t know which fights we’re going to win and when, and we know what our commitment as people of faith in be in the fight for democracy. And I urge you to remember the words of Fannie Lou Hamer and not let hate wrap you up. There is a spark of the divine in all of us.

(Sings)
The only thing that we did was right
Was the day we started to fight
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on, hold on
Hold on, hold on
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on, hold on

The prize of collective liberation.

So I implore you to let this time together in church bolster your spirit to spend as much of the next two days calling, texting, knocking on doors, and having hard conversations as you can.

Yesterday I walked my dog with a close friend. As we visited, she told me she probably wasn’t going to vote. She doesn’t believe the claims of either of the major parties. It’s all just too much. I listened and told her I understand the frustration. And then we talked about Project 2025 and extremists’ desires to get rid of the Department of Education. Our kids are in public school. I mentioned control of our own bodies. We both have daughters. I told about how a big city like Houston has still had races decided by a small number of votes. I lament that I didn’t have this conversation with her during the early voting period, but better late than never. I said, I’m sorry, I know this is not fun. I know we are sick of this. And she said, no, thank you for reminding me to do my duty as an American.

I will text her on Tuesday to check in and encourage her one more time to vote. I will check with all my friends on Tuesday.

This is the work we have to do in these last days before Election Day, and really, as people with faith in democracy and a vision for a true multiracial democracy, this is our work to do always. To talk with our neighbors with empathy. To take no vote or voter for granted. To acknowledge where we still have much work to do, and must hold our leaders accountable, and that voting is but a first step in that direction, not the last.

We can call and text strangers. We can protect the polls. And we still need to check in with our friends, family, church members, and neighbors,

Sarah Serel-Harrop in mid-October: “I was blockwalking with some fellow UU’s today, and we knocked on 57 doors … But the most impactful part was when one of my colleagues asked a person on the street if he was ready for the upcoming election. He said he wasn’t eligible. I asked, are you sure? And in talking with him, he was actually off paper [completed his term of incarceration or probation and any related paperwork] and thus was eligible to register. So I registered him, explaining that he couldn’t vote in November, but could vote after that. And, I gave him a few mail-in forms. This just goes to show how impactful it is to be out and visible in the community. It was also so meaningful to me to be able to help someone regain his citizenship rights.”

We don’t know exactly what’s to come. But we do know that every conversation you have in your community matters, how you live your faith in the public square matters every day.

(Sings)

This joy that I have
The world didn’t give it to me
This joy that I have
The world didn’t give it to me
This joy that I have
The world didn’t give it to me
The world didn’t give it,
the world can’t take it away

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

by Andrew Pakula

As you prepare to leave this sacred space
As you prepare to leave this sacred space
Pack away a piece of this church in your heart.
Wrap it carefully like a precious gem.
Carry it with you through the joys and sorrows of your days –
Let its gentle glow strengthen you, warm you,
remind you of all that is good and true
Until you gather here again in this place of love.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

2024 Celebration Sunday

October 29, 2024 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Michelle LaGrave, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson and Rev. Michelle LaGrave
October 27, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Each year, we celebrate the differences we make in our world together, and the joy that comes from being a part of and supporting this religious community. Join us for an uplifting service followed by a joyful celebration of building the Beloved Community together.

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

Today we celebrate a dream awakening.
Today we worship with renewed hope in our hearts.
Today we act on an audacity of hopes and dreams for the future.
Today we begin the hard work for justice, equity and compassion in all human relations, for today is a day like no other and it is ours to shape with vision and action.
Let us worship together and celebrate a dream awakening.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

Once a traveler came across three bricklayers.

She asked each one of them, “What are you doing”?

The first answered gruffly, “I’m laying bricks,” and returned sullenly to his work.

The second replied, “I’m putting up a wall,” and continued with the task at hand, growing wearier and slower with each brick.

But the third aid enthusiastically and with pride, “I’m building a cathedral.” And not so long after, it came to be, and was more magnificent than anyone could have possibly imagined.

– Anonymous

Sermon

Chris’ Homily

Happy Celebration Sunday!

On this, the last Sunday of October, last year, I was preaching the last of two sermons of a full ministerial candidating week, and then everyone went off to vote on whether I would be called as the next settled minister (while I waited nervously at a coffee shop one block away).

So, I am celebrating that I’m not doing that again on this Sunday this year!

And a year later, we have much to celebrate!

Today, we celebrate you, and the commitments, the pledges you have made or will make to keep this church and its mission alive and going strong in our world.

Your pledges make so much possible.

