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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 2, 2020
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

All Ages Service with our Annual Blessing of the Pets. There are several theories about how best to train horses and dogs. Might these theories work concerning humans as well?

Chalice Lighting

We light the fire of Truth and ask to be clear, wise, and humble enough to admit when we don’t know. We kindle the warmth of community and ask for open heartedness and patience. We are grateful to the Spirit of Life and ask to learn the secret to loving and being loved.

Call to Worship

A LITTLE PRINCESS
Frances Hodgson Burnett

How it is that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words, and everything in the world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything, and it can always speak, without even making a sound, to another soul.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Meditation Reading

THE POWER OF NOW: A GUIDE TO SPIRITUAL ENLIGHTENMENT
Eckhart Tolle

Watch any plant or animal and let it teach you acceptance of what is, surrender to the Now.

Let it teach you Being.

Let it teach you integrity – which means to be one, to be yourself, to be real.

Let it teach you how to live and how to die, and how not to make living and dying into a problem.

Most sermons during the past 20 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below 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.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

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Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
Jamuary 26, 2020
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

The second in the sermon series inspired by the elements of baking, we will talk about everything from the history of salt in the shaping of civilization to the Christian scriptures’ admonition to be the salt of the earth.

Chalice Lighting

We light the fire of Truth and ask to be clear, wise, and humble enough to admit when we don’t know. We kindle the warmth of community and ask for open heartedness and patience. We are grateful to the Spirit of Life and ask to learn the secret to loving and being loved.

Call to Worship

Israelmore Ayivor

Don’t be a pepper on the eyes of people; Rather be the salt on their tongue and make a difference that influences their sense of belonging to the earth.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Meditation Reading

THE SWEETNESS OF SALT
Cecilia Galante

She reached for a tiny white dish on top of the stove. “Oops, and salt. I almost forgot salt.”

“Salt?” I wrinkled my nose, and then widened my eyes. “Is that your secret ingredient?”

Sophie laughed. “Salt isn’t a secret ingredient, doofus. Besides, you just add a pinch. Salt brings out all the flavors.” She paused. “It’s weird, isn’t it? How something so opposite of sweet can make things taste even better?” “How does it do that?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Sophie answered. “It just kind of brings everything together in its own strange little way.

Sermon

A few years ago I read a book called “Glass Paper Beans.” The writer, Leah Hager Cohen, was sitting in a coffee shop drinking a glass of coffee, reading the newspaper. She found herself wondering where the coffee beans came from, and what the process was by which they came to this place. The glass, too. How is that made? And the paper…. It’s made from wood pulp, we all know, but how is the wood harvested? How is it made into paper? The book was interesting. Here, years later, I was baking baguettes, whose only ingredients are water, flour and salt, and I thought I didn’t know much about any of the elements of baking. Heat and Transformation was the first one, two weeks ago, and this past week I’ve been researching salt.

Since I was raised in the Christian church, one of the things that came to mind was Rabbi Jesus saying “you are the salt of the earth, but if the salt has lost its flavor, it is good for nothing but to be cast out and trampled underfoot.” This saying has never made sense to me because there is salt in the earth, but where there is salt in the soil nothing will grow there. Enemies used to salt the fields of the people they conquered to ruin their ability to live in that place any more. Salt of the earth doesn’t sound like a good thing. Also, salt doesn’t lose its saltiness. It’s salt. So it tastes salty. So I started reading about salt.

Where does it come from? Dry lake beds, salt flats, the ocean, and mines. In some mines, people go underground to chop it out of the eart, and in others, a well is dug, fresh water is forced down into a salt deposit, and when it comes back up it’s salty. Then they evaporate the water. Most kosher salt is sea salt. Much of our table salt comes from the wells that force water into the ancient oceans’ salt deposits.

In ancient China, the history of salt can be traced back over 6,000 years. Salt was such a valuable commodity that many battles were fought for control of the area and access to the dry lakes’ salt flats.

The first known Chinese treatise on pharmacology, the Peng-Tzao-Kan-Mu, written more than 4,700 years ago, lists over 40 different types of salt and their properties. It also describes methods of extracting it and preparing it for human consumption.

It was widely traded in pottery jars which, according to ‘The Archaeology of China’, served as a form of currency and ‘standard units of measure in the trade and distribution of salt’.

Maybe you have a pink salt lamp, or pink salt for cooking. Himalayan rock salt was first laid down more than 500 million years ago, the history of Himalayan rock salt starts with Alexander the Great in 326 BC. Alexander was recorded resting his army in the Khewra region of what is now northern Pakistan. His soldiers noticed their horses started to lick the salty rocks in the area, a small surface part of what is now known to be one of the world’s most extensive underground rock salt deposits.

Today, the Khewra salt mine in Pakistan is the second largest in the world and famous for producing culinary pink rock salt and Himalayan salt lamps. The Egyptian salt trade, especially with the Phoenicians and early Greek Empire, contributed significantly to the wealth and power of the Old and Middle kingdoms of ancient Egypt. Furthermore, the Egyptians were also one of the first cultures known to preserve their food with salt. Both meat, and particularly fish, were preserved by salting.

Salzburg, a city in Austria, translates to ‘salt city.’ It was also an important center of salt trade in ancient Europe. Today, the Hallstatt salt mine near Salzburg is still open and considered the world’s oldest operational salt mine.

In the Iron Age, the British evaporated salt by boiling seawater in small clay pots over open fires. Roman salt-making entailed boiling the seawater in large lead-lined pans. Salt was used as currency in ancient Rome, and the roots of the words “soldier” and “salary” can be traced to Latin words related to giving or receiving salt. During the Middle Ages, salt was transported along roads built especially for that purpose. One of the most famous of these roads is the Old Salt Route in Northern Germany, which ran from the salt mines to shipping ports.

Salt taxes and monopolies have led to wars and protests everywhere from China to parts of Africa. Anger over the salt tax was one of the causes of the French Revolution. In colonial India, only the British government could produce and profit from the salt production conducted by Indians living on the coast. Gandhi chose to protest this monopoly in March 1930 and marched for 23 days with his followers. When he arrived on the coast, Gandhi violated the law by boiling a chunk of salty mud. This march became known as the Salt March to Dandi, or the Salt Satyagraha. People across India began making their own salt in protest, and the march became an important milestone in the struggle for Indian independence.

Salt production also played a significant role in early America. The Massachusetts Bay Colony held the first patent to produce salt in the colonies and continued to produce it for the next 200 years. The Erie Canal was opened primarily to make salt transportation easier, Salt continues to be important to the economies of many states, including Ohio, Louisiana and Texas. Grand Saline is the saltiest town in Texas, and it has the Salt Palace to prove it. Calling the visitors’ center a palace may be stretching it, but the Northeast Texas town is literally sitting on a mountain of salt, 20,000 feet deep, left there when Texas was a sea bed. Apparently you can’t lick the court house, but you can lick city hall.

