2024 Pride Sunday

August 5, 2024 by tom Posted in Audio available, Michelle LaGrave, Sermons

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Michelle LaGrave and Carrie Holley-Hurt
August 4, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Come join us as we kick off LGBTQ Pride Week here in Austin! It takes courage to live authentically. We’ll have queer speakers, awesome music, and a glitter blessing. Come celebrate with us.

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

A PROTEST AND A PARTY
by Hannah Roberts Villnave

People sometimes ask:
Is Pride a protest
Or a party?

And the answer is
Of course
Yes.

And why not?

Why not
Rejoice as we resist
Dance as we demand change
Celebrate as we create community that delights in
All of who we are?

So bring all of that
With you this morning.

Bring your policy demands
Bring your glitter
Bring your supreme court broken heart
Bring your rainbow socks
Bring the emptiness you feel
For our siblings gone too soon.

Bring your Gloria Estefan remix
Bring your tender hope for change
Bring your most garish eyeshadow
Bring your spirit, tattered and battered
By a world that seems insistent on
Choosing fear and hate.

Gather up all these things
And bring them here
To a place where we don’t
Have to shoulder these burdens
Or celebrate these joys
Alone.

Come, let us worship Together.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

JESUS AT THE GAY BAR
By Jay Hulme

He’s here in the midst of it –
right at the centre of the dance floor,
robes hitched up to His knees
to make it easy to spin.

At some point in the evening
a boy will touch the hem of His robe
and beg to be healed, beg to
be anything other than this;
and He will reach His arms out,
sweat-damped, and weary from dance.

He’ll cup the boy’s face in His hand
and say,
my beautiful child
there is nothing in this heart of yours
that ever needs to be healed.

Sermon

NOTE: Carrie Holley-Hurt’s homily is an ai generated transcript.
Please forgive any errors.

Carrie Holley-Hurt

So, fun fact, pride at this church is actually my anniversary. Almost a decade ago I showed up at this church knowing nothing about you people and fell in love hard. So this is very exciting for me that I get to participate in this pride ceremony today. So when Reverend Michelle, who is generous, asked me what I wanted to do, how I wanted to contribute, I said, well, I want to give my testimony.

And I know that might be a little weird, but y’all, I come from a Pentecostal tradition, and so I’m going to give my testimony. And I hope that for those of you who were raised in a fundamentalist or otherwise soul-crushing church, that this does not trigger you. In fact, I hope my testimony is liberating and that it will inspire you to think about your own stories, your own narrative of growth and liberation.

So growing up I was different. I didn’t fit in at all. My body didn’t fit. My style didn’t fit. My mind didn’t fit. And I tried as best I could. I tried to act and look just like everybody else. I tried with clothes and hair, even got an eating disorder. I worked so hard to hide myself and to fit in all the right boxes. And then at some point that all just became too much. It was too hard, too stressful.

And after leaving my religion, I started to allow myself to be more me. And some of that included acting on my queerness. And it was freeing, but only up to a point, because I quickly found out that everyone I loved was not always loving about who I was. And so I stopped the process of coming out and went back into hiding, well, half-hiding because I couldn’t actually hide from myself anymore.

Then many years later, my own kid came out as queer, followed by several of my loved ones who are younger, and I realized that I never wanted them to go into hiding. I knew that they were perfect and wonderful as is. And I did not want the world to suffer because they felt the need to hide. So I came out again. I fully came out to my loved ones and this time I didn’t do it for their acceptance but as a display of my own acceptance and a really beautiful thing started to happen. I began the process of accepting all the parts of who I am, not just the queer part, but the neurodivergent part, the size of my body, my disabilities, in all of the ways that I will never conform to the societal standards of good enough.

I will never fit into those boxes. You see, in embracing myself I stopped embracing the boxes of patriarchy and internalized homophobia. When I decided I was going to fully embrace my queerness and stopped hiding it started to lose control over me. This to me is the beauty of queerness and those who have said yes to their queerness. They say, You, system of suprimacy, you don’t get to have control over me. I’ll not be confined by your boxes, the system that tries to punish me into conforming. You no longer get to call the shots.

So pride then is pointing to the liberation that is found in this act. Liberation on the most personal level. And please know that this message isn’t just for queer people. I love straight people. Some of my best friends are straights. Like my husband, who is a straight cis-man.

No, this message is for all of us because all of us need liberation. All of us feel the weight of the boxes that systems of supremacy try to force on us. The current contrived controversy with the Olympic boxers show us just how demanding and punishing these systems can be on all of us.

We all need the liberation of self. That deep embrace of our own inherent dignity and worthiness. And that comes when we stop conforming and we stop hiding ourselves. We embrace ourselves. And while I know not everyone can do this publicly, because it’s just not safe, I get it. When those of us who can – do. Let us all be those people. Let us continue to do the work of becoming a more radically welcoming church so that we can help others on their journey.

Thank you.

Rev. Michelle LaGrave

This is my story. Or a piece of it, anyway. A portion of the truth … that is me, that is my spouse, that is my family, that is you, that is all of us. Because I can’t really separate out my story from the stories of those I love, those I know, those I don’t know, but with whom I have crossed paths in some way. Our stories are interconnected because we are interconnected on the deepest level. Our stories go out into the world, shape and form each other, and then return to us, re-shaping and reforming ourselves, again and again.

This story is a Love story and I don’t mean a romantic, frilly sort of love, though that is a piece of it at times. I mean the kind of Love story in which people come to love themselves, and each other, in a most agonizingly authentic way and then have the courage to say to the world – “This is who I am!” and “This is who we are!”

The opening setting for this Love story, my Love story, is Andover Newton Theological School, a beautiful campus filled with tall trees and brick buildings, sitting on a hilltop just outside of Boston, Massachusetts, a rather typical New England scene. It began fifteen years ago, and I was deep in the process of ministerial transformation, of becoming a Unitarian Universalist minister. While my own faith tradition had a long history of welcoming, affirming, and marrying people of all sexual orientations, these were new practices, or emerging practices, for many of the faith traditions present at the school and were a frequent topic of theological conversation. As was the question of gender and gender identity. The very first openly transgender people were attending the school, and the very first transgender panel had recently been held. Gay marriage was only a few years old in Massachusetts and less than a year old in nearby Connecticut, where I am from. What I’m trying to say in setting this scene is that everything felt very new and fresh and groundbreaking in the area of GLBT rights. (Yes, it was still GLBT back then.)

And so it was within this cultural context, that I headed to the first day of class, Pastoral Care for GLBT People, with one of my best friends, Craig. We were joking around about something some of our friends had said about sexual attraction and how it works, and we decided to playa game, a bit of an experiment to bring back to the conversation. We would go to class and pick out the person who most immediately, without thinking about it, struck us as attractive and then share about it with each other later. As I scanned the room, I immediately noticed a very butch-presenting person – short, spiky hair, tats on her arms, thick, brown leather bracelet, cool sunglasses hanging around her neck. Oof. I immediately felt the attraction and wanted to get to know her, and so I went and sat kind of nearby. Afterward, I told Craig who I had chosen. It was the first time I ever admitted out loud to another person that I felt attracted to someone who was a woman or was genderqueer. I was in my late thirties.

About two months later, that person had become my girlfriend, my first, and only, girlfriend. Coming out on campus was relatively easy because I lived there, which was kind of like living in a fishbowl. I met up with her after an evening class and while walking around campus she took up my hand and held it. Boom! Done. I was out at seminary. Scary, but overall, not too painful.

What was terrifying was the prospect of coming out to my family and some of my friends. I was afraid of losing, or damaging, relationships with people I loved and cared about. And I did, but not the most important ones. Here’s where social location is important. I was a white, cisgender woman, well into adulthood, super well-educated, living in a liberal area of the country, following a calling to ministry in the most progressive faith tradition available. I had all of the advantages, all of the privileges, except for money, that would bode well for coming out, and still, coming out was terrifying. I risked, and experienced real loss. I lost relationships and I lost jobs. We all do. It takes courage to come out. Coming out is an act of resistance, coming out is an act of defiance, and coming out is an act of pride.

But my story, my Love story, did not end there. There was to be another coming out. Less than a year after meeting each other, my girlfriend came out as transgender. FTM, female to male, as we said back in the day. He had newly come into this identity, partly as a result of some of the work he had done at seminary. My girlfriend was really a transman. Many of you know him, as my spouse Micah. Yes, I married my ex-girlfriend. (That’s my favorite trans joke … Okay, it’s my only trans joke, but I really like it.)

So now we had a second coming out as well as a gender transition before us. These were hard, on both of us, in different ways. While I shared with you the story of my being attracted to a woman, having a first girlfriend, and using she/her pronouns to describe it all, that’s the story from my historical perspective. Now, both Micah and I avoid the use of his deadname and use he/him pronouns to talk about him at any age, long before he came out as trans, long before he came out as a butch lesbian, long before he played softball, long before he joined the Girl Scouts, back to when he was a little kid who played football on the playground with the other little boys, until they told him he couldn’t play anymore because he was a girl.

Returning to our Love story, that summer right after graduation, Micah came out to his family and friends, shared his new name and pronouns, and began gender-affirming care. We joined support groups for trans people and trans partners. We marveled at the way people began to treat us differently when they thought, incorrectly, that what they were seeing was a heterosexual couple. I got through some terrifying moments when I was afraid for his safety. One or the other of us often raged at the mistreatment he received, especially in relationship to his healthcare. And we got through it all, we still get through it all, with both Love and courage. By the next February, Micah had legally changed both his name and gender marker, and knowing we were to get married later that summer, also took on my last name and became Micah Shiloh LaGrave.

Our wedding was beautiful. We were married on the beach in Connecticut. I wore cargo shorts and a tiara. People who were walking along the beach joined in the circle of family and friends surrounding us for the ceremony, strangers welcomed in to the trans/partner wedding.

But before that, we worried that our wedding wouldn’t happen at all, or would only happen with great difficulty, at least legally. Because first we had to get a wedding license and even though Micah had all his gender marker papers in place, and even though gay marriage was legal in Connecticut, it wasn’t almost everywhere else. It was an exciting, but also fraught time. We worried the whole way down to get the license, and while standing in line, and while being helped. And we thought we were right to be worried, because as soon we handed over our papers it became clear there was a problem. The clerk took them in back and there was a lot of whispering and consulting going on before she came back and finally said, IIUmm, you both have the same last name? Are you related?/I We laughed with relief. They didn’t care that we were queer, they were concerned we might be committing incest! It never occurred to us it might be an issue that Micah had already taken my last name a few months back.

All of this is to say, that while there are moments of humor and misunderstanding, and lots of love along the way, coming out is long, hard, tough work. Coming out is never finally and fully over. It must be done again and again. And so it is, that we have Pride every year. We support those who are newly coming out and those who have been coming out for a long, long time. And we remember, that Pride began as a riot, led by trans women of color, as an act of resistance, and defiance, and of agonizing joy to throw off the cloak of oppression and finally act free by simply being ourselves – out loud, in public, and on the streets.

Pride says, still says – you cannot, will not hold me down. You policymakers, you legislators, you enforcers, you false prophets, you conservative religious fundamentalists, you oppressors, you the system, you cannot hold us down. We will persevere and we will survive as we have always done – whether we are lesbian, gay, asexual, bisexual, pansexual, polysexual, intersexual, transgender, non-binary, nonconforming, polyamorous, or plain old queer, we will persevere, we will survive! We are courageous! We are proud! And we will celebrate!

May it always be so, 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

As we go forth, we offer you this final blessing.

May you receive and reflect love, everywhere you go, and know-in your deepest heart and in every day – you matter and you belong.

May you hold on to hope and your inner sparkle even when discouragement and despair beckon.

May the beauty that is you shine out, bright as the stars from which we came and to which we will return.

Together may we make this a place of welcome and healing, of connection and plurality.

Together may we practice compassion and courage, seeing and celebrating and supporting each other.

Together may we be the sparkling force of love that our world needs.

Blessed by this community and by the divine, go forth and celebrate with pride!

Amen and 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

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

The Blessings of Small Group Ministry

July 29, 2024 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Guest Speakers, Sermons

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Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson, Toni Wegner, Melanie Cofield, and John Scott
July 28, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

One of our church’s most transformative ways of deeply connecting with fellow church members and experiencing profound spiritual growth is by participating in a Chalice Circle or Wellspring ministry group. Join us for this special service and hear about the real differences they make possible.

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

May we be reminded here of our highest aspirations,
And inspired to bring our gifts of love and service
to the altar of humanity.

May we know once again that we are not isolated beings
But connected, in mystery and miracle, to the universe,
To this community and to each other.

– Anonymous

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

From THE HEALING WISDOM OF AFRICA
by Malidoma Somé
Whether they are raised in indigenous or modern culture, there are two things that people crave: the full realization of their innate gifts, and to have these gifts approved, acknowledged, and confirmed.

There are countless people in the West whose efforts are sadly wasted because they have no means of expressing their unique genius.
In the psyches of such people there is an inner power and authority that fails to shine because the world around them cannot perceive it.

Sermon

Today’s service features several folks from the church who will explore the real differences our small group ministries such as Wellspring and Chalice Circles can make in our lives.

(NOTE: This is an ai generated transcript. Please forgive any errors.)

Melanie Cofield

Good morning, everyone. My name is Melanie Cofield, and I am a white queer woman with short grayish brown hair, wearing glasses, and a blue button -up shirt. My pronouns are she /they. I welcome this opportunity to share a bit about my experience participating in First UU Small Group Ministries.

I’ll start by sharing a little of my background. Due to experiences of judgment and exclusion in churches of my youth, I have been long estranged from organized religion. During the COVID pandemic, I found welcome, comfort, hope, and peace in the online services provided by First UU of Austin. And I joined as a member with my wife in 2022.

As someone working in higher education my entire career, and relatively new to Unitarian Universalism, a logical first step for me as a new church member was to learn more about the foundations of this religious tradition.