We have built an ever-growing culture of caring at First Unitarian Universalist (or UU), launching our Caring Companions lay pastoral support ministry and are planning for even more organized ways of supporting one another in the months to come.

Your pledges make a thriving social action ministry at the church possible.

This church year, we have committed more time and resources to dedicated church-wide social justice events and worship services than ever before, on topics like reproductive justice, climate justice, democracy and voting and more.

We are also working to make sure we live our social justice values here first, by exploring how we can become ever more inclusive and welcoming, finding ways to offer accessibility across all areas of church life, and taking steps to dismantle vestiges of white supremacy culture in our own ways of doing things.

Fare the well, Roberts Rules of Order, we bless and release you. Now, we have an election coming up in a little over a week, and no matter what the result, this church will be called upon to do justice and build the Beloved Community more than ever.

Depending upon the result of the election, those in control of our state government during the upcoming legislative session will either feel empowered and unchecked by the next Presidential administration or, if it goes the other way, they will do their best to undermine and run as counter to it as possible.

So, either way, as the large UU Church nearest the state capital, we will be there to demand love and justice, our voices raised and on occasion, I suspect, our fists in solidarity with so many of our partners.

Let us celebrate today that because of your pledges, that strong and faithful voice for love and justice will be showing up and stirring up!

Your pledges are also making it possible for this church to playa larger and larger role in our greater UU faith movement.

We’ve become a virtual birthing center for mentoring and supporting new ministers. I’ve lost count of how many ministers have come out of this church and how many of our current folks are at various stages of becoming UU ministers.

In the months to come we will also again become an internship site.

Folks from throughout the church are serving in several leadership capacities within our larger faith, and we continue to explore partnerships with other local UU churches, TXUUJM, and our UU Southern Region.

More and more folks are visiting the church and joining as members. We’re growing, not just in numbers, but in our spiritual development and our presence in each others lives and in our world.

This too is happening because your commitment is providing that spiritual home so many are seeking.

Well, I could go on and on about the future and vision your pledges make possible – a future and vision that will no doubt be extremely appealing to potential co-lead ministers out there!

I will close with this though.

When this church called me around this time last year, I had no way of knowing that my own personal calling would be altered so drastically only a few months later, when I would be called to become first caregiver and then mourner for the love of my life.

Because of that, I have witnessed in a very personal way the very real difference this church and our UU faith makes in people’s lives.

In the last months, they saved mine.

So, I celebrate you today for creating a religious community that I could not be prouder to say I serve as a minister.

I celebrate you.

Thank you for being First UU.

Michelle’s Homily

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

I’d like to tell you a little story. It’s a story about three people named Aubrey, Sasha, and Kinsey. Sasha is your administrator, Aubrey is your kitchen manager, and Kinsey is your manager of religious education.

They came up with an idea. I imagine it was a little idea at first but then as they talked and planned it grew and grew and grew. There were requests for recycled materials to come into the church. Cardboard tubes and boxes and paper towel rolls. There were searches on Facebook Marketplace looking for reused and repurposed materials for their project. There was sorting through and culling out of large storage closets. There was requests of volunteers to donate time and materials. And the project, the idea, grew and grew. It was definitely a project, not an idea anymore.

And I inserted myself every so often and asked if they needed some more of this or something of that and mostly they said that they were good and I wasn’t quite sure how it was gonna turn out because last night was the big reveal of their project. Have you all figured out what I’m talking about yet? Haunted Howson Hall.

I know not all of you have seen it yet. And it’s mostly still there. Last night it was much darker and much spookier and had more candy and had some games that aren’t there right now. But even so, the next few days it will remain up and you can be able to go through it and explore it and experience it.

And this is the totally unbelievable part. How many of you have already seen it or experienced it? A number of you have. Would you believe all of it costs less than $200? They are amazing. I was bowled over when I walked in last night and experienced haunted housing. It was amazing and it was fun and there were little kids and there were older adults and we were all there together and there were costumes and fun to be had.

And it’s a story not just of abundance because everything this community needed to put on something as fun and amazing as haunted housing was already here. It’s also a story of transformation. That hall is just this little segment of our bigger picture as first UU community. Your staff, and some very dedicated volunteers, and even the students that go to high school here during the week helped out and transformed your hall for you for this amazing celebration Sunday.

So here is the part where I talk about being an interim and what that means. I haven’t really talked about it a whole bunch with you over the whole last year, but a key part of being an interim is intentionally coming in with an outsider’s perspective, being able to reflect back to you what it is that I see and that’s important in what I’m trying to say today on Celebration Sunday.