OK, so what does being the salt of the earth mean? Since one of salt’s earliest uses was to preserve food, which enabled people to travel, not as they had traveled before, to find more food, but for other reasons, to go somewhere, to visit someone, to go on a sales trip to sell the salted food, or pottery or jewelry or grain or animals or people to sell. Salt enabled travel and trade.

Old time preachers seized on this and said what Jesus meant was that people who followed him were supposed to be a force to prevent moral decay and moral corruption.

I would love for us to be a force to prevent moral decay and corruption. I don’t think I share their views of what moral decay looks like. I think it looks like people in cages, treated cruelly, for-profit prisons, pay-for-play politics, super-rich people facing a completely different justice system than the poor. That’s what looks like moral decay to me. And corruption? Most of the governments of the world run on it. So maybe that’s one meaning. The old rabbis said that every passage in the Jewish Scripture has at least 300,000 meanings, and I think the same is true of the Christian Scriptures.

I think about salt, and I think we come from the sea, there is salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. If your body salt gets out of balance, you’re in trouble. In the hospital, you get a saline solution to restore your balance. Medicines are suspended in saline. You can help your cedar fever by squirting saline solution into your nostrils.

Another thing salt does is magnify the flavors of food. Your tongue has salt receptors along its sides, near your salivary glands, and close to the bitterness receptors. Sometimes you can put salt on something bitter, like coffee or grapefruit, and it occupies those taste buds so that it cuts the bitterness. A pinch of salt in cookies makes the sweetness deeper and more layered. You have to get just the right amount, though. They say, cooking pasta, that the water should be salted enough so that it tastes like the ocean. If you eat something that is less salted than you like it, it tastes bland and flat. If something is over-salted, it can be ruined. So, if you’re the salt of the earth, you have to spread that saltiness out. Too much salt of the earth on salt of the earth, it burns you. Tastes awful. How might salt “lose its savor?” By trying to stick to its own kind. Salt can’t salt salt.

Salt is essential for baking, for industry, for manufacturing, for preserving and cleansing and health. I still don’t really know what Rabbi Jesus meant, but here’s what I think today:

If we are salt of the earth we apparently need to spread out, to be about other people. If I’m sitting with you, and I’m in a good spiritual place, I’m going to be thinking “How can I enhance your flavors? How can I help you be a delight to this conversation, to yourself, to this group, to the planet?

Most sermons during the past 20 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below 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.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
January 12, 2020
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

The first in a sermon series inspired by the elements of baking. Sometimes transformation takes heat, it takes trouble, agitation or discomfort. We will have just finished two days of talking about our religious education program with an interim facilitator. Telling stories from the past can turn up the heat, but as in baking, the results can be something nourishing.

Chalice Lighting

We light the fire of Truth and ask to be clear, wise, and humble enough to admit when we don’t know. We kindle the warmth of community and ask for open heartedness and patience. We are grateful to the Spirit of Life and ask to learn the secret to loving and being loved.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Meditation Reading

Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the parts of the world that is within our reach… One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, sends up flares, builds signal fires,…

Sermon

HEAT AND TRANSFORMATION

One of my spiritual practices is baking bread on Fridays or Saturdays. I love the smell of the yeast starting to come alive, the feel of the dough as I knead it and braid it, and the way it makes the house smell when it is baking. Yeast and bread are an upcoming sermon. Today it’s heat. And transformation. We all “feel the heat” sometimes, and it can change us, and we’ve all seen that transformation can be for the better, for the worse, or it’s hard to tell.

In cooking and baking, you are conjuring transformation. A set of ingredients comes together and then, with the application of heat, they become something completely different. The ancient Celts talked about the cauldron of the goddess Ceridwen. When you were in trouble, when you were sick, when you died, you were in Ceridwen’s cauldron, being boiled up into something else. A lot of the time things are going well. You have your job. You have some money. Your body’s working pretty well. Then life throws in some heat. You’re in the cauldron. You’re in the heat, in the stove. How do you hold up?

When you read about stress, the consensus seems to be that people need some stress, we need to rise to a challenge. We sign ourselves up for marathons, or 5k runs. We take classes, we set ourselves songwriting challenges or start new businesses. We take on a big project like dating someone with the goal of changing them. We know that it’s going to be stressful, but we enjoy the challenge.

My dad used to teach at the Institute for the Achievement of Human Potential, casually known as the Better Baby Institute. He learned that making the surfaces babies crawled on too soft didn’t lead to as much development as letting them get scuffed up a little by crawling on burlap. Even babies need challenges. My mother wouldn’t let us have Lysol in the house, because she said that killing germs led to the deterioration of building immunities, and she thought our immune systems needed challenging. She taught second grade, and was not a scientist with any credential whatsoever, and she was not in love with house cleaning. She’d grown up in India playing with dried cow patties in the village, and thought American obsessions with cleanliness were misguided. That was possibly a self-justifying theory!

In England and Europe the new thought is that playgrounds should be slightly dangerous, that children need to learn to navigate risk and danger. If children never have to navigate risk, learn how far it is from the monkey bars to the ground, if we always run up to catch them, they won’t learn some crucial things. Intermittent challenges are called good stress. You rise to it, or you learn something, or you fail. And learn something. Failure throws you into the cauldron, with a chance for transformation.

Sometimes the challenge goes on and on. You are living with someone whose way of doing things is a continuing misery for you, and they can’t or won’t change. You are working for a boss whose way of doing and being makes your life a misery, and they can’t or won’t change. This leads to what they call chronic stress, which transforms people like being left in the oven at 350 for ten hours would affect your dinner. In chronic stress, we get left in the oven too long. Or we leave ourselves in the oven too long. We even say “I’m burned out.” “I’m crispy.”

When the pressure is on, our centeredness becomes crucial. When someone is throwing clay on a potter’s wheel, they try to slap that mound of clay right in the center of the wheel. It takes practice and skill. If the clay isn’t centered, when you put the pressure on, when the spinning starts and you press your hands into the clay and start trying to shape it into a pot, it begins to wobble wildly. You have to scrape it off the wheel and start over. Our spiritual practices, our learning from our experience, our support system are what can center us.

We’ve been talking about spiritual practices. Kelly has articles about them on the Religious Education table. Chris and Lee talked about their personal practices at the end of December. Then we all did the practice of burning the old year in the burning bowl last Sunday. It can be our spiritual practices that help us, when the heat is turned up, to be transformed in a good way rather than transformed in a destructive way.