I attended a membership information class and someone mentioned the opportunity to join a wellspring group focused on the six UU sources. So I signed up excited about a new learning adventure. Now I expected to learn about the history and foundations of Unitarian Universalism But I was surprised and moved to learn so much about myself and to connect so deeply with my fellow wellspring group members.

My spiritual life has been firmly grounded in a primal reverence for nature since childhood. And it has been a solitary, private, and somewhat haphazard pursuit for most of my years. Participating in wellspring groups has helped me deepen and fine-tune my spirituality and expand my spiritual circle. Put another way in borrowing the pragmatic motto of Unitarian Minister Reverend Mary Safford of the Iowa Sisterhood in the late 1800s, I’m learning to lengthen the cord and strengthen the stakes. Let me share some highlights from my Wellspring takeaways with you in hopes that it will inspire you to consider participation in the future. I’m pursuing deep reflection and practicing deep listening. I’m developing intentional spiritual practices. I have found a vocabulary for alter articulating my spirituality.

I’m reconnecting with my creativity And I’ve both recognized and discovered new sources of wisdom and inspiration that feed my soul. I’m slowly but tangibly letting go of self -consciousness and self -doubt in my spiritual endeavors.

And I’m moving from an exclusively solo spirituality to one based on trust and connection and community. Finally, I found space to build resilience and hope in a chaotic and despairing world. After joining that first Wellspring Sources group, I wasn’t ready for the experience to end, so I lengthened my cord and volunteered to co-facilitate a Wellspring Deep Questions program focused on the eight principles of Unitarian Universalism.

This coming year, I’m delighted to continue serving the first UU community by co-facilitating and exploring a new program in the Wellspring Curriculum called Love at the Center, UU Values and Covenants. My experience has been profound and I encourage others to explore the gift of these small group ministries offered by First UU and consider participating. We hope to see you there. Thank you for listening and have a wonderful day.

Jim Scott

Good morning. My name is John Scott and I’m a relatively new member here. My pronouns are he /him. I started attending here about two and a half years ago online, shortly after my father died. And I very unexpectedly, found myself, after about 30 years of not going to church, feeling like I wanted to belong to something like a church. So I started kind of looking around, seeing what was available, and what might feel welcoming to me, and gradually found my way here. So after attending online for several months, I began to feel ready to meet people and kind of be more engaged with the community.

And I love being a student. It’s one of my favorite things. So I thought, well, I’ll look for adult education opportunities. And I went online on the website and found my way to adult education and the Wellspring program. And it just sounded perfect for me, especially because when I was clicking around on the website, I found something that looked a lot like a syllabus. And there was like a reading list and homework assignments, and I thought, you know, this is for me. So I signed up. I signed up for Wellspring. And Two years later here. I am talking about wellspring This year we’re offering love at the center, and that’s the one that Melanie was just talking about That’s a foundational course for people who have not taken a wellspring program before so it’s For everyone in other words and plus it’s brand new so even if you have taken wellspring before You might just be interested in that because it’s new.

But then there’s also a second program called Spiritual Practices, and this one is for people who have already taken Wellspring in the past, a Wellspring Sources program. So I know there’s a group that’s just finishing Wellspring Sources. There are people that have taken it in years past, and this Spiritual Practices program would be especially for you because it’s one of the second year programs that we offer through Wellspring.

So just a little bit about how the groups work. We meet here twice a month in the church in the classrooms. It’ll be first and third Wednesday evenings from 7 to 9 p .m. We put the chairs in a little circle, put a stool in the middle with a candle on it as our chalice, do a brief check -in with each other just to see how we’re doing that day, how our spiritual practice is going. And then we spend most of the time reflecting on questions together. So about two weeks before we meet, the facilitators send out an email with things, and little video clips to watch, and about five or six questions to review. And for me, it would only take me maybe an hour, hour and a half over that two week period to do the homework and make notes in my journal about the reflection question.

So it’s a little bit of homework, but it didn’t feel like overly burdensome at all. And then when we’re together, twice a month, we go through those questions one at a time using Parker Palmer’s Circles of Trust. So I brought Parker Palmer’s book. It’s a really good process where when someone shares what they’ve reflected on, the rest of the group just holds that in sacred silence, just kind of deep listening. And the basic guideline is that there’s no fixing, no changing, no advising, and no setting each other straight.

So it’s not like a normal conversation. You’re deeply listening to each other, deeply sharing from your heart, and I really found this to be so helpful and nourishing. And it’s a great way to learn how to just be present with each other, which is ultimately maybe the most valuable thing we can offer to each other, is just being present with each other. So after that first year of Wellspring Sources, and Melanie was one of my colleagues, the group decided to stay together for a whole second year and do the Deep Questions program, which we just just a couple of months ago. So I think that speaks to how meaningful we all found the experience that we really bonded and we wanted to stay together a whole second year. And I just wanna give a brief shout out to my wellspring siblings, ’cause now I think of them as my siblings. So Jenny, I saw Jenny over there, and Carrie, Amy, and Melanie, Sharon, Stephanie, Aaron, AJ, and Eric. So they’re my siblings now and I look forward to having more siblings after this coming year from Wellspring. There are descriptions that I brought. If you like the syllabus like I do, I brought some of those so you can find me and I’d be happy to share those. And they will also be on the website. If you go to learning and and adults, you’ll find information about Wellspring.

Toni Wegner

Good morning. I’m Toni. I use she /her pronouns. I’m on the other side of middle age and I’m wearing a summery dress and sensible shoes. Regardless of what my record may suggest I did not join this church just to be on committees. I’m delighted to be here today because small group ministries are what nourish my soul.

I spent two years in wellspring up until the pandemic and I highly recommend the program for those who can make the time of commitment. I continue to zoom the spiritual advisor I had during that program. She was a lifeline during the pandemic and currently in my transition to retirement. I participated in Chalice Circles for a couple of years before Wellspring and for the past two years.

We currently use the Soul Matters curriculum which has themes each month that tie into the themes for the sermons and into RE, themes like renewal, mystery, generosity, heritage. We get a package of materials two to four weeks in advance that have readings and quotes, video links, spiritual You can pick you pick one spiritual exercise and one question to talk about when the chalice circle meets once a month And you can even make up your own question It’s very flexible with lots of options to choose from and you can spend as little or as much time on the packet As you’d like so there doesn’t have to be a big-time commitment It’s a fun and interesting curriculum that challenges you to think and to feel, I personally was definitely on the shorter time commitment end.

The group I met with was on Zoom, which I found very convenient, but other groups meet in person, which also have positives. Many of the activities have been creative and interesting, like identifying a family memento that has a hold on you or realizing your mother saved nothing, taking a weird walk, doing something generous while remaining anonymous, making a list of delights in your life, taking quizzes on our political misperceptions, or exploring how each of the homes you lived in has shaped and helped create you. I came away from each of the exercises and questions with insights about myself, some positive or comforting, others not so much, but always feeling like I had a better understanding of why I am the way I am.

In the chalice circle, after an opening reading and check-in, each person has the opportunity to talk about the exercise they did and the question they answered. This is completely without interruption, usually three to four minutes each, so very similar format to Wellspring. After everyone has had a chance to share, there’s a brief period for responses and reflections, again following Parker Palmer’s no fixing, saving, advising, or setting each other straight.

Here’s what I loved. I loved that even at this age I am learning things about myself that feel important, that I can talk about things that I have ever talked about with anyone else in my life, with full confidence of confidentiality, that all of us share things that make us vulnerable, and in doing so, we form a deep bond. And that I feel a deeper connection to members of the first UU community than I would have ever felt through coffee hour or committees. We had an end of year child event in June where people from all the different childless circles got together to share reflections on the program.

And having gone through the program, I felt a bond with many of these people, even though I had never met some of them before. People overwhelmingly enjoyed the curriculum, which has something for everyone. There were also lots of positive comments about the value of having uninterrupted time to talk with others listening, the practice of deep listening, and the bonding that comes from this depth of sharing.

I’m really glad that our church offers these small group ministries and hope that everyone looking to make connections or go deeper will consider signing up this year. You commit a couple of hours a month and you get a lot of nourishment for that. For those who are skeptical, as most you use are, I hope you’ll consider participating in a taste of soul after church on August 4th or 11th to let you see what this experience will be like.

Check the newsletter for more information. Finally, I haven’t mentioned yet that I was a co-facilitator last year and will be one again this year. Why do I co-facilitate? Well, pragmatically, the more facilitators we have, the more spaces available for people to participate. Also, you get to pick when and where the group will meet, so that’s kind of a plus, hence online. There’s a really good two -hour online training and opportunities to meet with other facilitators and other than that facilitating takes like less than 15 minutes a month more than participating. So you can facilitate even if it’s your first chalice circle. And I was a co-facilitator getting to work with and to know my co-facilitator has been a highlight of my last year, so please consider it. I hope that I get to know you better in a chalice circle someday.

Extinguishing the Chalice

We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we hold in our hearts until we are together again.

Benediction

As we go back out into our world today, may we carry with us the love of this, our beloved religious community.

May we center our lives in love, just as we center our faith in love. May the melody flowing through our souls be a river of love that carries us forward until next we gather our spirits again.

Amen and Blessed Be. Go in peace.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

Reproductive Justice for All

July 23, 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. Michelle LaGrave and Guest Speakers
July 21, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Who is Reproductive Justice for? Why does it matter to you if you don’t have a uterus, or you are a woman past reproductive age? We will hear from four speakers who are committed to the fight for Reproductive Justice, including abortion health care but also much more. What does Reproductive Justice mean to all of us?” How can we engage and live our UU faith to build the Beloved 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

THE RIGHT TO CHOOSE
by Elizabeth Mount

To begin, to start, to create, to undertake,
To grow, to promise, to increase, to generate.
All these are our birthright.

As we are created, so may we create.
The ability and the choice to create is sacred.
To withdraw that chance from any person without their permission
Would be a violent act, the cutting off of life itself.

And yet, as precious is the right to simply not.
To end, to terminate, to stop, to discontinue,
To rest, to hibernate, to impede, to prevent.
These, too, are our birthright.

For without consent, our ability to create
becomes not a blessing, but a burden and an imposition.
Without space for a “no,” there can be no trustworthy “yes.”

Today, we come to this holy place and time,
Ready to invoke the divine, to make space for the sacred,
To co-create community once again.
This too is a choice,
you cannot, you may not,
be coerced into relationship with the holy or with one another.

I invite you, I ask you to join us.
I respect it if you will not, today, or ever.

More sacred than any other individual need, is Choice,
The right to know oneself.
The right to know what you are ready for,
what you need, to stretch when you can,
to pause when you will,
to know your body, your mind, your spirit better than anyone else.
And ultimately,
to be trusted with the responsibility of your own living.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

REVOLUTIONARIES ARE EVERYDAY PEOPLE
By Linci Comy

The whole point about revolution
Is seeing the things that are intolerable
And insisting on making change
And it takes everyday people to do that
The people in power, they don’t want change
They don’t want to see it
It’s the everyday people
That are the revolutionaries
You don’t wake up one day and
Suddenly have this revolutionary fervor
That you’re going to turn the world upside down
One day you wake up and realize
That you’re just not going to do
The same thing again and again and again and
Expect a different outcome
And that you’re going to start to feel in your soul
What place you want to live in
Where you want to be
And you’re going to start to create that
With your community
So revolutionary fervor is really just that
Great space of change
And transition
That we learn to feel
Revolutionary people
That’s just the We
We the people
That’s the revolutionary you see
So welcome to the world
Just open your eyes
And revolution grows
That’s how we change
Everything we know

Centering

HOLDING REALITY AND POSSIBILITY TOGETHER
by Sam Trumbore

What an unearned blessing to delight in the calming peace of this space;
to hear the bird’s [robin’s] song again at daybreak;
to feel the warmth in this room,
and to enjoy the promise of summer [almost] upon us.
Each moment of wakefulness has so many gifts that offer energy and delight.

Yet, too often they seem unavailable
as the weight of our troubles press down on us.
The threats to our well being, real or exaggerated,
feel like mosquitoes in the night looking for a place to land.
Minds become captive to rising flood waters: forceful, murky, threatening and ominous.

Even in moments of great danger, the direction of attention is a choice.
Fear can dominate the mind, binding it like a straitjacket.
Or love can unbind it and open it to resource and opportunity.
The soil of the mind can be watered with kindness.
The thorns can be removed one by one to appreciate the buds ready to flower.

Great possibilities await us even if all we can see is the cliff before us.
The grandeur of life, of which we are a part,
scatters rainbows in every direction, even as the deluge approaches.
Holding reality and possibility together is the holy, hope-filled work of humanity

If … we choose it, again and again, in love.

Sermon

Elizabeth Gray, Reproductive Justice Social Action Chair

People ask me: why are you so passionate about Repro Justice? They assume I’ve had an abortion, and this is personal. Well, no, I haven’t had an abortion. Although unintended pregnancies are very common, I’ve been fortunate: I haven’t had birth control fail, I haven’t been the victim of coercion, I haven’t been impregnated by rape or incest. But mostly: I got a late start.

So no, I haven’t had an abortion, but I’m passionate about this topic because I’ve experienced reproductive freedom. I know what a difference it made in my life, and I cannot fathom that we would not demand the same for all people.

One of the four tenets of repro justice: I have been able to choose to have children, and how many to have. And, a second tenet of repro justice, I’ve been able to raise those children in a safe and sustainable environment. That’s reproductive freedom.

A third tenet of reproductive justice is the right to choose NOT to have children. And I know that if I HAD experienced an unwanted pregnancy, I would have been able to get an abortion. I had access to the procedure: the money, child care, ability to take time off, transportation,-everything you need to access this health care.

The last tenet of reproductive justice is the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy. Now, that one strikes home. Pregnancy is not health neutral. Birth can be brutal and physically damaging. I experienced birth trauma with my first child, and I was left with a lifelong daily reminder, pelvic organ prolapse. I am by no means alone in this: I know that statistically, I share that that condition to at least some extent with half the women in this room who have given birth. Urinary incontinence, anybody?