So you know that I’m leaving and I’ll be with you the rest of the year but I will be leaving. You know that my salary is already set I’m not invested personally in what happens with the Pledge Drive and the budget for the next several months. I’ll be going, but I am invested in the presence of this church as an amazing, thriving, vital UU community, and I want more of them all over the place, but especially in Austin, Texas.

So anyways, this Outsiders perspective is what I want to say about that is that this building that you’re doing, this building of the beloved community, it’s really all about you. It’s about you, it’s about your amazing staff. It’s about your amazing minister. It is about your amazing seminarians and newly ordained ministers, your community ministers, your musicians, your choir, your children, everybody. It’s all about you and what you are becoming.

So I kind of have this image in my head. I wish I had like two little poles right here with those red flashing lights, strobe lights that could go off, okay. So we’ve been hearing that y ‘all want some more theology, explicit theology. So theology, here we come. (audience laughing) There’s your warning sign. So, as an outsider, I am free to celebrate with you everything that you have become so far and everything you will someday become and everything you are right now.

Becoming is an ongoing theological and spiritual process. We are always becoming. We are always building on what has become before. We are always building on what is yet to come. This is process theology. I’m a process theologian in part, as is Chris. I’m also a pantheist. So I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about that, but it does go all the way back to William Ellery Channing and his preaching sermons about being a likeness to God in the 19th century theology-of-self culture and building ourselves up and always improving and becoming better. So there is some of that white stuff in there that we want to dismantle, but it’s also about God or the holy, whatever it is, the universe that you see that is bigger than any of us as individuals, is also in process, is also growing, is also changing. It’s a rejection of a static God or a static holy or static divine. So together with with whatever is greater than us, we are building. We are becoming.

I joked with Brent earlier about this old cartoon called Bob the Builder. Do any of you know it? It was popular when my nephew was a kid. And the opening song goes, I’m not going to sing it, but it’s about Bob the builder, can he build it? Yes, he can. We heard it from the choir. I sent him a YouTube video and told him that’s what we should sing today. Thankfully, he chose something else.

But the truth is that we are all Bob. I’m Bob, even as my outsider perspective, you’re Bob, you’re Bob, all of you are Bob, new people who just joined the church are Bob, the visitors who are here for the very first time are Bob, the people who’ve been here since the 1950s and helped founded this church are Bob. We are all Bob, members, friends, new folks, visitors. you have built, we are building, and you will continue to build it. All of us. So just like House and Hall has been transformed out of the abundance of resources that are already here, that are present, right here, right now, you are. We are together transforming this community both inside and outside of these physical walls. Right now you are at 85 percent of your goal after only two weeks. Let’s celebrate that.

We’re going to celebrate that today. And as careful as your staff has been with the resources that you entrust to them, Under $200, amazing experience right outside these doors, the truth is that our expenses have gone up by a lot, by a real lot. And I know that those sustaining pledges are easy to continue from year to year. So whether you haven’t pledged yet or you’re one of our amazing sustainers, remember to go in, and if you can, if you at all possibly can, increase those pledges so that we can keep up with those rising expenses. We are almost there. So let’s continue to pool those resources, let’s celebrate, let’s bring this pledge drive home. All the way, All the way, people keep telling me that you kind of usually stop at 85, 90, 95%. I’m challenging you to get to 100 % or more before the end of the drive. We have everything we already need right here in this room, out there in House and Hall, out there online. Our resources are here.

Let’s pull them together so that we can keep on doing amazing things because you are amazing and you are doing amazing things. Every dollar, every hour, given counts. Can we build it? Yes, we can.

Amen, and blessed be.

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

by Peter S. Raible

We build on foundations we did not lay. We warm ourselves by fires we did not light.

We sit in the shade of trees we did not plant We drink from wells we did not dig. M: We profit from persons we did not know

This is as it should be.

Together we are more than anyone person could be.

Together we can build across the generations.

Together we can renew our hope and faith in the life that is yet to unfold. C: Together we can heed the call to a ministry of care and justice.

We are ever bound in community.

May it always be so.

Amen and Blessed Be. Go in Peace

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

Listen Deeply. Truly Hear. Become

October 21, 2024 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
October 20, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Author, theologian, and Minister David Augsburger writes, “Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person, they are almost indistinguishable.” Feeling truly heard can be such a blessing. Might it also be true that truly hearing is a sacred act that will nourish our own soul?

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

When you listen so completely to another, you are also listening to yourself, listening to your own problems, to your own uncertainties, to your own misery, confusion, desire for security … We are talking together about what human beings are, which is you.