What makes heat for transformation? Anger is heat, indicating that your boundaries have been violated. How do you work with that heat to transform your situation? Desire is heat, when you want something very much and point yourself in that direction. The need to live authentically can make enough heat to lead people to come out as gay, even though that adds to trouble in their lives, or leads people to transition in their understanding of or presentation of their gender, inviting lots of concern from people around them. The desire to live authentically can lead people out of one career into another, or from one relationship to another.

When we feel the heat, we are in the cauldron. The chance of transformation is here. What do you do? You first say to yourself: I’m feeling the heat. This is a hot situation. What next?

The best thing to do, if you can, is to take yourself away and out of the stress from time to time. That is the way to keep it from being chronic. Learn to relax. As my counseling mentor used to say, “Don’t just do something, stand there!”

Celebrate your victories. Have a birthday party even if the eviction notice is on the door.

Take things day by day. Be grateful for what’s good. Change what you can. Ask for help, not to fix everything, but for someone to sit with you in the heat, the way the wise person does with those in their sweat lodge.

I would want a smooth life for you, with no trouble and no pain. That wouldn’t be the best for you, though. May we find a way to be in the heat and come out on the other side transformed with more compassion, more heart, and more understanding.

Most sermons during the past 20 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below 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.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above. Text of this sermon is not available.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
January 5, 2020
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Is it possible to let go of grudges? Is it a good idea? We take things that we want to let go of from 2019 and we give them to the Burning Bowl. Then, from a second bowl, we will draw a word which can inform our intentions for the new year.

Chalice Lighting

We light the fire of Truth and ask to be clear, wise, and humble enough to admit when we don’t know. We kindle the warmth of community and ask for open heartedness and patience. We are grateful to the Spirit of Life and ask to learn the secret to loving and being loved.

Call to Worship

By Maya Angelou

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive, and to do so with some passion, compassion, some humor, and some style.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Meditation Reading

BURNING THE OLD YEAR
Naomi Shihab Nye

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.

Sermon Reading

By Ralph Waldo Emerson

Write it on your heart
that every day is the best day in the year.

He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day
who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.
Finish every day and be done with it.
You have done what you could.

Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in.
Forget them as soon as you can: tomorrow is a new day;
begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit
to be cumbered with your old nonsense.

This new day is too dear,
with its hopes and invitations,
to waste a moment on the yesterdays.

Most sermons during the past 20 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below 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.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
December 24, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Come join our annual Christmas Eve worship service of Lessons and Carols. We will read, from the Christian texts, the story of Rabbi Jesus’ heralded birth as well as sing Christmas carols and hymns for the holiday.

WINTER TREES
by William Carlos Williams

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the dis-attiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold

Chalice Lighting

On this night of anticipation, we raise our voices in story and song to greet Christmas. May the lessons of compassion, trust, and generosity alight within us and lead us into the new day, renewed.

Opening Words

The Persian poet Rumi wrote,

God’s joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box
From cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flowerbed.
As roses, up from ground.
Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish,
Now a cliff covered with vines,
Now a horse being saddled.
[God’s joy] hides within these,
Till one day it cracks them open.

Reading

“COME INTO CHRISTMAS”
by Ellen Fay

It is the winter season of the year
Dark and chilly
Perhaps it is a winter season in your life.
Dark and chilly there, too
Come in to Christmas here,
Let the light and warmth of Christmas brighten our
lives and the world.
Let us find in the dark corners of our souls the
light of hope,
A vision of the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Let us find rest in the quiet of a holy moment to
find promise and renewal.
Let us find the child in each of us, the new hope,
the new light, born in us.
Then will Christmas come
Then will magic return to the world.

Reading

“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!

Reading

“ON ANGELS”
by Czeslaw Milosz

All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe you,
messengers.
There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seams.
Short is your stay here:
now and then at a morning hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.
They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for the humans invented themselves as well.
The voice – no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?),
girdled with the lightning.
I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:
day draws near
another one
do what you can.

Reading

Luke 2: 1-7

1. And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.
2. (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.)
3. And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.
4. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:)
5. To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.
6. And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.
7. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.

Reading

A GENTLE KIND OF MADNESS by Anthony F. Perrino

A gentle kind of madness
Comes with the end of December
A winter solstice spell, perhaps,
When people forget to remember –

The drab realities of fact,
The cherished hurt of ancient wrongs,
The lonely comfort of being deaf
To human sighs and angels’ songs.

Suddenly, they lose their minds
To hearts’ demands and beauty’s grace;
And deeds extravagant with love
Give glory to the commonplace.
Armies halt their marching,
Hatreds pause in strange regard
For the sweet and gentle madness born
when a wintry sky was starred.

Reading

“EACH NIGHT A CHILD IS BORN”
by Sophia Lyon Fahs

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.

Reading

Luke 2: 8-14

8. And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.
9. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.
10. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
11. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.
12. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.
13. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,
14. Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

Reading

“IN THIS NIGHT”
by Dorothee Solle

In this night the stars left their habitual places
And kindled wildfire tidings
that spread faster than sound.
In this night the shepherds left their posts
To shout the new slogans
into each other’s clogged ears.
In this night the foxes left their warm burrows
and the lion spoke with deliberation,
“This is the end revolution”
In this night roses fooled the earth
And began to bloom in snow.

Reading

Luke 2:15-20

15. And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.
16. And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger.
17. And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child.
18. And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds.
19. But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.
20. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.

Reading

“THE CAMELS SPEAK”
by Lynn Ungar

Of course they never consulted us.
They were wise men, kings, star-readers,
and we merely transportation.
They simply loaded us with gifts
and turned us toward the star.
I ask you, what would a king know
of choosing presents for a child?
Had they ever even seen a baby
born to such simple folks,
so naked of pretension,
so open to the wind?
What would such a child care
for perfumes and gold? Far better
to have asked one born in the desert,
tested by wind and sand. We saw
what he would need: the gift
of perseverance, of continuing on the hard way,
making do with what there is,
living on what you have inside.
The gift of holding up under a burden,
of lifting another with grace, of kneeling
To accept the weight of what you must bear.
Our footsteps could have rocked him
with the rhythm of the road,
shown him comfort in a harsh land,
the dignity of continually moving forward.
But the wise men were not
wise enough to ask. They simply
left their trinkets and admired
the rustic view. Before you knew it
we were turned again toward home,
carrying men only half-willing
to be amazed. But never mind.
We saw the baby, felt him reach
for the bright tassels of our gear.
We desert amblers have our ways
of seeing what you chatterers must miss.
That child at heart knows something
about following a star. Our gifts are given.
Have no doubt. His life will bear
the print of who we are.

Reading

A RITUAL OF THE WINTER SOLSTICE FIRE”
Rev. Meg Barnhouse

Let us take into our hands a Christmas candle, a Solstice candle
this is a night of ancient joy and ancient fear
those who have gone before us were fearful of what lurked
outside the ring of fire, of light and warmth.
As we light this fire we ask that the fullness of its flame
protect each of us from what we fear most
and guide us towards our perfect light and joy.