In addition, during the labor and delivery I was subjected to medical procedures I did not want, and for three days after my son was born, I had a screaming baby I was determined to breast feed, but no breast milk. That wasn’t resolved until I was rushed to the hospital with post-partum hemorrhage due to, it was discovered, my placenta still abnormally attached to the uterine wall-no breast milk because my body thought I was still pregnant–I would have died without blood transfusions and medical intervention.

The birth of my second child also involved a life-threatening condition. My son Patrick, a very active child, was also evidently active in the womb: so much so that he wound the umbilical cord around his chest and was lodged sideways in my uterus. This is known as a transverse lie, and going into labor leads to serious complications-up to and including death of the mother or fetus. So I had a C-section, although that was also higher risk due to the position of the baby.

Does any of this sound familiar? The two years since Dobbs has been like a nationwide seminar in obstetrical emergencies. Well, even with those unexpectedly difficult encounters, I experienced reproductive freedom. I told my husband I was done having children, and it was abstinence or a vasectomy. He chose the latter, and I am not making this up: his urologist was Dr. Dick Chopp.

So no, I didn’t have an abortion, but I have experienced reproductive freedom, and everything that I am today – my whole life – is defined by that. Pregnancy, gestation, birth, lactation, and parenting – let’s not forget parenting – are all life- altering events. They have physical, emotional, and economic consequences. They are risks that require consent. No person should be forced into bearing a child they do not want.

I hope my story illustrates that Repro Justice is not only for people who have had — or will need-an abortion. Repro Justice is for All. Of. Us. For women who may not ever experience an unwanted pregnancy, but still have to deal with other aspects of sexual health and self-determination, for trans folks who want to make choices about their bodies, for people with disabilities who have a right to desire, intimacy, and sexual pleasure. For women who have children, and the people who parent them. And for men. Today, in this service, RJ is about men too. First, it is personal for men. You men all know and likely love someone who had a baby or wants to have a baby or might get pregnant. You care about them; it affects you when they are denied their human rights.

Second, your body may not be under attack, but you deserve the right to control the future of your family. Just b/c the govt. isn’t controlling your body as a man, doesn’t mean the govt. isn’t also controlling you. What’s next? What other of your freedoms are at risk? You should get to make your own decisions. You are a stakeholder.

And third, for the white men here or listening online: do you believe that you have an obligation to speak up on racism? For straight men, do you believe you have an obligation to speak up on homophobia? Yes, well, then this is the same thing. If one of us is oppressed, all of us are oppressed. Silence is consent. You need to be an ally.

We need to hear from men. We need to hear their personal stories about reproductive rights and justice and freedom. We need to hear them speak out publicly to call out bad actors, to refute the lies and misogyny pervading our society right now. We need them to speak up privately, with friends and family, to normalize discussion about reproductive health, reinforcing the behavior that we do say the word abortion. And menstruation. And infertility. And all the words we have stigmatized and silenced because they deal with reproduction and reproductive health.

This service is giving all of us the chance to step up. We have invited three people today to tell their stories of Reproductive Justice. First is Samuel Franco, Austin-based member of Men4Choice, a national organization dedicated to mobilizing male allies into the fight for self-determination and full control over our bodies.

Then we will hear from Kelenne Blake, executive director of Black Mamas, ATX, the community partner the Reproductive Justice team here has chosen to support as part of our mission.

And finally, Toga Pendrake, a member of our Repro Justice team, will read the anonymous account of a man in this congregation who works with a community network providing abortion medication to people in states with abortion bans. Thank you.

Samuel Franco, Men4Choice

My name is Samuel Franco my pronouns are he/him and I’m here to speak on men for choice and thank you for saying those words because it is extremely important that we have male allies in this fight.

I’ll start by telling you a little story my story Many years ago when I was a much younger man I had an abortion and I say those words not to take anything away from women or people who can get pregnant but to stand in solidarity with those that can get pregnant, and to normalize the conversation, to accept the fact that the role that men play in this conversation.

Many years ago, when I was finishing up grad school, I met a young lady who was also finishing her studies in El Paso. That’s where I’m from. And we took a liking to each other, and we knew we were both going to leave El Paso afterwards. Well, shortly about two weeks after getting to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I had moved to, she called me up and let me know that she was pregnant. So I rushed back to El Paso, not telling anybody in my family, no friends, nothing. Just me and her.

Growing up a Latino Catholic on the border, abortion is not something we talked about. It’s pretty much stigmatized. So we spent the weekend discussing our lives, our hopes, our dreams, where we were at, what we were going to do, and knowing that we weren’t going to be together, and what was best for us and best for that potential child. And we decided that was best for that potential child was not having that child. And that was best for us at that time. So Monday we went to the clinic and did what we had to do.

I tell you this story because I was reminded of it a couple of years ago after Dobbs. And I was sitting there looking at social media and I saw all these protests and I thought to myself, wait a minute, why wasn’t I there? And then I remembered, “Oh, because I’m a heterosexual cisgendered male, and those algorithms are not for me.” Right?

And so then I started looking around, and I thought to myself, “There’s got to be more men like me.” And that’s when I was introduced to Men4Choice. And so I want to talk to you a little bit about Men4Choice today. Men for choice was founded in 2015 with a mission to activate, educate, and mobilize male allies in the movement for reproductive rights.

Recognizing that too many men have remained passive in this critical issue, Men For Choice aims to change that by engaging men as active partners and allies. The organization believes that reproductive freedom is a fundamental right and that everyone should have the autonomy to make decisions about their own bodies without interference. Men4Choice is unique in their strategic focus on young men, particularly those aged 18 through 25, through initiatives like their youth fellowship program. This program is designed to build a pipeline of well -trained allies who can influence and support reproductive rights both now and in the future.

By educating young men on the realities and impacts of reproductive laws, Men4Choice equips them with the knowledge and tools needed to become effective advocates. Their work is crucial for several reasons.

Firstly, engaging men in the fight for reproductive rights helps dismantle the deeply ingrained misogyny and sexism that often drive restrictive laws and policies. By changing the culture from within, Men4Choice aims to create a more equitable society where everyone’s rights are respected.

Secondly, the organization amplifies the voices and efforts of women and those directly affected by anti-choice legislation, providing much needed support and solidarity. Men4Choice has made significant strides by organizing educational events, mobilizing volunteers for on-the-ground actions, and running impactful digital campaigns. In conclusion, the work of Men4Choice is vital not only for financing reproductive rights, but also for fostering a culture of equity and respect.

By bringing men into the fold as allies, they help to build a stronger, more inclusive movement that can effectively challenge and change oppressive systems. I encourage everyone to learn more about men for choice and consider you can contribute to this essential cause.

Thank you

Kelenne Blake, Black Mamas ATX

Good morning, everyone. My name is Kelene Blake. My voice is a little bit unusual, but maybe only a couple of people might recognize that. And I’m the executive director of Black Mamas ATX. So I’m gonna be a little softer than usual today, but I wanted to talk about reproductive justice from my perspective as a black woman who works in this field.

Now specifically, pointed out so well, there are four parts to reproductive justice.

The ability to maintain bodily autonomy, that is huge.
The ability to have children,
Not have children,
And if you do have children, to be able to raise those children in safe and sustainable communities.

These are things that black women have been systematically deprived of from the inception of the United States project that we’re existing in. And what is interesting is that reproductive justice has been created by a black woman. And I first learned about reproductive justice not in birth and not related to abortion, But since the Supreme Court rolled back abortion rights, I’ve heard a lot more in, you know, communities that are not mine and specifically focused on abortion and that is really important. It has been an important catalyst for this change and for the awareness of this concept. However, this is a whole concept, and so I’m going to talk about some of the other aspects of it as well.

So, I learned about this first, when I would say about eight years ago, maybe not about a decade ago, when The black community in particular was coming to grips with how prevalent, or how, not really how prevalent, but how traumatic police brutality was becoming in our community, and how often we were literally seeing modern day lynchings of black community members through social media.

How does reproductive justice come in there? How did I first learn about it then? One studies show, especially from that time, one of the first things that a lot of people, you know, hear when they find out they’re pregnant, you know, they’re like, “Oh, is it a boy or a girl?” That’s the first thing they want to ask, right, or, you know, they’re excited, they’re enthusiastic. Black women asked often, is it a boy or a girl? And if they found out it was a boy, their hearts would sink. Because – Trayvon Martin – because of the many black boys and men that were experiencing state-sanctioned violence.

Not to say black women were not, but as always, black women’s stories are not highlighted. But yes, so in this concept, the idea of safe, sustainable communities in which to raise your back boys and girls, is really important. No aspect of justice work is siloed or separate from the other aspects. It all is intertwined. And so it is really important to see this very necessary and valuable push to regain abortion rights in conjunction with all the other fights for justice and freedom and liberation of all the very different groups needing those same things.

The work that I do, we specifically work with folks who are pregnant and we provide doula support because If I’m going to be really honest, it feels very dangerous to be a pregnant black woman in a hospital giving birth or even with a midwife giving birth that that midwife is not black or birth center are any of these spaces and so Working with a doula you have someone who’s yes, they’re coaching you as the pregnant person through the birth But they’re also advocating for you and helping to prevent any dangers. And that is why they make such a difference.

But then, as part of reproductive justice, as part of helping black women and birthing folks survive and thrive, we also have to look at access to mental health support. We also have to help people pay their bills and rent. Last month, we had a mom who was about to be evicted with a newborn baby, and we had to work to get her into a space, so she has her own space to live. We have countless moms, and it’s increasing every month, who literally, their lights are getting shut off. They’re worried about their water getting shut off, right? And they’re pregnant and postpartum and have these newborns. This is part of that safe, sustainable community. We are having to build it kind of offline with our work as a small non-profit. But we need to be — we’re just plugging the gaps where we can.

This needs to be something that is accessible to everyone, everywhere, whether or not they know about Black Mamas ATX or one of our doulas could serve them. So that is my take on how we are working towards reproductive justice. We are in support of our brothers and sisters who are doing the hard and scary work of addressing abortion rights in Texas.

That is frightening. And whenever y’all need us, call us and we will be there to support you. I also want to be able to call you because there’s the everyday parts of it that’s happening as well that’s not as loud and not as not as I would say in the zeitgeist of the conversation you know so that is what I wanted to raise today as part of reproductive justice.

Thank you for hearing me out thank you for your attention and your kind faces as I’m up here a little nervous, but really appreciating your ear.

Toga Pendrake

Text unavailable at the writer’s request.

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

Go in peace, with Love in your hearts, kindness on your lips, and compassion at your fingertips, blessing all others as you, yourselves, are now blessed.

Amen and Blessed Be.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

Buddhist Practices in Hard Times

July 19, 2024 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.

Rev. Florence Caplow and Rev. Chris Jimmerson
July 14, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

How do we take care of ourselves in tough times, whether those tough times are personal or societal? How do we continue to show up for what we believe in when it is so easy to lose heart? In this service, our guest speaker Rev. Florence Caplow will share stories and practices from the Buddhist tradition for resilience and renewal in tough times.

Chalice Lighting

This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

When the The Vietnamese refugee boats met with storms or pirates if everyone panicked, all would be lost. But if even one person on the boat remained calm and centered, it was enough. It showed the way for everyone to survive. I am inviting you to go deeper, to learn and to practice so that you become someone who has a great capacity for being solid, calm, and without fear. Because our society needs people like you who have these qualities. And your children, our children, need people like you in order to go on, in order to become solid and calm and without fear.

– Thich Nhat Hanh

Sermon

(NOTE: This is an ai generated transcript. Please forgive any errors.)

Almost all of the people I know, It seems, are talking about this particular moment in our history and whether its challenges are unprecedented or not. On hiking trails and cafes, on a phone with each other, we are talking about this. Maybe you are too. Maybe you’re feeling dread or fear or confusion. How could this be happening? I know that you in Texas have weathered literally just this week both extraordinary heat and an unprecedented hurricane that caused massive power outages in your state that are continuing. And then there is the looming hurricane in our country, this upcoming election with all its uncertainties and even terrors. I personally am of the view that both climate change and what is happening politically, not just here, but around the world is indeed unprecedented.

For quite a while now, my own personal spiritual vow is to help in whatever way I can when the storms that seem to be on the way break over our heads.

How, how do we live in this time, engaged, brave, and like the person in the boat that Thich Nhat Hanh wrote about, tall enough somehow to help everyone around us survive. This is not about turning away or turning inward, but about each of us building our own capacity, both for societal challenges and for the challenges in our own lives, in our own communities, our own personal hurricanes.

Today, I’d like to offer some possible ways, simple ways, as both a UU minister and a Buddhist teacher. And although these ways are informed by my Buddhist training, you do not have to be any kind of Buddhist to engage in them.

Many centuries ago, a Zen student in China asked their teacher, “What is the fundamental teaching?”

And the teacher replied, “An appropriate response.”

What is the appropriate response right now in these strange and scary times? Well, I can’t tell you. It’s really for you to find out. But I don’t think it is turning away or tuning out with the latest Netflix series, although that can be a helpful break, nor do I think it is drowning in fear or anger. I think at times like these spiritual practices are essential so that we can engage.

Now, I don’t really believe in giving advice, because honestly, who actually follows advice. But I’m going to break my own rule this morning and offer a little advice. Five spiritual practices for tough times. As you listen, see which one where maybe several of them really speaks to you. Even one of them could make a difference. Or consider what is already a spiritual practice for you, perhaps one you hadn’t even thought of as a spiritual practice.

The five spiritual practices I’d like to share this morning, very simple practices, are: pausing, appreciating, not knowing, staying together, and feeling your feet, with a little bonus practice at the end.

So first, and I think most importantly, find a way, or ways, to pause, to slow down, to rest, to feed your spirit. Many of us, maybe all of us, are moving so fast and so frantically, either in an attempt to survive economically or to address the wrongs around us, that spiritual practices become an afterthought or luxury. And the more we panic, speaking for myself, the more it may seem like we simply don’t have the time for spiritual practices.