– J. Krishnamurti
(a philosopher, speaker, writer, and spiritual figure from India.)

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

LISTENING WITH THE HEART
by Gary Kowalski
(a white, retired UU Minister and author of numerous books on animals, spirituality, history and the environment.)

Maybe prayer doesn’t mean talking to God at all.
Maybe it means just listening.
Unplugging the TV, turning off the computer,
Quieting the mental chatter and distractions.

Maybe it means listening to the birds
And the insects, the wind in the leaves,
the creaking and groaning of the trees, noticing
Who else is out there, not far away but nearby;

Sitting so still we can hear our heartbeat,
Watch our breath, the gentle whoosh of air,
The funny noises from our own insides,
Marveling at the body we take so much for granted.

Maybe it means listening to our dreams,
Paying more attention to what we really want from life,
And less attention to all the nagging, scolding voices from our past.

Or maybe it’s all about listening to each other,
Not thinking ahead to how we can answer or rebut or parry or advise or admonish,
But actually being present to each other.

Perhaps if we just sit quietly we’ll overhear a peace whispering through the centuries
That’s missing from the clamor of the moment.

Maybe prayer means listening to the silences between the words,
Noticing the negativity of space,
The vast, undifferentiated and nameless wonder
That underlies it all.

Maybe prayer doesn’t mean talking to God at all,
But listening with the heart,
To the angel choirs all around us.

Those who have ears,
Let them hear.

Sermon

“Sainthood emerges when you can listen to someone’s tale of woe and not respond with a description of your own.” So says author, Dr. Andrew V. Mason.

And yet, listen to these statistics that indicate our sainthood may be a ways away from emerging yet:

75% of the time, we are distracted or preoccupied rather than truly listening,
After listening to someone talk, we can immediately recall only about 50% of what they said. Even less if we didn’t like the subject or the person! One hour later, we remember less than 20%,
It takes less than 7 seconds for you to decide if you trust someone or not. If not, our primitive brain then filters out whatever else they say,
Less than 2% of the population has had formal education on how to listen,
We listen at 125-250 words per minute, but think at 1000- 3000 words per minute,
Most people are uncomfortable with silence and can only make it less than 10 seconds before having to ask a question or say something to break the silence.

And yet, 85% of what we learn is through listening, not talking or even reading.

Further, one in five Americans reports feeling lonely every single day, and having someone to talk with and who will share with us is the key element for alleviating loneliness.

So, it seems we too often are not listening to one another, at least not deeply.

Not only that, but studies show that most of us, most often may not be deeply listing to other important aspects of our lives, such as:

Our own inner voice and calling.
Our own emotions.
What our own bodies are telling us.
Nature.
God, or that which we consider ultimate and larger than ourselves.
The cry of a world that is hurting and needs us to hear and take action.

Theologian David Augsburger wrote, “Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person they are almost indistinguishable.”

And, as our Call to Worship pointed out, doing the listening, hearing deeply is essential to our own wellbeing. It is how we learn and grow the most. It is how we create connection and belonging. It is the way in which we live love.

Now, I want to pause and acknowledge that for folks who face physical hearing challenges, which these days includes me, the language around deep listening might feel ill-fitting.

So let’s acknowledge the metaphor and respect that, for all of us, deeply understanding, respecting, and embracing one another involves all of our available ways of accessing and interacting with the world around us.

Telling our stories, and feeling that they have been deeply understood and respected, it vital to us as humans. As already noted, it is one one the huge ways by which we feel loved.

It creates a sense of belonging and acceptance.
It is how we process large emotions, such as grief.
It can alleviate suffering and help heal our woundedness. Deep listening is a gift and a blessing we can give to one another.

And doing the deep listening is a one of the practices that can nourish our own souls and transform our own lives the very most.

When we truly hold the story of another, we open ourselves to love – we create love in our relationships.

The sense of belonging and acceptance it creates for the person to whom we listen, it creates for us also.

And, it may touch our own suffering in ways that begin to heal the wounds we carry.

As I mentioned earlier, offering deep understanding to another is a major way in which we learn and grow.

When we fully embrace the sacred stories of others, we ourselves move into the hallowed space that is the ground of our own sacredness.

Now, that is pretty, abstract language, but how, practically, does such deep listening help us to learn and grow?

Well, probably in too many ways to cover them all today, but one of the bigs ones is it helps us overcome one of the major barriers to our own intellectual, emotional and spiritual development.

Confirmation bias.