May we each be encircled by the fire and warmth of love
and by the flame of our friendship with one another.
On this night, it was the ancient custom to exchange gifts
of light, symbolic of the new light of the sun.

Therefore make ready for the light!
Light of star, light of candle,
Firelight, lamplight, love light

Let us share the gift of light.

Reading

“THE WORK OF CHRISTMAS”
by Howard Thurman

When the song of angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are
home,
When shepherds are back with
their flock,
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 brothers,
to make music in the heart.

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 Words

“KNEELING IN BETHLEHEM”
by Ann Weems

It is not over, this birthing.
There are always newer skies
into which God can throw stars.
When we begin to think
that we can predict the Advent of God,
that we can box the Christ in a stable in Bethlehem,
that’s just the time that God will be born
in a place we can’t imagine and won’t believe.
Those who wait for God
watch with their hearts and not their eyes,
listening, always listening for angel words.

Most sermons during the past 19 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below 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.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
December 22, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Our Annual Christmas Pageant with costumes provided for Angels, shepherds, and more as we hear and perform the famous story and sing beautiful carols.

Chalice Lighting

Through the longest night we waited for the sun to rise once more. This first morning we kindle the flame of Courage, the fourth of the five values of our congregation. May the light of Courage strengthen us as we tend to our roots in the winter darkness.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Christmas Pagent

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 of how light, hope and life are returning to the world and to our lives. Darkness is good for rest and for root growth, but it’s harder to see where you are going and what is coming when you’re in the dark, so humans like to 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.

THE CHRISTMAS STORY

Here is the Christmas story. It happened a very long time ago in a land faraway. A man and a woman 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 where they were born 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 saw 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 time, 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. It was a boy and 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 child!” 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 only a few days old 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 the baby gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

Mary and Joseph wondered for a long time about all of these things that happened when their child was born. “It’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, is a wonder and a miracle. And as they grow up, they are always and forever a treasure, a wonder and a miracle.

Excerpted from “Each Night a Child is Born is a Holy Night”
by Sophia Lyon Fahs

For so the children come and so they have been coming.
Always in the same way they come
Born of the seed of man and woman
Each night a child is born is a holy night.
Fathers and mothers sitting beside their children’s cribs
feel the glory in the sight of a new life beginning …
Each night a child is born is a holy night, a time for singing, a time for
wondering, a time for worshipping.

Sermon

There is no Batman at the manger,” one person said later. “Probably not,” I answered, “but there is a lot we don’t know about what actually happened. Historically, we barely know Jesus lived, much less whether he was born in Bethlehem, or whether he was married to Mary Magdalene, or whether he went to India to study in the ‘lost years’ between being a twelve-year-old talking with the teachers in the temple and beginning his ministry as an adult.” I saw her eyes glaze over with this much information, and circled back to the point. “Right. Odds are against there having been a Batman.”

The baby in the manger is a soul story, if not an historical story. Soul stories are as likely to be true as stories from history, but they are perhaps a different sort of true, and you approach them differently. Before and after doing historical research, biblical study, and the kinds of work on context and language one does when looking at a story from scripture, my inclination is to interact with the story as I would with a dream.

Holding the image of the Divine as a baby in mind and heart, I invite myself to let go of my hold on the Abrahamic God, the ideas about the Divine I can live with or not, the elements of the concept of a God I believe in and those I don’t believe in. A soul story is a dream from the depths of a culture, not an individual. This is bigger than my squeamishness or my history.

When God is a baby, no one has to be afraid of God. No one has to tremble before God’s wrath. No one has to wonder what they have done wrong, how they have disappointed God. A baby God isn’t mad at you — in fact, he needs you to coo over him, hold him close, smell her head, curl her tiny fingers around your pinkie, protect him, and visit her with presents. No wonder Christmas is a well-loved holiday: We get to coo over the baby God, and feel the aching openness of a heart at its very beginning.

Among the ways to understand the Divine is as the spirit of love, the spirit of light, the spirit of life. A baby love, a baby light, a baby life would carry within itself all that it will become, like an oak within the acorn, like a mighty river that starts as a spring seeping out of the earth in a high and quiet place. The light starts as a tiny spark. A new baby love has all the possibilities in the world; it carries all the hopes and dreams. Later on, as it grows and matures, it becomes more real, and if you are skilled and lucky, it grows richer and deeper. As life starts you care for it and nurture it. You are careful with it. You delight in it. A baby is full of possibility.

What if this is a story about the soul entering the world of the body? The light of spirit and wisdom, the Divine seed planted in a human being? Some of the founders of our free religion believed that the seed of God, a tiny sliver of the light, was in each of us.

I think about the Divine seed, the wise baby, within me, containing the whole of divinity in itself, yet needing to grow. Antoine de Saint-Exupery writes in Flight to Arras: “The seed haunted by the sun never fails to find its way between the stones in the ground.” Is my soul the seed, or is it the light? I say it is both. Do we long for the Divine, or are we divine ourselves? Both. Do we search for God or is God within us? Both.

In times of confusion and doubt, I see myself able to visit my soul like the magi, the wise magicians, and kneel before it with gifts of quiet, respect, and love. I can nurture the light, the seed of God within me. I can protect it from the forces of power over, which show up next in the faith story-the forces of fear and control, the Herod power, the light-killing, love-killing power of the outer world and of my inner world as well.

I wish for each of you at this time of the rebirth of the light that the light be reborn in you, that love be cradled in your heart, that you be a seed haunted by the sun, finding your way from the nurturing darkness, past all obstacles, stubbornly and rapturously breaking through to live in the light.

Most sermons during the past 19 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below 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.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
December 15, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

What can we say about miracles? Are they supernatural interferences with the laws of nature? Are they proofs of divine power? Are they everyday beauties and interactions we can see if we have an eye for miracles?

Chalice Lighting

As we await the return of the light, we kindle the flame of Compassion, the third of the five values of our congregation. May the light of Compassion brighten our own spark of the divine, guiding us to treat ourselves and others with deep love.

Call to Worship

Albert Einstein (attributed)

There are only two ways to live your life. One is a though nothing is a miracle, the other is a though everything is a miracle.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Meditation Reading

MIRACLES
Walt Whitman

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with anyone I love,
Or sleep in the bed at night with anyone I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown,
Or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.