Please don’t think of them as an afterthought. Think of them whatever they are or could be for you as a foundation, as essential in these times as drinking enough water. Maybe some of you feel like you’re running a And in a marathon, although honestly, I have never participated in a marathon, but this is what I hear you need to be sure to get enough water and pace yourself. Same with mountaineering, which I have done. Rest breaks are absolutely essential. When you get up into the high elevations for mountaineering, you actually have to rest with every step.

And I’m more than half convinced that there are people out there who are trying to get us to never rest, never stop surfing of the net so that we won’t stop and think what is happening. Sometimes those of us who are Activists feel that we can’t rest, that the problems are so dire, we need to be doing whatever we can 24 /7. For you, us in that category, or anyone who overworks, I want to offer these provocative words by the late Trappist monk and writer, Thomas Merton.

There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist (that’s us) most easily sickens activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. It kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

Or as the Black activist and founder of NAP Ministry, Trisha Hershey writes,

“Consider rest a radical act. Walk in the woods, cuddle with your loved one, or a dog, or a cat. Drink a cup of tea, Go to church on Sunday, go on retreat. Take a moment to breathe with awareness, just right now. Take in an in-breath, in an out-breath. And know that you are not turning away from the troubles of the world. You are strengthening yourself for the journey and the struggle.”

It’s said that Gandhi used to meditate for an hour a day but one day there was a big political action coming up and his followers said today is so busy that we won’t be meditating, right? Gandhi said today is so busy we will be meditating for two hours.

Maybe you’re saying to yourself I can’t meditate. That’s just not my thing and certainly not for two hours. I am here to tell you that there is such a thing as homeopathic meditation. Even a moment of presence goes a very long way. Even a breath can be a moment of Sabbath and pause. It doesn’t take any special equipment. You always have it with you. It’s always available, even one breath.

So my first piece of advice to summarize, find a way, find ways to slow down and be present, whatever you call it. I promise you that your adrenal glands will thank you if no one else does. and probably others will thank you as well.

Advice number two, Appreciating. The harder and uglier things get, the more important this simple practice becomes. Yes, you have a right to some happiness, even when things are falling apart. The intentional practice of gratitude, of gratefulness, of appreciation, has been shown scientifically to increase baseline happiness, reduce pain and depression, lower stress, and improve sleep.

Think about it, if we had a drug that did that with no side effects, it would be a runaway bestseller. And there are a thousand ways to practice this, or as Rumi said, to kneel and kiss the ground. But like most practices, it does not have to be elaborate. Two of the easiest practices are Sabering and Awe.

Sabering is to fully experience small pleasures and comforts like your morning coffee with tea or how it feels to get into bed after a long day to really notice and experience those things. And awe is our response to something vast or amazing, something seen, heard, or experienced. Awe can also arise from witnessing human kindness or greatness or courage.

I am currently visiting a little town in the Roaring Fork Valley of western Colorado where I served as a minister a number of years ago, and all around me are mountain landscapes that easily evoke awe. And last night, I went to a performance at the Aspen Music Festival. And I heard a British cellist, Stephen Isserlis, play a long, long, long lost Haydn concerto for cello. As soon as he started to play, The grace of his playing, his ease brought me into intense presence, and his very obvious bliss and joy in the music as he played was contagious. I experienced bliss too and awe.

But appreciation doesn’t need to be so special. One of my favorite quotes is from the Reverend Howard Thurman, the founder of the first intentionally interracial church in America, the church for the fellowship of all peoples in San Francisco. And this is from his Thanksgiving prayer, which starts with these words.

Today, I make my sacrament of Thanksgiving. I begin with the simple things of my days, fresh air to breathe, cool water to drink, the taste, the food, the protection of houses and clothes, the comforts of home. For all these, I make an act of Thanksgiving this day.

Advice number three, and this may seem strange to a bunch of UUs, but is it the heart of Zen and very helpful in hard times? Practice not knowing. What do I mean by that? Well, most of the time, we are so sure we know, and it certainly seems like a lot of people online or on the news programs know something as well. But our thoughts and their thoughts about the world and where it’s going can literally, literally drive us crazy, but they are just thoughts. And when we realize this, we can act with greater peace.

Thich Nhat Hanh used to tell his students to ask themselves always, “Am I sure, for instance, perhaps like you, I am sometimes filled with dread about our collective future?”

But the reality is, I don’t know the future. And no one does, not even the wisest pundit writing in the most prestigious publication, apologies to any pundits in the sanctuary. I can ask myself, am I sure, and then still act for what I believe in without being certain of the outcome? Give it to try. Practice.

And this really comes from my UU tradition. Remember to stay together. Remember that you are not alone. What brought me to UU ministry was witnessing and being a beneficiary of the tremendous care and love even for strangers that can be expressed in a UU congregation. What actually brought me to UU ministry was stumbling into a congregation in Flagstaff, Arizona, sad and unwell and being embraced almost before they knew my name.

Come to think of it, I experienced awe when that happened too. There is so much power and encouragement that comes from showing up for each other, Acting for the world standing in a picket line or marching for justice not alone, but together This is one of the many reasons that I think Progressive faith communities will matter all the more in the coming years Despite what the pundits say. We need each other. We can’t do this alone.

I want to share a poem that has been important to me since my teen years, written by the great Zen beat poet Gary Snyder in 1959.

FOR THE CHILDREN

the rising hills, the slopes,
the statistics
lie before us,
the steep climb
of everything going up
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century,
or the one beyond that,
they say
our valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests,
one word to you,
to you and your children.

Stay together.
Learn the flowers. Go light.

Stay together. Learn the flowers. Go light.

Number five, the simplest of all. Pay attention to your feet. Pay attention to them right now. See how they are beneath you in contact with the floor connected to the earth. We spend so much time up in our heads. Meanwhile, our humble feet are supporting us all the time. To feel your feet is to feel your foundation, to quite literally ground yourself. Whether you’re standing in a grocery line, having an argument with your partner, or facing a line of oncoming police in a direct action, feeling your feet will bring you into your body, and in contact with the earth, which is always there, always supporting you, and which receives us all in the end.

And on a lighter note, a little bonus advice. I promised you a bonus, from the great satirist Kurt Vonnegut. His last words of advice, who knows if anyone listened, to an audience in 2007. “And how should we behave during this apocalypse? We should be unusually kind to one another, certainly. But we should also stop being so serious. Jokes help a lot. And get a dog if you don’t already have one.”

So if one of these spiritual practices spoke to you, I invite you to bring it more fully into your life.

And just to review, here are some simple spiritual practices for these tough times.

Pause
Appreciate
Practice not knowing
Stay together
Feel your feet
And don’t forget to laugh now and again.

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

You are not alone. You have generations of ancestors at your back. You have the blessings of interdependence and community. You have the great trees of the forest and steadfast allies. You have the turning of the seasons and the renewal of life as your music. You have the vast sky of emptiness to hold all things graciously. Now it is time to step forward, bringing your equanimity and courage, wisdom and compassion to the world,

– Janet Cornfield

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

Generosity of Spirit

July 8, 2024 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.

Rev. Kristina Spaude
July 7, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Together we will reflect on our interdependence as we grow in community through the lens of time and imagination. Rev. Kristina Spaude currently serves as the contract minister for the UU Church of Tarpon Springs, FL. Her six-word story of faith is, “We’re here to build Love’s house,” and she is passionate about making the way for more justice in this world.

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

GO TO THE LIMITS OF YOUR LONGING
– Ranier Maria Rilke
(translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

“A HOUSE CALLED TOMORROW”
by Alberto Rios

You are not fifteen, or twelve, or seventeen
You are a hundred wild centuries
And fifteen, bringing with you
In every breath and in every step
Everyone who has come before you,
All the yous that you have been,
The mothers of your mother,
The fathers of your father.

If someone in your family tree was trouble,
A hundred were not:
The bad do not win – not finally,
No matter how loud they are.

We simply would not be here
If that were so.
You are made, fundamentally, from the good.
With this knowledge, you never march alone.
You are the breaking news of the century.
You are the good who has come forward
Through it all, even if so many days
Feel otherwise.

But think:
When you as a child learned to speak,
It’s not that you didn’t know words –
It’s that, from the centuries, you knew so many,
And it’s hard to choose the words that will be your own.
From those centuries we human beings bring with us
The simple solutions and songs,
The river bridges and star charts and song harmonies
All in service to a simple idea:
That we can make a house called tomorrow.

What we bring, finally, into the new day, every day,
Is ourselves.
And that’s all we need
To start.
That’s everything we require to keep going.
Look back only for as long as you must,
Then go forward into the history you will make.

Be good, then better.
Write books.
Cure disease.
Make us proud.
Make yourself proud.
And those who came before you?
When you hear thunder,
Hear it as their applause.

Sermon

Last year during the Festival of Homiletics, a week long celebration of preaching and presentations by progressive and libratory Christian preachers and scholars, I was struck by one particular story. So we are getting biblical this morning. One of the preachers mentioned Lot’s wife and shared that she is the most referenced woman from the scriptures in poetry, I think it was.

Lot’s wife has been sitting with me for months patiently waiting for her turn to teach us. Of course, it is Lot’s wife who is unnamed in the scriptures, but who in the Midrash, the wisdom of rabbis that supplements the Torah, is named as Edith. She is the one who breaks God’s instruction not to look back as she is fleeing from her home, which is being spectacularly destroyed, fleeing with her husband and their children who would leave, and for this she instantly becomes a pillar of salt.

Now, that story begins with God expressing that there has been such an outcry from people that they cannot ignore that the twin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah had fallen into sinfulness, with the greatest sin, perhaps, being breaking the commandment to welcome the stranger, to love our neighbors, to be hospitable.

To assess the situation there, God sends two emissaries to the city, two of the same who had just visited Abraham and Sarah, who despite their ages are promised their own child. Abraham, just informed that he would be the father of nations despite being ancient, is told by God that Sodom is sinful, so they are preparing to make their way to Sodom, where one of Abraham’s nephews, Lot, lives.

Abraham pleads with God, “What if there are 50 good people. What if there are only 45? Maybe there are only 40. What if there are only 30, 30 good people in the city? What if there are only 20? What if there are only 10. What if there are only 10 good people? And God says he will not destroy the city if 10 are good.

They arrive and Lot who has been at the gate welcomes them into his home. Initially the angels decline but Lot urges them to stay with him. They eat well, and as night falls, the home is surrounded by the men of the town, demanding that the two be sent out. Lot begs them to behave and offers his daughters instead, and the crowd gets angrier. They only stop banging at the door when the angels strike them blind, and they can no longer find it.

This story is often misconstrued as one condemning homosexuality, but it is not about that at all. It is about the inhospitality of the residents who have wealth and food in abundance. And somehow this has made them cruel instead of generous. It has become the practice of the men of the city to violently assault their visitors, which is why people cried out to God for help. And so God decides that the city must be destroyed.

Lot and his family are given little time to collect their things and make their way out before God unleashes their destruction, sulfur and fire, which leads to explosions and more. God warns them not to look back or there will be consequences. But Lot’s wife cannot help herself, it seems.

So this raises a few questions. I’ve been spending some time with Krista Tippett and her philosophy of asking good questions. And so we begin with what other reason could there be that she would look back knowing that it would be her end. It is natural for us to look back as we leave. We remember in those moments what was, has been, the promises we once felt held by. We think about the community that we had or dreamed of having, our roots, the places we loved, and for Lot’s wife, that perhaps her children also loved.

It is deeply human to recognize that places become homes, that our relationships with places and people are what shape and make our lives. Maybe she was looking back to see if her daughters who had chosen to stay with their husbands had changed their minds. How do you not look back and remember your hopes, the people who loved you into yourself, the memory of firsts and lasts and everything in between?

As I left Pennsylvania to take my position in Tarpon Springs, I looked back as we drove across the Susquehanna River for the last time, wanting to have my last memory of the place not to be one of pain, but of beauty.

Perhaps Lot’s wife was looking back to help her accept that this city was worthy of such destruction. Given how natural of an instinct turning back would be, It seems cruel to believe that God would want to punish anyone already facing such a terrible situation.

So this is the second question. Why would God make such an instruction? In general, the God of the Hebrew Bible isn’t the warmer and fuzzier God we get to know once Jesus enters the picture. But God is also not unreasonable or punishing for the sake of being punishing. So what would inspire them to make this instruction?

Given the context of the rest of the scriptures, my interpretation is because sometimes we humans have a tendency to hold on too tightly to the past, even at the expense of our present and future. We continue to act in the ways we have acted, even when doing so keeps us locked in cycles of creating harm to ourselves. God’s attempt at going scorched earth in these cities of licentiousness is to try to create a blank slate to give the people a chance to begin again, to build something new and one would expect or at least hope better.

In order to do that, not only does Lot’s family, the ones who are to survive, that they need to be far away, they need to be moving in the direction of forward with their hearts and minds as well as with their bodies. Turning back slows us down and risks us getting stuck, whether physically or emotionally. As if looking back might cause us to freeze. As if turning Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt was just an affirmation of her own unwillingness or unpreparedness to make space for the future or even the present.

The third question is why salt? Why does she turn into a pillar of salt? The Midrash says that Lot’s wife went to other homes in Sodom asking for salt so that she could share that she had guests for the evening. This is not part of the scriptures though, and the text itself does not offer any insight into the question. What we do know is that salt is a component of tears. Being turned into a pillar of salt may be a way to convey tears of loss. Salt is also highly soluble in water that is when wet salt will melt away. And land that is saturated with salt cannot grow anything. Salt is a cleanser, a purifying agent, a sanctifier.

Perhaps being made a pillar of salt which will not last as a monument to the past for long and will become a stain upon the earth as a patch where nothing will grow is what God is trying to warn against, that if there can be no good or healthy growth, there will be no growth at all. Without a future, the past will also be lost because there is no one left to carry it.