And all of us as humans share a tendency toward it, at least to some degree.

Confirmation bias is when we come to believe something, and then start to only take in that information which supports what we already think, while simultaneously ignoring or reinterpreting anything that might contradict it.

Sound at all familiar?

Let’s bring it a little closer to home.

Let’s say, one were to decide something like, oh, I don’t know, those ministers talk too much about God during church. (or visa versa, but anyway).

Confirmation bias would then cause us to only sit up and take notice every time God or related language gets mentioned during a church service – you know, scribbling in our order of service, talkin’ about God stuff again.

And then, we would also ignore or explain away when no or very little such language gets used, never hearing that other folks would like more of a language of reverence.

Same thing with, “Worship should follow a set order of service and be exactly one hour” versus “No, services should be experimental and vary depending upon what needs to he addressed.”

or … “Too much boring old classical white people music” versus “No, we have too much new-fangled, non-reverent music.”

And then, too often, we only hear and remember what we don’t like and miss out on enjoying what we love!

The beautiful thing about listing deeply to others is, in order to do it, we have to acknowledge what they think, even if it contradicts what we do.

Now, that may not mean that we come to agree with them, but it at least allows information that confirmation bias would have otherwise caused us to ignore, and by doing so, we open ourselves to learning and growth and a possible expansion of our own perspective.

Not to mention a greater understanding of our fellow human beings and their beliefs, potential biases, and preferences.

I think of when I studied Buddhism. I didn’t become a Buddhist as a result, but I did come to understand how other folks perceive their world, and it altered my own practices – enhanced and added nuance to my own theology.

This way that listening deeply can break through our confirmation biases, I think, can be especially important when we find ourselves in strong disagreement with others.

Author, actor and founder of Urban Confessional: A Free Listening Movement, Benjamin Mathes tells a story of when he held up a sign that simply said, “free listening” at the Republican National Convention.

I want to read you an edited version of his story, because I don’t think I could do it justice otherwise. He writes:

She was just staring at me.

Finally, she walked up, and like a young warrior preparing for battle, she said:

“I don’t usually do this … But, I think abortion is wrong. It s not a form of birth control, and people who have them should be arrested for murder.”

… I wanted to stop her, and tell her my story.

I’ve sat with two loved ones as they suffered through the difficult decision and consequences of ending a pregnancy. It was a brutal human experience …

There were so many things I wanted to say.

I wanted to change her mind, to argue, to disagree. It s a natural response.

But, if my story brought me to my beliefs, then I needed to know how her story brought her to her beliefs.

So, I asked:

“Thank you for sharing that. Tell me your story? I’d love to know how you came to this point of view.”

She seemed surprised by my interest.

“Why? It doesn’t matter. Your sign said Free Listening, so I gave you something to listen to.”

“Give me more to listen to.”

“They should be locked up! Its wrong. Its not right to go out and sleep with whoever, then just toss away the result like it never happened.”

She paused … then inhaled the entire world.

“And its not fair. All I’ve ever wanted to be is a mom. My whole life, I knew I was meant to have children. Then, when I was 18 É 18 the doctor told me I’d never have children.

I kept it a secret, and when my husband found out, he left me. I’m alone, my body doesn’t work, I’m old … who will ever love me …”

I wondered if she could hear my heart breaking

Sometimes, there s nothing to “disagree” with.

I didn’t need to be right.

I just needed to be there.

She wiped away a few tears, gave me a hug, and thanked me for listening.

Maybe one day, she’ll hear my story. But today, it was my turn to hear hers.

I hope she felt loved.

The truth is, … our love can hold space for paradox, tension, and disagreement … our listening, must bring in, not edit out.

Dare to listen, dare to be quiet, dare to seek understanding; in the end, it’s the people we need to love, not their opinions.

Now, Benjamin Mathes didn’t change his mind about reproductive justice that day.

He did learn something about our own biases regarding those with whom we disagree.

And in fact, those who study it say that the number one way to dialogue with folks with whom we disagree, is to start with the question he asked, “Would you tell me your story?”

As one researcher put it, “Hear the Biography, not the ideology.”

Now, I’d like to quickly share a few other important tips for listening deeply, whether or not we agree or disagree:

When possible, maintain eye contact and watch for verbal cues.
Stop formulating your response while they are still speaking – you can’t keep an open mind if you do.
Wait until they pause to ask questions and then only ask questions to clarify. “How can you possibly think that?” is not a clarifying question.
Practice the 80/20 rule – if you are talking more than 20% of the time, stop talking and start listening more.