Sermon

PERFECT MIRACLES

The choir this morning is singing about the conversation Mary had with the angel, when he brought her God’s message that she was to be the mother of the divine baby. In the faith story, this is a miracle. In my mind the bigger amazement is that in that time when women were seen almost as property, the angel, and God, waited for her to say yes. The church, as it evolved, made the miracle of Jesus’ birth a centerpiece of the faith. In most religions of that time, a miraculous birth was part of the story of their prophet, or their divinity. The Roman Christian church didn’t cement it in time, though, because the gospel of Matthew begins with the list of the ancestors of Jesus, and the lineage goes back through his father Joseph. You may not want to point this out to Uncle Hollister at Christmas unless you want to start a fight.

The Transcendentalists, our Unitarian forbears in the 19th century, were scornful of the thought that the Divine would have to show their power by miracles. Most people think of miracles as events where God disrupts the laws of nature for the purpose of helping, healing, or showing power. Ralph Waldo Emerson saw it as almost insulting of God, that the creator of this wondrous world with all of its laws and patterns, with falling rain and crashing waves, with buds that bloom and then make seeds, with the Fibonacci series, with our bodies, and most of all our minds, would have to interrupt those laws in order to show the people, whom they created, their power.

If we don’t retain our sense of wonder and awe at all of these things around us, we could get into an overly dry and linear place where we say “there is no such thing as a miracle. Everything is chemistry and physics and everything is understandable.” Or we might stubbornly hold on to a desire to live in a world where monks can levitate and make themselves warm sitting in the snow on the mountain. People flock to evangelical and Pentecostal churches where the Spirit is called down for healing and guidance. The miracles advertised by these churches are like the ones in all religions, faith stories, up to and including people being raised from the dead. My suspicion is that most of that is fake, or it’s the placebo effect (which I take to mean “great! You are healed for some reason we don,t understand. That’s wonderful. Your mind/spirit/body did that.”) Any scientist, any person working in medicine, will tell you there are factors in healing and sickness that can surprise and astonish everyone involved. There are mysteries. Most of us, if you get us in a talkative and trusting mood, will talk about something inexplicable in our lives that could be considered magic, or a miracle. The poets, the mystics of all religions remind us that there are things beyond our ken. Almost any traveler will tell you how their minds were opened, broadened.

I live in the tension between what I can believe and what I experience. I don’t believe in Reiki, but I have experienced it and it has been helpful, and when I do it for others they sometimes find it helpful. When I say I don’t believe in something what I mean is I can’t find a rational scientific way to understand it, and that it works sometimes and not other times. I don’t believe that there are Saints who can help us find things, but, as I confessed to you a couple of years ago, I sometimes pray to St. Anthony to help me find something I’ve lost. I was not raised with saints, but when he seems to agree to work with a UU, who am I to argue?

I saw a medicine man from Surinam offer to show a group of us how he could walk in fire. “Oh yeah, I thought. He’ll be like those folks who walk fast across coals, and the distribution of their weight and the speed at which they move keeps their skin from burning.” He left to meditate for fifteen minutes. Walking back to us, he said “There are many of you, so I will choose a burning log and hold it to my foot as I move around the circle.” I was disappointed, as I pictured him holding it to his foot for a second, then moving on. Then I watched him go choose a log. By which I mean he walked into the fire and stood there as he picked up first one log then another to find just the right one.

I saw a man who teaches mentalism at the New School in NYC bend keys at my father’s wedding reception. He didn’t touch the spoons himself, he asked us all to hold one of our own keys in our hand. Then we were to concentrate on them and try to make them bend with our minds. I wanted mine to bend, but it didn’t. When he asked the assembled crowd to open our hands, my Uncle Rob, a conservative Episcopalian Pathologist from Squirrel Hill and his daughter who was teaching English in China gasped in a chorus of two. Their keys, as they held them up, were nearly bent in half. We were astonished, even as Gabe the mentalist said “Please let me remind you that this is an illusion.”

I also saw a fortune teller in India run up to a friend of mine on the street, and say “your mother’s name was Ruth and your father’s name is Greg. Your mother died when you were 38. If you want to know more, come into my shop for a reading.” My friend, a Franciscan friar in his brown robe with its white cord, lost all the color in his face. “That was right! How did he know!” We were both – what’s a word – nonplussed.

My Aunt Ruth, who was with us on that trip, a medical doctor as well as a doctor of divinity, said “Of course. He was reading the Akashic record in your aura.”

What I think as a neo-Transcendentalist is that just because there is no current scientific understanding of all of those mysteries doesn’t mean they are supernatural. What a bunch of arrogance, to draw the trajectory of human scientific understanding as if we were at the pinnacle. If anyone were to give it more than a moment’s thought, they would know that we are somewhere on the trajectory, but nowhere near its peak. Here is what I think. Surprising things happen. The rules of nature as we currently understand them may be disrupted, and that just means there are things in nature we don’t yet understand.

And speaking of miracles Mary’ s Magnificat says

The Magnificat
My soul magnifies the Lord…
He hath showed might with His arm: He hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the lowly.
He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away.

May this world she dreamt of come to pass. May the heavy-footed be thrown down, their scepters broken, their hearts healed. May the proud, conceited and heavy-footed within each of us also be scattered and our hearts healed. This would be a miracle indeed.

Most sermons during the past 19 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below 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.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 24, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

In time for Thanksgiving, we will talk about family dynamics, focusing on “cut-off”, when someone decides they can’t be around the rest of the family.

Chalice Lighting

We light the fire of Truth and ask to be clear, wise, and humble enough to admit when we don’t know. We kindle the warmth of community and ask for open heartedness and patience. We are grateful to the Spirit of Life and ask to learn the secret to loving and being loved.

Call to Worship

May we be reminded here of our highest asperations and inspired to bring our gifts of love and service to the altar of humanity. May we know once again we are not isolated beings but connected in mystery and miracle to the universe, to this community, and to each other.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Meditation Reading

THE LEGACY OF CARING
Thandeka

Despair is my private pain
Born from what I have failed to say
failed to do, failed to overcome.

Be still my inner self
let me rise to you, let me reach
down into your pain
and soothe you.

I turn to you to renew my life
I turn to the world, the streets of the city,
the worn tapestries of brokerage firms,
drug dealers, private estates
personal things in the bag lady’s cart
rage and pain in the faces that turn from me
afraid of their own inner worlds.

This common world I love anew;
as the life blood of generations
who refused to surrender their humanity
in an inhumane world,
courses through my veins.

From within this world
my despair is transformed to hope
and I begin anew the legacy of caring.

Sermon Notes

WHAT HAPPENS IN FAMILIES

Some of us are going to gather with family at some point during the holidays. It’s likely that there will be someone missing, maybe because now they live too far away, or they have to work, or they are with another part of the family. At some tables, though, there will be one, maybe even more, who are absent because they aren’t choosing to be part of the family right now. Family therapists call this “Family cut-off”.

I want to talk all about gratitude today, and I’ll get to it, but I do also want to talk about the reality of families.