Or to quote from Paul Razor in a 2010 UU World article, “Nearly a Century ago, the Reverend Louis B. Fisher, the Dean of the Universalist Seminary at St. Lawrence University, described Universalists are often asked to tell where they stand. The only true answer is that we do not stand at all. We move.” Razor continues, “Yet there are times when the opposite is true. When the realities are so daunting that we freeze up playing out Dean Fisher’s aphorism in reverse, we do not move, we stand. And more, when we decide to go it alone, to look backward more than we are willing to move forward, we lose ourselves. We wander into a wilderness of our own making and without companions, surrounded by what seeks to separate us from one another.

Lot’s wife is a warning to us that where we travel, we must go together if we are to have any hope. To reference another scriptural story, the one about Moses leading the people from Egypt. Too often we focus on the 40 years wandering the desert. And with good reason, we understand that hardship. But in doing so, we overlook the effort that it takes to leave Egypt at all. Some people protest. The journey will be hard. And is being a slave really so bad when you know how the system works?

They clung to their horrendous conditions because they were familiar. The past can feel like a warm comforter on a cold day. Cause sometimes we humans have a tendency to hold on too tightly to the past, even at the expense of our present and future. We continue to act in ways that we have acted, even when doing so keeps us locked in cycles of creating harm to ourselves.

Communities, including congregations that are not moving or resting actively are dying, resting from the lens of doing appropriate care, of catching our breath, of meditating to bring us calm or to help us dream. Of taking the time to ask the hard questions, these are all active resting. Refusing to engage in these practices like refusing to do the work to move forward is an indication of unease of this, we become like Lot’s wife, frozen in time.

The thing is that generosity is not just about money, or your time, talent, and treasures we so often say. It’s about all of that and more, about the ways that we are open to curiosity, hospitality, care. The ways we think about not just this moment, but about this moment in the context of what has been and what will yet be, yet to be possible based on what we do today.

Generosity is temporal this way, it extends from before all the way to beyond. It’s also a conversation that we have, both with the past and the future to give direction to the present. It’s a conversation we have with all that is possible now. Perhaps we are like children who created Roxaboxen, whose imaginations inspire them to create homes and neighborhoods out of boxes, stones, glass, cactus, and other odds and ends. The present offers different possibilities to us just as the future does if we let it.

Generosity is about reaching beyond ourselves into the future, doing just a little bit more than is necessary to make other things possible. We need to be generous in holding space for dreaming, for others dreams that we alone cannot imagine, but that will save us nonetheless. We need to look forward at least as much as we are looking back. Are we reaching forward for the generosity the future is trying to extend to us?

How do we hold space in this moment to honor the past, to name what it has given us, and to allow the future to also be possible? A healthy past wants us to let go and grow forward. When Lot’s wife looked back, she was holding herself back from being able to hold space for other possibilities in that moment.

When I left Pennsylvania, I was already making space in my heart and mind for Florida for a couple of months. My looking back was a last goodbye, an act of closure. Our minds sometimes imagine us living in the future or our hearts and minds may try to convince us that we live in the past. We know how that turned out though.We can only ever live in this moment in the present.

Our own imaginations as we age may become less inspired, less curious, less interesting. Imagination is something that we have to practice. And congregations have to practice this together. And every time someone comes or goes, we have to rework the possibilities we have been imagining to make space for everyone, to practice a generosity of spirit.

And we can if we choose to do so. Choose to make a little more space. Choose to be a little bit more flexible. Choose to dream a little bigger. Choose to lean in a little more. May we choose to do the next right thing, the next caring thing, the next thing worth doing for the tomorrow we hope to build.

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

From THE GIFT OF FAITH
Jeanne Harrison Nieuwejaar

In the lore of ancient China, there is a story of a philosopher who was asked, “Where is the road called Hope?”
He replied, “It does not exist, but as people move upon it, it comes into being.”

I invite you to continue moving forward on this path, this journey called hope, together in Unitarian Universalism with me.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

Poetry Plus

July 1, 2024 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

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Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson and AJ Juraska
June 30, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

So often, we recoil against overly literal interpretations of the bible that at best seem irrational and at worst harmful. What if rather than a “literal- factual” understanding of biblical scripture, we embraced scholar and theologian Marcus Borg’s “historical-metaphorical” approach instead? Might then the bible become poetry of love and justice?

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

READING THE BIBLE AGAIN FOR THE FIRST TIME;
TAKING THE BIBLE SERIOUSLY BUT NOT LITERALLY
by Marcus J Borg

“… stories can be true without being literally and factually true … A metaphorical approach to the bible thus emphasizes metaphors and their associations … metaphors can be profoundly true, even though they are not literally true. Metaphor is poetry plus, not factuality minus.”

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

“The Bible is like Santa Claus and sex. Children hear about it on the playground or on the street, whether or not their parents discuss it with them. And as an adult, if you don’t enjoy it and wish to abstain, you can successfully avoid it only by taking extreme measures such as total social deprivation or profound isolation.

The Bible is holy scripture because it is the living document and foundation of many important faiths, including Unitarian Universalist. To abandon the Bible would mean alienation from one of the world’s most important influences on religious thought-liberal and otherwise …. Our concept of respect for the web of existence, for instance, emanates from a stream of thought that flows through the Psalms and the Prophets from that same God of Genesis who declared the goodness of creation.”

– Rev. David McFarland

Sermon

AJ Juraska’s Homily

I just finished my first year of seminary. If you had told me five years ago I would be in seminary, I would have been shocked. Even more so by the fact that I am attending a Christian seminary.

I wanted to attend a Christian seminary in part because I knew that whether I end up being a chaplain, a parish minister, or working on social justice issues, living in Texas means that I will be exposed to Christian viewpoints and references to the Bible. The more I learn about the Bible, the more I realize that the Bible is hidden in plain sight all around us – in song lyrics, art, writing, common sayings, and so much more. The song we heard earlier, Turn Turn Turn by Pete Seager, is from Ecclesiastes Chapter 3. While working on this homily, I learned that Emily Dickenson’s works reference the Bible.

A part of me also hoped that, by going to a Christian seminary maybe I would find myself identifying as a Christian again. I grew up in a Christian church and I miss some of the magic I found there, and the belonging in having a shared text. Being a UU can be hard in that way. When I used to play roller derby I would often get asked “but where is the ball.” I think the equivalent in UUism is “where is the central text that you all read and agree on.”

As it turns out, though, even the Christians don’t agree on a central text. Catholics include different books of the bible than Protestants. So we’re not even all reading the same Bible. It took hundreds of years after Jesus’ death before there was even a semblance of agreement on what books to include, and the order to read them in.

The books of the Bible were written in a time and a place. As my New Testament professor says, some of what we are reading is essentially someone else’s mail. Paul is writing to early Christian churches to try to guide them in how to be successful in this new endeavor, especially at a time when Christians were persecuted and there was debate over who could be included in this new church.

So why should we read something written nearly two thousand years ago that has context and meaning for a time so long in the past? Unitarian Universalist Minister John A Buehrens answers us in his book Understanding the Bible: An Introduction for Skeptics, Seekers, and Religious Liberals. He says, “Progressive people simply cede their power to opponents when they leave interpretation of our religious heritage, or the meaning of our nation, or authentic ‘family values,’ to the reactionaries, the chauvinists, and the bigots.” He goes on to say that if we reject the Bible, it, quote “doesn’t mean that it ever goes away. Rather it simply means that it ends up only in the hands and on the lips of others – often reactionary others-where it can and will be used against you.”

Buehrens is right. Louisiana just passed a law requiring public school classrooms to display the ten commandments. Texas tried to pass a similar bill last session, and we can bet it will be on the docket again come next year’s session. We can shout about separation of church and state all we want, but the Bible isn’t going to leave our political dialogue any time soon.

While the ten commandments are a part of the bible, they are cherry-picked, in that, according to Jewish tradition, there are actually 613 commandments or mitsvot in the Bible. Most of these mitsvot cannot be followed for a variety of reasons, including that they require being in the temple which was destroyed.

One of the big questions in the early Christian church was whether the early Christians needed to follow the law, in other words the commandments. The New Testament in part is grappling with this question, and there are different interpretations of whether the Jews and the Gentiles, the Christians who do not have Jewish heritage, need to follow the law.

Laws to post the ten commandments might still get passed, but imagine if more teachers knew this context, and could explain that the ten commandments are just a selection of the 613 laws that one ancient group thought were appropriate for governing themselves.

For all my humanist friends in the audience, I promise we haven’t forgotten about you. In fact, Buehrens calls himself a Biblical humanist. He points out that one can have a foundation in the Bible without believing it reveals something about the supernatural.

The Bible has a lot for us to learn. I took a class on the book of Judges last semester, and I’m taking a class on Revelation in the fall (fun fact, it’s Revelation without an S at the end, not Revelations as I know I had said my whole life). Judges is one of the harsher books in the Bible, with lots of violence including some of the most horrific violence against women in the text. Through analyzing the book, I came to learn all the ways it can be read, including as a feminist piece, one that in talking about violence against women is in fact speaking out against it. It can also be read as a tract against kingship, and many parts of the Bible are speaking out against empire.

Like much of the Bible, Revelation chapter 13 was written in a way that people of that time and place would have understood, but we do not if we try to read it literally. It talks about beasts but is in fact coded writing against the Roman empire. This is the chapter that includes a reference to 666, or 616 in some of the manuscripts. 666 and 616 are actually codes for Emperor Nero, not a literal devil.

So where do we go from here? I don’t have all the answers, and I know Rev. Chris has some more to share with us as well. I don’t necessarily recommend trying to sit down and read the whole Bible. I do recommend looking at a study bible and learning how to use the footnotes and references. If you’d like to learn more about how to do that, I’ll be teaching a workshop called Reclaiming the Bible on July 14th from 1-3pm here in the church. We’ll go over how to look up passages and the meanings behind them using study bibles and other reference tools. An announcement will be going out soon about that workshop if you are interested.

There are also great books like John A Buehrens’s book, which I have here if you’re here in person and would like to look at it. I also have a few other books up here that you’re welcome to look through after the service. If you want to take a deeper dive, you can audit a class at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary or another seminary. There will be a class in the fall on the Hebrew Bible taught by one of my favorite professors that is mostly asynchronous, for example.

The Bible that I have discovered in seminary is not the one that I was taught as a child growing up in a Christian church. It is both more violent and more beautiful and poetic than the stories of Adam and Eve, Noah, and Jesus from my childhood had led me to believe. If you find yourself afraid of or unsure about the Christian Bible, know that you are not alone. There are many of us who share those concerns.

I know that many come here with religious trauma from Christianity and the Bible. If engaging with the Bible is painful for you, honor that. No one should have to engage with religious or spiritual practices that cause harm. I am still on my own journey when it comes to the Bible. I have discovered some verses that I really like, such as James chapter 2 which talks about how faith without works is dead, or James chapter 5 which warns rich oppressors that God sees the harm they have caused. I have yet to draw the spiritual comfort from the Bible that I see so many others have-something a part of me wishes I had too.

I’m grateful for the UU value of pluralism, which celebrates diverse theology and honors that we can draw from more than one source of spiritual wisdom. The Christian Bible is one source of spiritual wisdom, but it is not the only source, and I appreciate the opportunity to explore all these wisdom traditions in this religious community. Thank you.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson’s Homily

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

That’s the Gospel of John chapter 3, verse 16 of the New testament.

King James Version. Don’t you just love the King James language? “Believeth.” “Begotten.”

Some of you have heard me talk before about how I was raised as a Southern Baptist and said I wanted to be a minister when I was a very young child, even preached sermons into the cassette tape recorder my parents had given me.

One such “baby” sermon was based upon that bible verse.

It is amazing to me that all of these years later and having rejected the fundamentalist religion of my childhood, I can still remember John 3: 16 word for word. King James version, no less.

Here’s why I think that matters.

Regardless of our religious upbringing, despite a culture that has gown more and more secular over time, the words and images and metaphors of our largely bible-based religious history have become embedded within our our cultural symbols, mythologies, values, rituals, traditions – indeed the very language with which we think and communicate, and therefore imbedded within our individual subconsciouses as well.

So, as our reading earlier describes, the bible is still pervasive in our society, and is a large a part of our Unitarian Universalist liberal religious heritage.

So to though, are more fundamentalist interpretations of the bible, like that of my Southern Baptist childhood, also imbedded within our cultural landscape.

And so part of my spiritual journey through adulthood has been to reclaim the biblical narratives that got so implanted into my formational inner psyche in ways that parallel my evolving values and understandings of life.

I have learned to reinterpret and re-embrace the sacred texts of my younger self – like that one from John 3:16.

A Quest for Freedom

June 20, 2024 by tom Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons

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Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Addae Ama Kraba
June 16, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Whatever way we choose to become indebted economically, thereby chaining ourselves to a workforce that we hate out of necessity is a personal choice of imprisonment. However, true freedom is a natural right that every human being is born with.

Chalice Lighting

At times our own light goes out and is redindled by a spark of another person. Each of us has couse to think with great gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.

Call to Worship

ETERNAL MYSTERY
Carol Meyer

May we open ourselves ever more fully to that Eternal Mystery which lures us onward toward life and creativity.

May we find the courage to live our faith, to speak our truth, and to strive together for a world where freedom abounds and justice truly does roll down like water.

May we know the fullness of love without fear, and the serenity of peace without turmoil. May we hold one another in the deep and tender places with compassion, and may we grace one another by sharing our own vulnerabilities, being ever mindful of the divinity within that makes soulmates of us all.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

THESE WORDS

These words are dedicated to those who survived,
Because they refused to give up and defied statistics.
Because they had faith and trusted in the holy,
Because the expected the worst and were always prepared,
Because they were angry,
Because they could act,
Because they endured humiliation,
Because they turned the other cheek,
Because they looked the other way.

These words are dedicated to those who survived,
Because life is a struggle and they struggled.
Because life is an awakening and they were alert.
Because life is a flowering and they blossomed.
Because life is a gift and they were free to accept it.