Finally, I want to close with two really big ones: Stop interrupting!

Author and researcher Diane Schilling writes, “Interrupting sends a variety of messages. It says:

‘I’m more important than you are.’
‘What I have to say is more interesting, accurate or relevant.’
‘I don’t really care what you think.’
‘I don’t have time for your opinion.’
‘This isn’t a conversation, it’s a contest, and I’m going to win.’

And, lastly and maybe most vitally, treat listening deeply as a spiritual practice … because we have to practice it in order to actually do it in our daily lives.

As I mentioned earlier, almost none of us were taught how to listen.

And one of the ways we can get the practice is right here, in this our religious community.

We can practice with each other.

And our small group ministries are designed specifically to encourage deep listening.

We can use them as models.

What if we made life our own small group ministry?

Whether it is with other people; our own inner voice, emotions or body; that which we consider ultimate; God; the cry of a world that needs us, deep listening is a sacred act.

“The truth is, … our love can hold space for paradox, tension, and disagreement … our listening; must bring in, not edit out.

Dare to listen, dare to be quiet, dare to seek understanding … Then, might our sainthood emerge after all.

It’s worth a try.

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

HOW TO LISTEN
by Joyce Stephan

Tilt your head slightly to one side and lift your eyebrows expectantly. Ask questions.
Delve into the subject at hand or let things come randomly.
Don’t expect answers.
Forget everything you’ve ever done. Make no comparisons. Simply listen.
Listen as if the story you are hearing is happening right now.
Listen as if a move might frighten the truth away forever.
Don’t attempt to copy anything down.
Don’t bring a camera or a recorder.
This is your chance to listen carefully.
Your whole life might depend on what you hear.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

2024 Commitment Sunday

October 14, 2024 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Michelle LaGrave, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson and Rev. Michelle LaGrave
October 13, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

We join together with love, joy, and a sense of belonging to express our commitment to our mission. Join us on this special Sunday when we explore building the Beloved Community and all that we are and dream of becoming as a religious community. Together, we make our pledges for 2025 so that we may live that commitment into the future.

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

REACHING FOR THE SUN
by Rev. Angela Herrera

Don’t leave your broken heart at the door;
bring it to the altar of life.
Don’t leave your anger behind;
it has high standards
and the world needs your vision.
Bring them with you, and your joy
and your passion.

Bring your loving,
and your courage
and your conviction.
Bring your need for healing,
and your power to heal.
There is work to do
and you have all that you need to do it
right here in this room.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Centering

ALL THAT YOU NEED LIES WITHIN YOU
by the Rev. Angela Herrera

Consider this an invitation
to you.
Yes – you
with all your happiness
and your burdens,
your hopes and regrets.

An invitation if you feel good today,
and an invitation if you do not,
if you are aching –
and there are so many ways to ache.

Whoever you are, however you are,
wherever you are in your journey,
this is an invitation into peace.
Peace in your heart,
and peace in your heart,
and – with every breath
peace in your heart.

Maybe your heart is heavy
or hardened.
Maybe it’s troubled
and peace can take up residence
only in a small corner,
only on the edge,
with all that is going on in the world,
and in your life. Ni modo. It doesn’t matter.
All that you need
for a deep and comforting peace to grow
lies within you.
Once it is in your heart
let it spread into your life,
let it pour thru your life into the world
and once it is in the world,
let it shine upon all beings.

Sermon

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

MICHELLE’S HOMILY

I love this congregation. My favorite part of it is on Sunday morning when I walk in and I feel all of this energy and vitality as people are gathering and entering into the sanctuary and I can feel, I know, that this church is alive, that is doing things, that is going somewhere, that feeling is palpable. You know your mission, you recite it, you believe in it, you live it, you refer to it, you are so curious, you have this great immense love of learning, an ability to change and grow and transform both yourselves and your congregation.

You have resilience, so much resilience, which we can see even in the story of the last dozen years or so. When you went from a time a really painful conflict with the congregation voting to dismiss a minister to doing the work of an interim work that you really did. Then calling Reverend Meg Barnhouse, your minister emerita, doing the work of rebuilding healthy relationships, covenanting together as a congregation, surviving the pandemic together as a congregation, and then coming out of it ready to rebuild, ready to grow in spirit and in numbers. Not every congregation did that. Some are still faltering, some are still recovering. And yet we come in here, and most Sundays, we’re almost overcrowded.

There’s a retreat going on at UBARU this Sunday, so we’re a little lighter for people on retreat. But still, you’re all here, and I can feel your presence, your love of being here, your joy in being here, the ways in which you are comforted by being here.