Families.”are lovely, and they can be hard. Fault lines exist within all families. For thoseá of us in this sanctuary, religion is often a big one. Our families may hold different views, more conservative beliefs. Some of their understandings of faith say that their God demands that they attempt to convince us of those beliefs. If our beliefs aren’t correct, they have to try to save us. Hopefully they won’t do it at the holiday meal. Our faith invites us to stand up for what we believe, but we don’t have to stay in the debating society.

For those of us in this sanctuary in Texas, sometimes what shows up as a fault line is politics. It’s going to be hard to focus on the turkey instead of saying “Do you see it now?” You might be able to find common ground by saying “Boy, I sure do miss the GOP of fifteen years ago.” Common ground is usually easy. What TV shows you’re enjoying, what the kids are up to. Babies, travel. Common ground doesn’t mean that you meet in the middle, that you have to compromise your values. Common ground just means things everyone cares about.

Money is another fault line. Someone borrowed money and didn’t pay it back. Someone pays for things all the time and is starting to resent it. Some family members went into business together and it didn’t work out.

Styles of child rearing are another fault line. Some members of the family may not approve of others’ methods of discipline, or lack of discipline.

Maybe a new spouse is jealous of the children, or the ex. Maybe a spouse hates one of their in-laws, and something blows.

Pressure on any of these fault lines can cause arguments. Arguments can be survived, can pass. Arguing, in fact, is the style of communication in some families. A cut off can happen because of an argument, for sure. Or it can happen because people get exhausted with a difficult person. You put up with their behavior for so long, and then you decide “no more.” You might phase them out, little by little, or cut them off suddenly.

Some people cut themselves off from their family because the family knows their past, knows them before they started their new life, and they just don’t want to see that past in their family’s eyes. Maybe they are transitioning, and their family keeps using their old name, dead naming them in an effort to get them to be their old self. Maybe they just want a total new start for some other reason, and they don’t want reminders of their former life.

Clashes in loyalties can cause a cut off. As I said, if someone hates your new spouse, your new spouse isn’t going to want to go to the family. Then you have to choose. Cut offs can happen when someone feels they’ve been slighted. Insulted or belittled. Sometimes alcohol is involved. When someone feels slighted, an apology is in order. I’ll talk about that in a bit.

Abuse tears families apart. There is so much pain, violence, chaos. Who knew about it? Who reported it? Were they believed? Was the abuser believed instead? Who got to stay in the family?

Lastly, it happens so often that caring for a sick or elderly parent or for a sick child can Cause someone to get thrown out, or to leave the family. Especially if there is money involved. Death is a crazy time, and people can fight instead of feeling their grief. Lots of families pull together and handle these times well. More often, they try to handle them well, and they do, mostly. They have to get over the cracks that occur as the stresses multiply.

Life in families can be hard. Being cut off by family members is one of the greatest sources of pain. Especially when you’re not sure why you’re cut off. People feel shame, confusion, depression, stress, and a sinking feeling of disempowerment. What do you do?

One of the greatest sources of pain is being cut off by family members. Regardless of the reasons, people who are cut off feel shame, confusion, stress, and sometimes even depression and a feeling of being disempowered. This is particularly the case if no explanation is provided for the cutoff. Relatives may cut each other off for months, years, and sometimes even a lifetime with little to no explanation.

How do you stop the pain of being the one who is cut off? Usually, you have one big chance to make a good apology. What is that? Let’s talk about that.

A good apology is all about the other person’s feelings and they experience. It doesn’t matter what you actually said, or what you meant. What matters is what they heard. You have to be slow and wide as an ocean. Patient. Even if they are unreasonable, if you want to reconnect with them, you stand in their shoes, in their feelings.

You say something like “I’m so sorry that what I said felt awful to you. Can you help me understand how it was for you?” You don’t self-justify, you don’t let your emotions of being sorry overwhelm whatever emotions they are having. The focus is on your actions, not on the other person’s response.

For example, “I’m sorry that you felt hurt by what I said at the party last night,” is not an apology. Try instead, “I’m sorry about what I said at the party last night. It was insensitive and uncalled for.” Own your behavior and apologize for it, period.

A good apology does not have the word “but” after “I’m sorry.”

Even if you are only 23 percent at fault, you can make a good apology for your part in the break.

After a good apology, you try to take corrective action, and try not to have that happen again.

A true apology should not serve to silence another person (“I said I’m sorry at least 10 times, so why are you still bringing up the affair?”).

Nor should an apology be used as a quick way out to get yourself out of a difficult conversation or dispute.

A true apology should not be offered to make you feel better if it risks making the hurt party feel worse.

Not all apologies are welcome. Making amends may be part of your healing process, but find another way to heal if the other person doesn’t want to hear from you.

Your being right or righteous doesn’t matter. Their being unreasonable doesn’t matter. Be right or be happy.

Now, gratitude. Be grateful for the family you do have, bio family or chosen family.

There is great pain in families, and there can also be joy and strength. We are grateful when someone attempts to make a real apology, or when someone is willing to listen to ours. We can be grateful that our faith does not put the soul burden on us to convince others of our beliefs. I am grateful for this community, and I will be here Thursday afternoon to have a holiday meal with any of you who would like to come.

Most sermons during the past 19 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below 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.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 10, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

“How to Comfort Someone Who is Suffering” Lessons from the recent “Lunch with Meg” study of the book of Job from the Hebrew Bible.

Chalice Lighting

We light the fire of Truth and ask to be clear, wise, and humble enough to admit when we don’t know. We kindle the warmth of community and ask for open heartedness and patience. We are grateful to the Spirit of Life and ask to learn the secret to loving and being loved.

Call to Worship

Thich Nhat Hanh

Water flows from high in the mountains.

Water runs deep in the Earth.
Miraculously, water comes to us,
and sustains all life.

Water and Sun
green these plants.

When the rain of compassion falls,
even a desert becomes an
immense, green ocean.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Meditation Reading

EARTH TEACH ME
From the Ute Indians of North America

Earth teach me stillness
as the grasses are stilled with light.

Earth teach me suffering
as old stones suffer with memory.

Earth teach me caring
as parents who secure their young.

Earth teach me courage
as the tree which stands all alone.

Earth teach me limitation
as the ant which crawls on the ground.

Earth teach me freedom
as the eagle which soars in the sky

Earth teach me resignation
as the leaves which die in the fall.

Earth teach me regeneration
as the seed which rises in the spring.

Earth teach me to forget myself
as melted snow forgets its life.

Earth teach me to remember kindness
as dry fields weep with rain.