These words are dedicated to those who survived.

Sermon

Text of this sermon is not yet available.

Extinguishing the Chalice

We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we hold in our hearts until we are together again.

Benediction

As you go out into the world
in the face of hate,
in the face of exclusion,
in the face of homophobia,
let us answer the call to love.

In the face of racism,
in the face of misogyny,
in the face of bigotry,
we answer the call of open-mindedness.
we answer the call of hope.

As Unitarian Universalists,
now more than ever,
we answer the call to love.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

Lessons from Chalice Camp

June 11, 2024 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Kelly Stokes

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Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson and Kelly Stokes with Chalice Campers
June 9, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

This week we hosted Chalice Camp, a summer day camp exploring UU history, theology, values, and traditions. During worship this Sunday, the campers and counselors will be sharing some of the songs and stories from camp. Join us for this youthful – and very joyful – worship service.

Chalice Lighting

We are Unitarian Universalists,
now we light our chalice.
We are the church of the open minds,
we are the church of the listening ears,
we are the church of the loving hearts
and helping hands.

Call to Worship

It’s a blessing each one of us was born.
It matters what we do with our lives.

What each of us knows about god is a piece of the truth.
We don’t have to do it alone.

– Sheri Prud’homme and Laila Ibrahim.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

LET THIS BE A HOUSE OF PEACE
by Jim Scott

Let this be a house of peace.
Let this be our house of peace.

Let this be a house of peace,
Of nature and humanity,
of sorrow and elation,
Let this be our house,
A haven for the healing,
An open room for question,
and our inspiration.

Let this be a house of peace.
Let this be our house of peace.

Let this be a house of freedom;
Guardian of dignity
and worth held deep inside us,
Let this be our house,
A platform for the free voice,
Where all our sacred differences
here shall not divide us.

Let this be a house of peace.
Let this be our house of peace.

Let all in this house seek truth,
Where scientists and mystics,
abide in reverence here,
Let this be our house,
A house of our creation,
Where works of art and melodies
consecrate the atmosphere.

Let this be a house of peace.
Let this be our house of peace.

Let this be a house of prophecy,
May vision, for our children
Be our common theme.
Let this be our house
Of myth and lore and legend,
Our trove of ancient story,
and cradle of most tender dreams.

Let this be a house of peace.
Let this be our house of peace.

Let this be a house of peace.
Let this be our house of peace.

Sermon

Every day this week, the counselors acted out a play for the campers about our UU history. Today we are sharing two of these. In these stories, we see how UU’s in the past have helped others.

On Tuesday, we talked about how it matters what we do, and we sang this chant.

We’re UUs and we’re here to say,
we’re making a difference in many ways;
some are big and some are small,
but they make a difference
for one and all.

CHALICE CAMP THEATER

SCENE 1: Classroom

NARRATOR: You see before you a classroom at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Anywhere. The teacher and children have just finished lighting the chalice when Miguel asks a question.

MIGUEL: So now do we get to learn how Unitarians and Universalists became one church?

NARRATOR: Not yet. We have another tale to learn. This one is about the chalice. For this we must go back to the 1940’s during World War II.

STORY OF OUR THE FLAMING CHALICE

SCENE 2: Nazi Border

NARRATOR: You see before you a group of Jewish refugees escaping from Eastern Europe due to the Nazi occupation. They come upon a border patrol.

GUARDS: Stop. You may not cross unless you have papers.

REFUGEES: We are going to Lisbon. Here are our papers.

GUARD 1: What is this?

REFUGEE 1: These are papers from the Unitarian Service Committee in America. They are expecting us.

GUARD 1: (speaking to Guard 2) I’ve never seen this seal before, but it looks official.

GUARD 2: Yes, let them through.

GUARD 1: You may pass.

NARRATOR: The refugees went on to Lisbon where they were helped by the Unitarian Service Committee.

UNITARIANS AND UNIVERSALISTS WORK TOGETHER AND UNITE

A few years later, after the war was over, people in Europe did not have enough food, blankets or clothing. The Unitarian Service Committee worked to send supplies from the United States to people in Europe.

Members of Unitarian and Universalist churches packed up goods such as food, blankets and medicine to be sent to Europe. Like this Universalist family from Maine:

SCENE 3: Universalist family home

CHILD: What are you doing?

PARENT: Packing up a box of goods to be sent to Europe. The people there need food, blankets and medicine .

CHILD: But the war is over.

PARENT: It will be awhile before the people there have all that they need.

CHILD: How will it get there?

PARENT: It will be sent by the USC – the Unitarian Service Committee.

CHILD: But aren’t we Universalists, not Unitarians?

PARENT: Our two churches are working together on this project. We have a lot in common with the Unitarians. Here, Becky, help me draw this symbol – it’s called a Flaming Chalice.

CHILD: Why are we drawing this on there?

PARENT: That’s the symbol of the Unitarian Service Committee. They used it during the war on documents which helped refugees leave Europe. When they see the symbol they will know this box contains help.

SCENE 4: (Back to the classroom)

NARRATOR: Thank you guys. Good work on the play.

The Unitarians and Universalists realized that they had much in common. They decided to merge in 1961, becoming one church. Around that same time, the chalice started to be used in churches around the country and now throughout the world. Chalices don’t have to look a particular way. People make them out of clay or wood or metal. Even play-dough. I’ll bet you’ve made chalices in Religious Education.

CHORUS: (singing chalice lighting song)

We are Unitarian Universalists,
now we light our chalice.
We are the church of the open minds,
we are the church of the listening ears,
we are the church of the loving hearts
and helping hands.

NARRATOR: You got it. Now when you go home you can quiz your parents to see if they know the origins of the flaming chalice.

CIVIL RIGHTS LIBERATION MOVEMENTS

NARRATOR: We are going to transport ourselves to three different times that Unitarian Universalists fought for Civil Rights.

Womens’ Suffrage Movement

SCENE 4: (Protest Sign that says “How long must women wait for liberty?” goes up in the air.

UU GROUP: (CHANTING) Voting rights for women. Voting rights for women.

NARRATOR: Women deserve to have a voice in public affairs! Our voices must be heard. It is no longer tolerable that we cannot vote! I say to you all that it is only fair that we be given full emancipation!

UU GROUP: (CHANTING) Voting rights for women. Voting rights for women.

CONSERVATIVE GROUP: (CHANTING) Women at home keep our country strong. Women at home keep our country strong.

UU GROUP: (CHANTING) Voting rights for women. Voting rights for women.

CONSERVATIVE GROUP: (CHANTING) Women at home keep our country strong. Women at home keep our country strong.

UU GROUP: (CHANTING) Voting rights for women. Voting rights for women.

CONSERVATIVE GROUP: (CHANTING) Women at home keep our country strong. Women at home keep our country strong.

UU GROUP: (CHANTING) Voting rights for women. Voting rights for women.

Civil Rights Protest

NARRATOR: All Americans deserve the right to vote.

SCENE 4: Protest 2. (Sign that says “Unitarian Universalists for Voting Rights” goes up in the air.)

NARRATOR: None of us will be free until all of us are free. We stand in support of fellow Americans who are fighting for their right to vote. We join in the struggle with Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. All Americans deserve the right to vote regardless of the color of their skin. The arch of history is long, but it bends toward justice. Civil rights for everyone. Voting rights for everyone.

UU GROUP: (CHANTING) Civil rights for everyone. Civil rights for everyone.

CONSERVATIVE GROUP: (CHANTING) Whites only. Whites only.

UU GROUP: (CHANTING) Civil rights for everyone. Civil rights for everyone.

CONSERVATIVE GROUP: (CHANTING) Whites only. Whites only.

UU GROUP: (CHANTING) Civil rights for everyone. Civil rights for everyone.

Gay Rights Protest

SCENE 5: Protest 3. A sign goes up that says: “Civil Marriage is a civil right.”

NARRATOR: Same-sex couples don’t get the same rights and responsibilities as our straight friends. We have been granted a separate and unequal status. We are second-class citizens. This is wrong. This is un- American. This is not an example of our nation living up to its highest ideals. This must end. Civil marriage is a civil right.

UU GROUP: (CHANTING) Civil Marriage is a civil right. Civil Marriage is a civil right.

CONSERVATIVE GROUP: (CHANTING) Defend traditional marriage. Defend traditional marriage.

UU GROUP: (CHANTING) Civil Marriage is a civil right. Civil Marriage is a civil right.

CONSERVATIVE GROUP: (CHANTING) Defend traditional marriage. Defend traditional marriage.

UU GROUP: Civil Marriage is a civil right. Civil Marriage is a civil right.

NARRATOR: Great job you guys. Come sit down. Let’s talk about this. It is so hard to believe that women couldn’t even vote.

ALL: Yeah!! Maybe in 100 years people will think that about gay marriage.

NARRATOR: So what did all those protests have in common?

They were fighting for people’s rights.

They were making our country better and more fair.

Even people who had those rights were fighting for other groups to get those rights.

NARRATOR: You guys nailed it. Those were the three ideas I wanted you to learn:

1) They were fighting for people’s rights;
2) They were insisting our country live up to its best ideals;
3) Even people who already had those rights were fighting for those groups to get those rights.

And the reason that we are talking about this in church is that Unitarians, and Universalists, and Unitarian Universalists were involved in every one of those liberation movements. That is something to be proud of. Our religion asks us to make a difference in this world.

NARRATOR: That concludes Chalice Camp Theater. (Performers bow.)

Extinguishing the Chalice

Let us remember that each of us is a blessing, that it matters what we do, and that we are not alone, until we light this flame next time.

Benediction

This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.
Ev’rywhere I go, I’m gonna let it shine.
Building up a world, I’m gonna let it shine.
Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

Go in peace.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

</p

2024 Flower Communion

June 4, 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 Michelle LeGrave
June 2, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

This Sunday we will hold our annual Flower Communion Service. Please join us for this much-loved Unitarian Universalist ritual exchange of flowers. During the service you will have the opportunity to add your flower(s) to large bouquets we will create in the sanctuary and to take a different flower with you, symbolizing both the unique, sacred beauty of each of us and the even greater beauty we create when we share that sacred uniqueness with one another.

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 who have an eye for miracles regard the bud now appearing on the bare branch of the fragile young tree. It’s a mere dot, a nothing. But already it’s a flower, already a fruit, already its own death and resurrection.”

– Diego Valeri

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

FLOWER COMMUNION
Lynn Unger

What a gathering-the purple
tongues of iris licking out
at spikes of lupine, the orange
crepe skirts of poppies lifting
over buttercup and daisy.
Who can be grim
in the face of such abundance?
There is nothing to compare,
no need for beauty to compete.
The voluptuous rhododendron
and the plain grass
are equally filled with themselves,
equally declare the miracles
of color and form.
This is what community looks like-
this vibrant jostle, stem by stem
declaring the marvelous joining.
This is the face of communion,
the incarnation once more
gracefully resurrected from winter.
Hold these things together
in your sight-purple, crimson,
magenta, blue. You will
be feasting on this long after
the flowers are gone.

Sermon

On June 4, 1923, Rev. Norbert Capek, the minister of Prague Liberal Religious Fellowship, a Unitarian church, created what has become our flower communion.

Rev. Capek needed a symbolic ritual that would bind people together as they faced the impending threats from Nazism in neighboring Germany ..

Capek turned to the beauty of the surrounding countryside and created a communion where congregants would bring flowers from their gardens, fields or the roadside and share them with one another – symbolizing that just as no two flowers are exactly alike, so each of us has an inherent and unique beauty.

Capek’s wife, Maja, also an ordained minister, came to the United States in 1940 and introduced the ritual to U.S. Unitarians while she was here.

Unfortunately, she was unable to return to Prague at the time, because World War II had broken out.

It was only after the war that she learned that the Nazi’s had sent Capek to a concentration camp.

However, even in the concentration camp, he held a flower ceremony with his fellow prisoners, using whatever flowering weeds they could find, testifying to a love larger than themselves and that would outlive them – a ritual we still practice today – a ritual still symbolizing both the unique, sacred beauty of each of us and the even greater beauty we create when we share that sacred uniqueness with one another.

Extinguishing the Chalice

We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we hold in our hearts until we are together again.

Benediction

As we go out into our world now, let us continue to share our unique gifts.

May we flourish and flower in communion with one another and all that is.

May we bring one another and our world delight.

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

Go in peace.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

2024 Youth Sunday

May 28, 2024 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.

First UU’s High School Youth Group
May 26, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

This Sunday, our High School Youth Group will take us on a journey of coming of age in the twenty-first century. The youth will share music and readings that have resonated with them this year, along with very real and sometimes challenging stories and reflections on mental health, being a teen, and being a UU.

Chalice Lighting

ELEVEN
Sandra Cisneros

“What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday, you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t. You open your eyes, and everything’s just like yesterday, only it’s today. And you don’t feel eleven at all. You feel like you’re still ten. And you are – underneath the year that makes you eleven.

Like some days, you might say something stupid, and that’s the part of you that’s still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama’s lap because you’re scared, and that’s the part of you that’s five. And maybe one day when you’re all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you’re three, and that’s okay. That’s what I tell Mama when she’s sad and needs to cry. Maybe she’s feeling three.

Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one…”

Call to Worship

What connects us all is bagels and coffee and talking in Howson Hall after service.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

BELONGING
Toko-pa Turner

For the rebels and the misfits, the black sheep and the outsiders. For the refugees, the orphans, the scapegoats, and the weirdos. For the uprooted, the abandoned, the shunned and invisible ones.

May you recognize with increasing vividness that you know what you know.

May you give up your allegiances to self-doubt, meekness, and hesitation.

May you be willing to be unlikeable, and in the process be utterly loved.

May you be impervious to the wrongful projections of others, and may you deliver your disagreements with precision and grace.

May you see, with the consummate clarity of nature moving through you, that your voice is not only necessary, but desperately needed to sing us out of this muddle.

May you feel shored up, supported, entwined, and reassured as you offer yourself and your gifts to the world.