You went through the news of Reverend Meg’s devastating illness. You supported her through her need for an early medical retirement. You are going through the interim process again. You are working, you worked through the decision to go to co-ministry, you called Reverend Chris, you learned the departure of your DRE, went through another healthy transition process, moving the fabulous Kinsey into managing the RE program, Religious Education program, and now you are going in to search again. And still, the energy is there. And sometimes the staff struggles to keep up with all of you. Often we struggle to keep up with all of you. We talk about this a lot. It’s the opposite problem a lot of congregations have. You are amazing. And that’s just the brief story of what you’ve done and what you’ve been through in recent years. You’ve also done so much more than that. And still, you come out ready to thrive, ready to grow, ready to do, to nourish souls, to transform lives, and to do justice. That is truly amazing. This is my job as an interim to reflect your story back to you.

I’ve been around the block a bit. I’ve served congregations in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Illinois, Nebraska, and Texas. And it is being here in Austin, in this city, in this congregation that gives me faith in the future of our liberal religious tradition as a whole. Faith that we can and we will not just survive, but thrive, post-pandemic. That other congregations can learn how to do what you are doing and have been doing. That in this new world that is all too quickly emerging with its immense needs, including the needs for spiritual nourishment and transformation and justice building that it can be done. You all have, you already have a very long history of supporting and integrating the LGBTQ + community and working to integrate and support the local BIPOC community. You’ve passed the eighth principle, which is about anti-racism for those of you who haven’t heard of it yet, who might be new. You’ve worked through a congregational process of supporting the UUA’s Article 2 bylaws change, and now, as you heard last week from Celeste Padilla, you have more to do. Yes, there is more to do, both internally and externally. Internally, there is more to be done in the process of dismantling a culture of privilege that is embedded in not just all of our congregations, but all of our nation’s institutions. More to be done to become truly radically welcoming to all people, including BIPOC folks, non-binary folks, and disabled folks, keeping in mind that some of us are the same people. So many of us have intersecting backgrounds identities and needs and you will do it You will do it. It’ll be challenging and I have faith that you will do it.

These are some of the reasons why I believe in this congregation. I hope that you do too And I hope you will show that you believe in this congregation too, by increasing your commitment to it in all the ways, by working to grow yourself spiritually, by working to transform the culture of this congregation, I should say continue to transform the culture of this transformation of this congregation, and by increasing your financial commitment to do all that we are here to do. One of the things that we ministers and staff have been hearing lately, and we do listen, is that you like to make the Church’s covenant more prominent in the life of the congregation. You’d like to see it more, hear about it more, read it more. So let us begin by doing that now.

Let us begin by making it even more clear how it is that we aspire to be together as we do the work of fulfilling the mission of this congregation. So will you rejoin me in recommitting to this congregation, to its mission, and to each other by reading or listening to the Covenant together now.

FIRST UU CHURCH OF AUSTIN COVENANT OF HEALTHY RELATIONS

As a religious community, we promise:

To Welcome and Serve by

Being intentionally hospitable to all people of good will
Celebrating all aspects of diversity
Treating other as we want to be treated
Being present with one another through life’s transitions
Encouraging the spiritual growth of people of all ages

To Nurture and Protect by

Communicating with one another directly in a spirit of compassion and good will
Enshuring those who wish to communicate are heard and understood
Speaking when silence would inhibit progress
Disagreeing from a place of curiosity and respect
Interrupting hurtful interactions when we witness them
Expressing our appreciation to each other

To Sustain and Build by

Affirming our gratitude with generous gifts of time, talent and money for our beloved community
Honoring our commitments to ourselves and one another for the sake of our own integrity and that of our congregation
Forgiving ourselves and others when we fall short of expectations, showing good humor and the optimism required for moving forward

Thus do we covenant with one another.

So we are covenanted, so we are committed.

CHRIS’S HOMILY

Thus do we covenant. These promises we make. This is our great commitment to center ourselves in love and right relationship together.

Last Sunday, as Michelle mentioned, Celeste Padilla so eloquently reminded us that the commitment we make is not just to who we are now, but it is also to building the beloved community of our dreams and aspirations. I just lost my spouse Wayne a little over a month ago, and so, of course, as we have approached this commitment Sunday, I haven’t been able to help but think about the commitment he and I made to one another, and how we came to realize that that commitment was not just to who we are and the love we have at any moment, but also to acting for that love, doing the work to keep that love growing stronger and larger.