Sermon

HOW TO COMFORT SOMEONE WHO IS SUFFERING

I’m going to talk about being present with someone who is suffering, and we’re going to talk about the sufferings of Job, from the oldest book in the Hebrew Scriptures, and we’re going to talk a little about how the way Christians have read the book of Job shapes their thinking about Jesus’ suffering, and how all of that has shaped the way people around the world talk to those who are suffering. So that’s the map for today. Job to Jesus to how to comfort (and how NOT to comfort) people who are suffering.

Let me start by reminding you of the plot of this book, which is, as I said, the oldest one, and it deals with the oldest question of humanity: why do people suffer bad things?

The opening scene is in the heavenly realms, where Satan strolls in to where God is watching his good man Job. Job is the richest man in the East, he has ten sons and daughters, sheep, cattle, health and regular family parties. “Look at that man,” says God. “He loves me and blesses me.”

“Well, of course he does,” says Satan, (whose name translates to “The Accuser,” like the prosecutor in a trial. “He’s got everything! Just take all that goodness away and he won’t love you so much.” So God does that. All the children killed, all the crops ruined, the cattle stolen, and his health gone. All the way gone.

Then for the next 30 chapters, Job wrestles, struggles, strives with God over this completely undeserved suffering. Three or four of his friends come to comfort him. For the first week, they sit in respectful silence while Job cries out to God that he is a good man, and he doesn’t deserve any of this. That is a good way to be a comforter. To sit with someone in respectful silence, not defining their suffering for them, not comparing their suffering to others ( Hey, it could be worse,) not trying to explain it or minimize it.

Then they start talking. They say all the things that people say to folks who are in pain and loss.

“No one’s really good, you probably did something you’re being punished for.” “Maybe you are good, but maybe your children did bad things.”

“Maybe you are being tested, to see if your faith in God is strong enough.” “Life is like a school, and there are lessons we must learn.”

They skipped the one I’ve heard, which is “I wonder why you wanted to attract this kind of suffering into your life?”

They did not talk of past lives and karma, which is how some people deal with suffering.

You may have heard the phrase “the patience of Job,” but he wasn’t that patient. He yelled at God, questioned God, defended himself and demanded an in-person answer to his question of why this was happening to him when he was such a good person.

For thirty some chapters the argument rages, as the comforters insist he must know he deserves this in some way and he holds his ground. They suggest that his very self-defense and protestations of righteousness are themselves sinful, and that his questioning and anger at God are sinful too. The words of Job’s comforters could be said from any Jewish or Christian pulpit in the world. Their poetry is beautiful. Then, in chapter 39, God comes and says to the comforters “Who are you who obscure my plans with words without knowledge?…… where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand, who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know….” The voice goes on to say things like “are you friends with the water-spurting whale? Do you know how to open the storehouses of the snow?

God lays out credentials as the creator of all things, but he doesn’t answer Job’s question. Job gets ten new children, and his cattle are replaced. He gets his health back. But there is never any admission that what happened to him was the result of God trying to prove that he could take all Job’s good things away and Job wouldn’t abandon God. Which he did not. He yelled and demanded, but he never turned his back. God doesn’t look that good in this old book. Its message should be that yelling and demanding answers is a faithful act, and that no one has the answer to why bad things happen. We’re. All. Wrong.

People can’t live with that, though, so they talk about Job’s patient suffering. Christians talk the same way about Jesus, who really was killed by the military and religious leaders of an empire, but it’s a lot better for the empires of this world to say he was killed by his father, who needed blood in order to forgive sins. This makes the violence an intimate violence instead of state violence. They say Jesus went willingly to be tortured and killed because it was God’s will. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist, says Jesus was God’s answer to Job, along the lines of “I made you suffer for no good reason, so here, I’ll come suffer too. You were righteous, I’m righteous, and we both suffer.” This is not widely taught.

What is widely taught is that God has a reason, and that we should suffer whatever we suffer with patience and humility. This translates, unfortunately, to intimate violence within families being given an almost religious meaning. Suffer patiently and God will reward you. You will be like Job and Jesus. What is widely taught in Christianity around the world is that the father did violence to his child to pay for your badness. Submission to the violence, obedience to the situation is seen as love, is held up as virtue. Fathers have their reasons.

“What happens when violent realities are transubstantiated into spiritual teachings? “You’ve heard it or said it yourself. A mother loses her son to suicide. In an effort to comfort her you say, ‘God has a purpose in this. He sends pain to make us strong. You may not feel it now, but you will learn to give thanks for this experience, because through it, God will strengthen your faith.’ “These words take the grieving mother away from the reality of her lost child. Tragedy is renamed a spiritual trial, designed by God for the mother’s edification. God becomes the sender of torture, who injures us then comforts us — a perverse love.”

Rita Nakashima Brock, Proverbs of Ashes

And in personalizing this violence, the role of the state and its violence is smoothed out and hidden, where, if it were help up, Christianity might have always taught that resisting the violence of the state was an act of faith and love for the world and its people.

How do we comfort those who suffer? Presence. That’s the biggest thing. Be there. Do something useful if they need it done. Listen to them talk if they want to. Don’t explain their suffering, or ask them what they are learning from this lesson, or compare it to something that happened to you. Everyone is living their own life, and even if the exact same thing happened to you, their experience of it will be different from yours.

Further notes

From its language, the oldest book in the Canon. The story of an epic battle, not between God and Satan, but a battle of a person within themselves, theologically, wanting to love God and yet haven’t gotten attacked at all as he expected God to act.

C.S. Lewis puts his wages on a God who holds goodness and pain in a paradox. The Problem of Pain demonstrates a more distant, less emotional reaction to humanity’s situation, while A Grief Observed reads like a psalm of lament from within pain itself. The two texts compliment one another by identifying parts of our struggle, the intellectual and physical difficulty life will bring, and how pain can bend us toward a loving God if we let it.

The Problem

From the loss of his mother at a young age to the untimely death of his wife Joy, Lewis experienced pain as God’s megaphone, as he says, to rouse a deaf world. Pain leads us somewhere – to something. That something is a life of faith. Just as there is importance placed in a strong rope when you’re dangling from a precipice, faith is the only way to pull ourselves out from a life of desperation, a life of anxiety and need, a life of doubt and insecurity. But how can faith be present if we don’t realize we need something beyond our own person? How do we believe unless we recognize how frail our efforts have become to maintain everything just so?

Lewis says that we must understand our fallenness. He interprets the fall of humanity not only as an opportunity for evil to thrive, but also the choice to ignore the purpose of pain. Christianity creates the problem of pain because it provides hope for righteousness and love. Without the revelation that God loves us, the painful world would make sense. Pain would have no cause. Let’s face it: it’s much easier to dismiss God or to regard him only as an airman regards his parachute, as Lewis says, there only if he needs it but he hopes he never does. When we run headlong into God, Lewis contends that pain is demanded. Why? “How impossible it is to enact the surrender of the self by doing what we like,” he says. The truth is that at the heart of God’s love is a suffering Messiah and followers who take up crosses and follow in like fashion.