May you know for certain that even as you stand by yourself, you are not alone.

Sermon

Homily 1: Pheonix Holley-Hurt

Homily 2: Adlai Parry

Homily 3: E.B. Parry

Homily 4: Isaac Braman-Ray

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

THE COMPETITION
Kimya Dawson

I got good at feeling bad and that’s why I’m still here.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

The Force of Possibility

May 23, 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. Michelle LaGrave
and Casandra Ryan, VP of the UU Service Committee
May 19, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

From fighting for climate justice in the South Pacific, to assisting refugees in Ukraine, supporting migrants in Central America, and helping rebuild civil society in Haiti, please join us to learn about UUSC’s work around the world and how UU’s are partnering to promote peace, justice, and global solidarity.

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 first task in approaching another people,
another culture,
another religion,
is to take off our shoes,
for the place we are approaching is holy,
Else we find ourselves treading on others’ dreams.

– Max Warren, adapted

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

SUMMONS
by Aurora Levins Morales

Last night I dreamed
ten thousand grandmothers
from the twelve hundred corners of the earth
walked out into the gap
one breath deep
between the bullet and the flesh
between the bomb and the family.
They told me we cannot wait for governments.
There are no peacekeepers boarding planes.
There are no leaders who dare to say
every life is precious,
so it will have to be us.
They said we will cup our hands around each heart.
We will sing the earth’s song,
the song of water,
a song so beautiful that vengeance will turn to weeping,
the mourners will embrace,
and grief replace every impulse toward harm.
Ten thousand is not enough, they said,
so, we have sent this dream, like a flock of doves
into the sleep of the world. Wake up. Put on your shoes.
You who are reading this, I am bringing bandages
and a bag of scented guavas from my trees. I think
I remember the tune. Meet me at the corner.
Let’s go.

Centering and Meditation

This is a prayer for all the travelers.
For the ones who start out in beauty, who fall from grace,
who step gingerly,
looking for the way back.
And for those who are born into the margins,
who travel from one liminal space to another,
crossing boundaries in search of center.

This is a prayer for the ones whose births
are a passing from darkness to darkness,
who all their lives are drawn toward the light,
and for those whose journeys
are a winding road that begins and ends in the same place,
though only when the journey is completed
do they finally know where they are.

For all the travelers, young and old, aching and joyful,
weary and full of life;
the ones who are here, and the ones who are not here;
the ones who are like you (and they’re all like you)
and the ones who are different (for in some ways, we each travel alone).

This is a prayer for traveling mercies,
And surefootedness,
for bread for your body and spirit,
for water,
for your safe arrival
and for everyone you see along the way.

– Angela Herrera

Sermon

THE FORCE OF POSSIBILITY
Casandra Ryan, VP of the UU Service Committee

Hello Friends! It is a joy to be with you on this beautiful day.

Thank you for welcoming me, and thank you to Mary and David Overton, for inviting me to be with you today, and to also be a part of last night’s celebration of legacy giving.

I know that many of us are working in different ways to promote justice in the world and at home – you are working to help your local community and protecting our nation’s democracy-thank you! And I know that there is so much strife and devastation around us, in Ukraine, Palestine and Israel, Central America, and in the U.S. So many important causes that demand our attention.

It’s why I am especially grateful to be with you, to share a bit about some good that is happening.

***

In her 2019 message of support to the youth climate strikers, author, Rebecca Solnit shared some important guidance … she opens her letter with this,

I want to say to all the climate strikers today: thank you… for being un- reasonable.
Your actions matter, and your power will be felt.
Today you are the force of possibility.

***

At the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, we are blessed to be in relationship with partners who imagine what is possible. It is this fundamental principle that I believe is needed, for the sake of a world that reflects our commitment to peace, and justice.

I am grateful for the opportunity to share stories of UUSC’s history, and the work we are doing, with our members and our grassroots partners around the globe, and with you.

***

UUSC has always depended on the support and vision of the UU community. And the values of UUSC are at the center of our congregations.

More than a hundred years ago, Lewis Fisher, dean of the Ryder Divinity School in Chicago, famously said, “Universalists are often asked to tell where they stand. The only true answer to give to this question is that we do not stand at all… we move.”

I have the honor to travel around the country visiting UU congregations, and each UU community is so unique. The elements of the service, the configuration of the space, the ambiance; all very different from each other.

However, there is one thing that solidly connects us. At every single gathering, there is a chalice, lit to begin our time of reflection.

It is the chalice itself, the very thing that binds UUs together, that calls us to the work of resisting oppressive systems, such as racism, sexism, and fascism, promoting human rights for all people, and caring for the earth we share.

***

Our chalice was not always the symbol of the Unitarian and Universalist faiths. In 1940, Reverend Charles Rhind Joy was sent by the newly created Unitarian Service Committee, to Lisbon, to aid refugees fleeing the Nazi regime. Dr. Joy worked with Hans Deutsch, an Austrian refugee and artist, to create documents with an official seal to match other travel papers. That seal was the flaming chalice.

It was at this same time when Waitstill and Martha Sharp, were also sent to Europe by the Service Committee-and from these efforts, UUSC was born. If you are interested in learning more about our founding and the Sharps, the terrific Ken Burns documentary, Defying the Nazis, will be shown in this congregation on Wednesday at 6 PM!

***

So, the thing that binds Unitarian Universalists together –the chalice– was founded on our commitment to human rights. Since the founding of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, we have been committed to supporting the work of liberation, even when, and maybe especially when, it involves making trouble for the powers that would deny anyone’s full humanity.

***

UUSC now works with more 30,000 members and over 50 grassroots partners in 20 countries. We galvanize our members to advance Climate Justice, Emergency Response, and the rights of displaced people.

The key to our success is our very dedicated membership and working in close partnership with locally led groups. We invest in these grassroots groups to help them implement their own plans for relief. UUSC engages in the work of human rights through what we call “radical trust.”

Our mission affirms the inherent dignity of all people. We are often the first funder of these partner groups, helping them launch movements for justice and to grow into mighty forces for good.

UUSC partners consistently and stubbornly claim their power and reject the notion that there is little we can do. We are committed to standing with them and helping them achieve their goals-our shared goals.

***

How can we use the power of possibility to imagine action that can lead to different and better futures?

UUSC’s grassroots partners see a better future. Getting to know their work offers us a chance to see new possibilities. Through them, we reach beyond ourselves, to marshal our efforts and resources, to create a new world.

Let’s learn a bit more about the important ways we are all advancing justice:

With our migrant justice work, for example, UUSC focuses on three aspects of the crisis people are experiencing. First on supporting grassroots organizations working so people can remain safely at home, in Honduras and Nicaragua and Guatemala. And providing safety to people migrating along the trails through Mexico, and finally, access to asylum here in the United States.

One of the ways we are supporting access to asylum is in partnership with UU congregations, and other progressive faith communities, to provide support to the congregations as they sponsor and accompany asylum seekers. We are also doing similar work to support trans folks in the United States through the Pink Haven Network, helping them to relocate and resettle in safety and community.

Recently, in another area of work, 27 Pacific Islands Students worked with UUSC to form a group fighting Climate Change. They took their vision from a theoretical law school project to the floor of the United Nations General Assembly, where it was adopted by unanimous consent. UUSC was their first funder and, we were able to connect them with even larger funders, so that they could become a force for indigenous communities across the globe.

In Haiti, we have launched an emergency response fund to support our partners and people facing extreme violence and immediate threats to their lives. We do this by building upon the deep relationships we have established in the country over the last decade. This work at its core is all about relationships.

UUSC partners cannot deny the devastating systems of oppression that order so much of our world. Yet with courage and imagination, they resist.

In this work, we see possibility and courage, in our partners and with UUs across the country. And I love the way that our being a small organization makes BIG, important things possible.

***

A few weeks ago, I returned from a trip to Poland where we visited with partners who are supporting refugees from Ukraine.

One after the other, I found each of our partners, as I always do, to be immensely inspiring and dedicated to their cause.

One group, Toward Dialogue is working with Romani people in Eastern Europe, including Roma refugees from Ukraine, a largely ignored population. The Alliance for Black Justice Poland is a team that fights against the racism that is rampant in Eastern Europe and, among many NGO’s.

We are working with groups to support refugees and combat human trafficking. Martynka is the only group in Poland that exists specifically to protect refugee women from gender-based violence. And sadly, the need is great.

I am humbled by the brilliance and compassion of our partners. And they are so grateful to us and to you, and those who support UUSC. Margo from Toward Dialogue, told us that UUSC is different. We listen, our support is flexible, unrestricted, and long-term.

And I hear this again and again. From UUSC partners all over the world. They tell us that UUSC works differently. Ours is a better model, one that works. All of us together, we are creating possibilities. We are lighting sparks of hope that burst into fire of commitment and justice.

***

In rejecting the notion that there is no other way, and little we can do, aid workers in Poland, the Pacific Students, grassroots groups in Burma, feminist farmers in Nicaragua, water defenders in Honduras, democracy activists in Haiti, are recreating a world where all may flourish and thrive.

It is not always easy to see what is possible.

BUT, what our partners have shared with us, provides me with the hope that we can, and we, in fact, do effect change. Here are just a few more examples from what I have heard from them: Like,

Ana Lorena from Mexico City. She is working to reunite lost and displaced people, along the multiple migrant trails that runs through Mexico to the United States, who said that, together, “We are putting Justice on the Move.”
And Joseph from the South Pacific, who works with indigenous groups fighting to save their countries and cultures from the ravages of climate change, he boldly declares that “We are not drowning, we are fighting.”
Jasmin and Marissa, of LEGIS in Macedonia are supporting refugees from North Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East. They shared that where larger aid agencies swoop in and absorb available resources and staff, their relationship with UUSC has transformed the organization, making it stronger so they can aid more refugees and save more lives.
Kasia from Poland, she works at the Association for Women’s Rights. Kasia said that she remains hopeful because she knows that where there is injustice, good people will organize.
And Juan Antonio, from Honduras – he is one of my favorites. Juan Antonio is a quiet, sweet man, defending human rights defenders from corrupt corporate and government officials who are stealing land and resources, and committing crimes with absolute impunity, exasperating the migration crisis. His life is constantly under threat. He has been wrongfully detained multiple times, and his friends and coworkers have been murdered. Yet he insists that “Hope is the act of defiance I commit each day.”

As a staff member of UUSC, it is one of my great privileges to travel to meet these partners and learn about their life-saving work. It is also my privilege to visit congregations, to thank folks in person for their social justice efforts.

I know this congregation is doing so much good both locally and globally. I am grateful to you for standing with UUSC. Though, I am hoping that more of you will join our ranks. A member of this congregation has offered to match donations of new or renewed supporters, up to $2,000!

A gift of any size will make you a member-and all gifts make a difference. To those of you who are supporting UUSC, I thank you.

Whether you are a current member or not, I want you all to be confident that this organization is doing great things in the name of Unitarian Universalism, and that you are a part of that.

The struggle for justice is real. But if you are ever tempted by despair, please remember UUSC and our partners. And know that we can all resist injustice, by joining together.

Together, we are a force of possibility. 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

We have a calling in this world:

We are called to honor diversity,
to respect differences with dignity,
and to challange those who would forbit it.

We are people of a wide path.

Let us abide in affection
and go our way in peace.

– Jean M Rowe

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

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

Searching for Asherah

May 13, 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
May 12, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Did you know that God had a “wife”? Her name was Asherah and stories of this old Hebrew Goddess remain in the Bibles of today. On this Mother’s Day, let us reclaim the story of the Queen of Heaven.

Chalice Lighting

Blessed is the dark, in which our dreams stir and are revealed.
Blessed is the dark of earth, where seeds come to life.
Blessed are the depths of the ocean where no light shimmers:
the womb of all earthly life.
Blessed is the light into which we awake,
the light that sparkles on the waters: that calls the tree forth from the seed, and calls the shadow forth from the tree.
Blessed are we as we move through darkness and through light.

Call to Worship

THERE IS ROOM FOR YOU HERE
Mary Edes

If God is your strength and companion
and prayer the means of centering your thoughts,
There is room for you here.
If the teachings of the Buddha give you clarity and calm in the midst of human striving,
There is room for you here
If Gaia’s seasonal rhythms lead you best through the myriad steps of Life’s great dance.
There is room for you here.
If the still mysterious capacity and power of the Mind, stirs your imagination and quickens your pulse,
There is room for you here.
Rest now, beside that spring, wherever it is for you
And let your attention go to the small places inside or out in the great wide world –
places or people in need of healing or for which your heart is filled with thanksgiving,
And in that spirit, let us be silent together for a time.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

REMEMBER
(excerpt) by Joy Harjo

Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.

Centering

by the Rev. Victoria Safford

What if there were a universe, a cosmos, which began in shining blackness, out of nothing, out of fire, out of a single, silent breath, and into it came billions and billions of stars, stars beyond imagining, and near one of them a world, a blue-green world so beautiful that learned clergymen could not even speak about it cogently, and brilliant scientists, with their physics, their mathematics, their empirical, impressionistic musing, in trying to describe it, would begin to sound like poets?

What if there were a universe in which a world was born out of a smallish star, and into that world (at some point) flew red-winged blackbirds, and into it swam sperm whales, and into it bloomed crocuses, and into it blew wind to lift the tiniest hairs on naked arms in spring, and into it at some point grew onions, out of soil, and in went Mt. Everest and also the coyote we’ve spotted in the woods about a mile from here, just after sunrise on these mornings when the moon is full? (The very scent of him makes his brother, our dog, insane with fear and joy and ancient inbred memory.) Into that world came animals and elements and plants, and imagination, the mind and the mind’s eye. If such a universe existed and you noticed it, what would you do? What song would come out of your mouth, what prayer, what praises, what sacred offering, what whirling dance, what religion and what reverential gesture would you make to greet that world, every single day that you were in it?