So I have to share with you all a story about that commitment we had to becoming together. So to start, you have to know that Wayne absolutely loved dogs. You’ll see why in a little bit. Now some of you have heard the first part of the story before. Wayne and I first got legally married in Vancouver, Canada. We got married in this beautiful house on the bay by this wonderful woman who happened to be babysitting a dog named Marley who she thought she had locked away for the time of doing our nuptials but Marley broke free and came in and that turned out to be a good thing because when we got to the point where we were to say our vows both Wayne and I got unexpectedly emotional and couldn’t really speak and Wayne was able to make before he got too sick to travel was to go back to Vancouver. And unbeknownst to me, while he was there, he fell in love with the work of a gay Ukrainian artist and bought this large piece of art that I didn’t know about. And in the weeks leading up to his death, he started to kind of sheepishly tell me about this because that was kind of against the rules of our relationship to buy a big piece we were gonna hang in our house without talking to each other about it. But he hoped I would love it as much as him and he had even picked out where he hoped I would frame it and hang it in the house.

Well a week after he died I found the cardboard tube that had the piece of art in it. So I took it to a frame shop near our house and I told the woman who was helping me, I probably can’t make it through this without breaking up because of the situation and as she unrolled it and I saw that it wasn’t the print I thought it would be but the actual piece of art, art and the actual canvas, I did totally lose it.

Well, there was a female couple in the shop with us who had a dog and the dog came running over and insisted that it love on me and I love on it and that once again rescued me so we were able to measure the piece of art and it was so large they had to ship it off to their central warehouse in order to get it framed.

Oh, and also, Wayne and I had been discussing that our oldest dog, Benjamin, turns nine years old on January one of next year, and so I should think about getting another puppy to help me through when I lose Benjamin, because that’s getting near the end of his lifespan, and it would really help our younger dog, Luisa, who has never lived without a canine companion. So I started looking into that, but it was a little too soon right now because I plan on doing travel through the end of the year.

And at the same time I was doing that, I kept trying to track the painting online and it kept saying, “We can’t wait to get started.” And a month later, I was starting to worry like, “Have they lost the painting?”

Well, yesterday was my day, the first one without Wayne, and so I was worried about how I was going to make it through that. And then partway through last week, I got an email from the woman that we bought Benjamin from saying, “You can be among the first, if you would like, to choose from the litter of puppies I’ll have in early November that we’ll be ready to adopt after the first of the year.

And then I got an email saying his ashes could be picked up. And so I got my younger brother to take me over, and we picked up the ashes and brought him home.

And then yesterday, the painting showed up. And so it kind of feels like Wayne Spirit made it back just in time for my birthday and gave me a large-framed art piece and a new puppy.

Now that’s a commitment to becoming together.

You know, people say that we Unitarian Universalists have no common theology because we have folks who range from non-theistic humanists to naturalists to Christian-oriented to folks who draw from one or more of the many world religions or philosophies, and I say they’re wrong. I say we do have a common theology because common to all of our various perspectives, we have that commitment to centering ourselves in love and right relationship. And because we have always been a living tradition, our promises and covenants we make among ourselves embrace who we are now and also include a commitment to who and what we are not yet.

We commit to all that we have been, all that we are and all that we aspire to become together, just like Wayne did with me.

Recently, I was telling Wayne’s best friend of over 40 years, Teresa, that at one point, after he had gone on hospice, we were talking, and he said to me, “I love Teresa more than anyone in the world except you, and sometimes I’m not so sure about that.”

Thanks, honey. I can tell you this. I love and am committed to this church, second only to Wayne of that I am sure. And I know, I know that so many of you love this church and are just as committed to it and your church needs you because we have been hit with almost a hundred thousand dollars in greater expenses for 2025 due to insurance and other cost increases and that means our expenses will be about thirty two hundred dollars per day even with a very cost conscious budget.

That is a big challenge. And I know, I know that this church will not only meet that challenge, but will also do so many great things in this coming year because we commit, we make promises, we make covenants about how we will grow together in the ways of love. You see, for us theologically, God is in those promises we make. And our divine promise emerges from within right relationship centered in love. And our pledges are a promise.

So my beloveds, pledge early. Pledge now. Pledge big. It makes you feel good all over. God is in the promises we make, now let us make those promises together.

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

We come to religious community from many paths and with diverse needs:
If you have come here seeking comfort, may your pain be soothed
If you have come here looking for answers, may you find new questions
If you have come here seeking purpose, may your call be awakened
If you have come here hoping to build a new way, may the path open before you
May it be so, Amen, and Blessed Be

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