“If I knew any way of escape I would crawl through sewers to find it,” Lewis writes. “I am not arguing that pain is not painful. Pain hurts. That is what the word means. I am only trying to show that the old Christian doctrine of being made “perfect through suffering” is not incredible. To prove it palatable is beyond my design.”

PROVERBS OF ASHES

I counsel some of the religious kids, and the more attached they are to traditional ideas about Jesus, the more likely they are to think of their abuse as ‘good’ for them, as a trial designed for a reason, as pain that makes them like Jesus. They are often in denial about the amount of pain they live with. Violence denies presence and suffocates spirit. Violence robs us of knowledge of life and its intrinsic value; it steals our awareness of beauty, of complexity, of our bodies. Violence ignores vulnerability, dependence and interdependence. A person who acts violently disregards self and other as distinct, obliterating the spaces in which spirit breathes. We can resist and redress violence by acting for justice and by being present: present to one another, present to beauty, present to the fire at the heart of things, the spirit that gives breath to life.

We show how theological claims about Jesus’ death have become proverbs of ashes. We turn our faces toward a different theology.

“Pat,” I said, “the only way you could have helped Anola more is if the whole Christian tradition taught something other than self-sacrificing love. If it didn’t preach that to be like Jesus we have to give up our lives in faithful obedience to the will of God.”

“This is how I feel about the church. I love the church. It’s my home and has been my family’s home for generations. And I love the liturgy in all its beauty. At the same time, I feel something is dreadfully wrong. When I preside at the Eucharist, am I not reenacting images and ideas that tell people God wants them to sacrifice their lives? Am I right to do this? Does this give them life? Now when I pray in the church before the congregation arrives, I ask God to forgive me for performing the Eucharistic rite.”

P. 21 went to my priest twenty years ago. I’ve been trying to follow his advice. The priest said I should rejoice in my sufferings because they bring me closer to Jesus. He said, ‘Jesus suffered because he loved us.’ He said, ‘If you love Jesus, accept the beatings and bear them gladly, as Jesus bore the cross.’ I’ve tried, but I’m not sure anymore. My husband is turning on the kids now. Tell me, is what the priest told me true?” Lucia’s deep black eyes searched my hazel ones. I wanted to look away, but couldn’t. I wanted to speak, but my mouth wouldn’t work. It felt stuffed with cotton. I couldn’t get the words to form. I was a liberal Christian. I didn’t believe God demanded obedience or that Jesus’ death on the cross brought about our salvation. I hadn’t forgotten Anola Reed, though I thought of my theology as far from hers. But just that past Sunday I had preached a sermon on the willingness of love to suffer. I preached that Jesus’ life revealed the nature of love and that love would save us. I’d said that love bears all things. Never breaks relationship. Keeps ties of connection to others even when they hurt you. Places the needs of the other before concern for the self. In the stillness of that moment, I could see in Lucia’s eyes that she knew the answer to her question, just as I did. If I answered Lucia’s question truthfully, I would have to rethink my theology. More than that, I would have to face choices I was making in my own life. After a long pause, I found my voice. “It isn’t true,” I said to her. “God does not want you to accept being beaten by your husband. God wants you to have your life, not to give it up. God wants you to protect your life and your children’s lives.”

I could see that when theology presents Jesus’ death as God’s sacrifice of his beloved child for the sake of the world, it teaches that the highest love is sacrifice. To make sacrifice or to be sacrificed is virtuous and redemptive. Do we really believe that God is appeased by cruelty, and wants nothing more than our obedience? It becomes imperative that we ask this question when we examine how theology sanctions human cruelty. “If God is imagined as a fatherly torturer, earthly parents are also justified, perhaps even required, to teach through violence. Children are instructed to understand their submission to pain as a form of love. Behind closed doors, in our own community, spouses and children are battered by abusers who justify their actions as necessary, loving discipline. ‘I only hit her because I love her.’ ‘I’m doing this for your own good.’ The child or the spouse who believes that obedience is what God wants may put up with physical or sexual abuse in an effort to be a good Christian. “Theology that defines virtue as obedience to God suppresses the virtue of revolt. A woman being battered by her husband will be counseled to be obedient, as Jesus was to God. After all, Eve brought sin into the world by her disobedience. A good woman submits to her husband as he submits to God.

“When Jesus’ crucifixion serves as a metaphor for spiritual processes of transformation, or a mystical illumination of God’s abiding presence, violence is justified as sacred. In this mode, the infliction of pain can be re-inscribed as a holy action. Violence can be justified as a disciplining of the spirit.

But Nelle took a different tack. She spoke about the power of listening. She said there is a quality of listening that is possible among a circle of human beings, who by their attentiveness to one another create a space in which each person is able to give voice to the truth of her life.

I was haunted by Sylvia’s conviction that God was letting her be hurt, the passivity and resignation it elicited from her. I heard such ideas from youth struggling with the violence in their lives, pain inflicted by the deliberate cruelty of their parents or others they loved. Believing in the benevolent protection of a powerful God, they interpreted violence as divine intent, pain for their own good. And the Christian tradition reinforced this impulse by upholding Jesus as a son who was willing to undergo horrible violence out of love for his father, in obedience to his father’s will.

When the Christian tradition represents Jesus’ death as foreordained by God, as necessary to the divine plan for salvation, and as obediently accepted by Jesus the Son out of love for God the Father, God is made into a child abuser or a bystander to violence against his own child. The seal of abuse is placed on their relationship when they are made into a unity of being. If the two are one, Jesus can be selfless, can give himself totally to God, a willing lamb to slaughter. I thought of this system as cosmic child abuse.

Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much comfort, how much soul and transcendence there might be in a well-made taco and a cold bottle of beer are called at certain moments to comfort people who are enduring some trauma.

Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

Many of us don’t know how to react in such situations, but others do. In the first place, they just show up. They provide a ministry of presence. Next, they don’t compare. The sensitive person understands that each person’s ordeal is unique and should not be compared to anyone else’s. Next, they do the practical things–making lunch, dusting the room, washing the towels. Finally, they don’t try to minimize what is going on. They don’t attempt to reassure with false, saccharine sentiments. They don’t say that the pain is all for the best. They don’t search for silver linings. They do what wise souls do in the presence of tragedy and trauma. They practice a passive activism. They don’t bustle about trying to solve something that cannot be solved. The sensitive person grants the sufferer the dignity of her own process. She lets the sufferer define the meaning of what is going on. She just sits simply through the nights of pain and darkness, being practical, human, simple, and direct.

David Brooks, The Road to Character Tags: comfort, sensitive, sensitivity

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