We begin our candlelighting time with a communal ritual, honoring our most ancient of human ancestors and milestones …

Ardi 4.4 mya – Ardipithecus Ramidus (most complete early hominid skeleton, about 110 pounds, 3’11”, likely bipedal on ground, quadrupedal in trees, diet of fruit and nuts)

Lucy 3.2 million years ago – Australopithecus Afarensis

Over 2 million years ago – genus Homo emerges, the earliest hominins, use of stone tools begins (homo habilis)

Control of fire by humans, 1.5 million years ago (homo erectus)

Earliest evidence of homo sapiens outside of Africa, 210,000 years ago (Greece)

Mitochondrial Eve, 150,000 years ago

Earliest evidence for agriculture, now at 23,000 years ago (Sea of Galilee); certainly by 12,000 years ago

Biblical Eve: mythic story of leaving the Garden of Eden (out of Africa); transition to agriculture; transition to hidden menses and monogamy

Miriam 1200ish years ago

Our individual mothers: I am Michelle, the daughter of Nancy, who is the daughter of Eleanor, who is the daughter of Henrietta, who is the daughter of Eleanor, who is the daughter of Martha and I light this candle for all the mothers of my line.

I now invite you to light candles honoring your own lines of descent, or whatever it is you need to honor during this time.

Sermon

Once, early on a drizzly Saturday morning, I went to see the Dali Llama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism. As I sat in this gigantic outdoor football stadium, he said: Think about this:

Everyone of us here, some ten thousand of us, has a mother. And he paused for a moment, allowing that knowledge to sink into our very beings. A hush fell over the stadium, so that in the silence, I could almost hear the thoughts of others, and I certainly felt the sense of amazement, as we took in this knowledge – that we are all connected to each other in such a fundamental way. It’s such a simple fact, isn’t it? We were all, each and everyone of us, born of a woman. And, I’d guess, it’s a fact most of us take for granted.

It wasn’t always so; this taking for granted of new life. Disconnection from our bodies and disconnection from nature is a rather modern phenomenon. Today, in this country, most of us were born in a hospital- in a sterile environment; with quick and easy access to life-saving drugs, equipment, and procedures; with quick and easy access to the miracle of medical technology.

For the millennia before the advent of modern medicine, we were born, that is our human ancestors were born – in the grasses of the savannah, within the confines of caves, under the protection of thatched roofs. Our survival, and the survival of our mothers, was always in question. For our survival, we relied on the wisdom of the women who had gone before, on the oral traditions that had been passed down from generation to generation, on the medicinal value of plants and herbs growing nearby. And – we relied on the Goddess.

We relied on the Goddess. Throughout ancient times and ancient cultures, it was the Goddess who was revered. Archaeological evidence from Palestine of the 13th and 14th centuries BCE in the form of clay figurines, with their emphasis on the elements of human fertility and survival, tells us that our earliest religious impulse, as humans, was to worship the Goddess. This makes sense to me – for as people we were intimately tied to the cycles and rhythms of nature, of the earth. We knew life and death, we knew the seasons of the year, we knew seedtime and harvest – in a way most of us, today, cannot and do not know. And we, that is our human ancestors, made the connection between human sexuality and reproduction and the implantation of seeds in Mother Earth, for our very survival depended on both.

Today, we celebrate Mother’s Day. Mothers all over the country will be blessed with brunch, courted with cards, favored with flowers, and showered with small gifts of time and treasure. Joy and good humor abound, such as was sent in this email chain, when 2nd graders were asked questions about the relationships between mothers and God. Here is a sampling of just a few of them: Why did God make mothers? She’s the only one who knows where the scotch tape is. How did God make mothers? Magic plus superpowers plus a lot of stirring. And finally, what ingredients are mothers made of? Clouds and angel hair and everything nice in the world and one dab of mean.

Of course, Mother’s Day is not only joy, good humor, and celebration. On this day, children mourn the deaths of their mothers, mothers mourn the deaths of their children, and some children grieve the loss of the mothers they wish they had had or never knew.

When the Dali Llama spoke to that stadium full of people, reminding us of our common origin from our mothers, I do not know if he was aware of the approaching Mother’s Day holiday here in the United States or not. He taught of the importance of a mother’s touch, of a nurturing touch, in the first few months of human life; of its essential function in brain development. And he spoke of his own mother, telling stories from his childhood. He told us that his mother was a person of great kindness and compassion and he spoke of being spoiled by her. During the earliest time of his life, in the first two years, his mother carried him about on her shoulders just about everywhere she went. He said that when he wanted her to go this way, he tugged on this ear, and she went this way. And he said when he wanted her to go that way, he tugged on that ear, and she went that way. But sometimes, sometimes … she wouldn’t do as he wished, and he tugged on both of her ears like this.

Yes, this story is both funny and cute, and for that reason alone, it is one of my favorites. Without fail, I smile each time I remember him telling this story. To me, though, the wonder of this teaching is its humility; and the brilliance of this teaching is its universality. For all are not mothers, and many shall never be; but we are all children of mothers, we all were born of a woman, all- even Jesus, even Muhammed, even Buddha, even the Dali Llama. For this teaching gets at the heart of life, the cycles of life and death, or as the Dali Llama would say, birth and rebirth; for this is the universal connection of all human life.

Earlier, I spoke of the importance of the Goddess in early human religion; yet, our culture has developed in such a way that it is a male God who is most commonly worshiped. How did that happen? Where did the Goddess go? Did she simply disappear with the advent of monotheism? Almost, almost, but not quite … as we shall see, Biblical scholars and archaeologists have been busy rediscovering and reclaiming the Goddess of Ancient Israel.

In one of the most intriguing stories of the Hebrew Bible, God, who is very upset with the people of Israel, speaks to Jeremiah and says to him:

“As for you, do not pray for this people, do not raise a cry or prayer on their behalf, and do not intercede with me, for I will not hear you. Do you not see what they are doing in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? The children gather wood, the fathers kindle fire, and the women knead dough, to make cakes for the queen of heaven; and they pour out drink offerings to other gods, to provoke me to anger.” (Jeremiah 7: 16-18)

Later in the story, after the first Temple had been destroyed and many of the Israelites were exiled to Babylonia; Jeremiah then speaks to a crowd of refugees who had fled Jerusalem, explaining that they cannot escape the wrath of God by fleeing to Egypt.

“Then all the men who were aware that their wives had been making offerings to other gods, and all the women who stood by, a great assembly, all the people who lived in Pathros in the land of Egypt, answered Jeremiah: ‘As for the word that you have spoken to us in the name of the LORD, we are not going to listen to you. Instead, we will do everything that we have vowed, make offerings to the queen of heaven and pour out libations to her, just as we and our ancestors, our kings and our officials, used to do in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem. We used to have plenty of food, and prospered and saw no misfortune. But from the time we stopped making offerings to the queen of heaven and pouring out libations to her, we have lacked everything and have perished by the sword and by famine.’ And the women said, ‘Indeed we will go on making offerings to the queen of heaven and pouring out libations to her; do you think that we made cakes for her, marked with her image, and poured out libations to her without our husbands’ being involved?'” (Jeremiah 44: 15-19)

There are many, many interpretations of these passages of Jeremiah. Some say that the Queen of Heaven was Ishtar or Astarte, a foreign goddess; others say she was Asherah. Some say that she was the consort of the LORD of Israel; others say that she simply represented the feminine side of God. I believe the strongest evidence supports the idea that the Queen of Heaven was Asherah, the wife of the old Hebrew God EI, whose worship flourished throughout Biblical times. William Dever, a professor of archaeology, believes that the writers of the Hebrew Bible in their monotheistic interpretation were actually battling a widespread and well-entrenched folk religion; a religion practiced not just by the women, but by the men as well; a religion which revered and worshiped the Queen of Heaven in all of her local manifestations; a religion which worshiped a Hebrew goddess, yes, a Hebrew goddess, through and through.

Eventually, as we all know, monotheism and a patriarchal God did win the battle for the religion of the people, or at least most people. Worship of the Goddess continued, albeit underground and in secret, and survived through millennia of persecution; finally re-emerging in the light of day, or perhaps, by the light of the moon, in the form of pagan and wiccan traditions practiced today by UUs and many others, the world over. Other vestiges remain as well. The goddess has survived in mystical Judaism as the Shekinah, the feminine aspect of God who dwells in this world; and the Goddess has survived in all of Judaism as the Sabbath bride. In Christianity, the Goddess has survived in the form of Mary, as the human mother of a divine God; a story long familiar to many pagan traditions.

Over the course of time, as human societies grew increasingly complex and more and more patriarchal; women lost much of their stories, much of their power, much of their access to the divine. Women lost their roles as prophets and priests. Women lost their Goddess.

As Unitarians and Universalists, we have our proud stories of reclaiming the place of women in ministry. Universalists lay claim to what was perhaps the first modern ordination of a woman to ministry; most likely, the Rev. Olympia Brown in the year 1863. Unitarians took their turn, a few years later, with the ordination of the Rev. Celia Burleigh.

Lest we be too proud of ourselves, it is also important to remember that the history of women in Unitarianism and Universalism was also sometimes problematic. Our triumphs were often more the exception than the rule. Despite our early ordination of women, many congregations rarely or never called a female minister. It wasn’t until 2017 that we elected a woman to the presidency of the Unitarian Universalist Association for the first time.

As we journey forward in our quest to regain the divine feminine, I am reminded of some old ideas about the unity of God. In Platonic, Hellenistic thought, society was organized in a hierarchy of those thought to be farthest away from God and those thought to be closest to and most like God (or the gods). Not surprisingly, slave women were on the bottom of the hierarchy. On the next rung up – slave men; on the next – free women; and on the next – free men. At the very top of the hierarchy, those thought to be most like God, were androgynous or gender-less people.

A similar line of thought continued in the writings of early Gnostic Christians found at Nag Hammadi. They believed that the end times would manifest as a return to the beginning times – to the time before humans were divided into male and female; when humans were simply one; one gender.

This yearning for unity, for the Goddess and the God, is reflected in these words by a UU minister, the Rev. Shirley Ann Ranck. She writes this as if from the perspective of Gomar, a devotee of Asherah, who is speaking to her husband Hosea, a prophet of YHWH, the LORD of Israel:

“Are our Gods so different? Must it be one or the other? Can we not dwell together in harmony? Is Asherah so different from the Gods of your ancestors, Hosea? … Were they so different? Elshaddai and Asherah? The Divinity of the Mountains and the God of the Air and Rain … Forgive me as I forgive you. Even as our Gods, the great YHWH and the great Asherah forgive us. May they live side by side. Although I know in my heart that may never be, I still pray for it …. And some day your world-transcending God will be reconciled with my world-renewing God, peace shall reign, and we shall be together again in the land.”

And so our search for Asherah continues. May we reclaim the Goddess while retaining the God. 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

Our circle is open but unbroken,
May the Goddess and the God go with you,
and all the protection they provide.
All are one.
Merry meet and merry part and merry meet again.
Amen and Blessed Be.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

Exponential Theology

May 11, 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
May 5, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

We often talk about how divided we are politically, societally, and religiously. Many a magazine article lately has even featured how so many of us are even feeling divided among the many parts within ourselves. What if we valued these differences though? What if, with loving intent, we put them into conversation with one another? Might not this pluralism help us all grow our own depth and breadth of being by many multiples?

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

– Walt Whitman
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.

– Rumi
There are many ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

THE SACRED HOOP

Then I was standing
on the highest mountain
of them all,

And round beneath me
was the whole hoop
of the world.

And while I stood there
I saw more than I can tell

And I understood
more than I saw.

For I was seeing
in the sacred manner
the shape of all things
of the spirit.

And the shapes
as they must live
together like one being.

And I saw that the sacred hoop
of my people
was one of many hoops
that make one circle,
wide as daylight and starlight,

And in the center grew one
mighty flowering tree

To shelter all the children
of one mother
and one father.

And I saw that it was holy.

– Black Elk

Sermon

Text of this sermon is not yet available.

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

Silent No More

April 28, 2024 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.

Nancy Mohn Barnard
April 28, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Lately, bad news is omnipresent: climate change, polarized politics, and inequity abound. But Unitarian Universalism offers a message of good news; we just need the courage to share 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

YOU ARE BELOVED AND YOU ARE WELCOME HERE
Joan Javier-Duval

Voice 1: You are beloved and you are welcome here

Voice 2: Whether tears have fallen from your eyes this past week or gleeful laughter has spilled out of your smiling mouth

Voice 1: You are beloved and you are welcome here

Voice 2: Whether you are feeling brave or broken-hearted; defiant or defeated; fearsome or fearful

Voice 1: You are beloved and you are welcome here

Voice 2: Whether you have untold stories buried deep inside or stories that have been forced beyond the edges of comfort

Voice 1: You are beloved and you are welcome here

Voice 2: Whether you have made promises, broken promises, or are renewing your promises,

Voice 1: You are beloved and you are welcome here

Voice 2: Whatever is on your heart However it is with your soul in this moment

Voice 1: You are beloved and you are welcome here

Voice 2: In this space of welcome and acceptance, commitment and re-commitment, of covenant and connection,

Let us worship together.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

I WANT TO BE WITH PEOPLE LIKE YOU
Dana Worsnop

Often people say that they love coming to a place with so many like-minded people.

I know just what they are getting at — and I know that they aren’t getting it quite right.

I don’t want to be with a bunch of people who think just like me.

I want to be in a beloved community where I don’t have to think like everyone else to be loved, to be eligible for salvation.

I want to be with people who value compassion, justice, love and truth, though they have different thoughts and opinions about all sorts of things.

I want to be with independent-minded people of good heart.

I want to be with people who have many names and no name at all for God.

I want to be with people who see me in me goodness and dignity, who also see my failings and foibles, and who still love me.

I want to be with people who feel their inter-connection with all existence and let it guide their footfalls upon the earth.

I want to be with people who see life as a paradox and don’t always rush to resolve it.

I want to be with people who are willing to walk the tight rope that is life and who will hold my hand as I walk mine.

I want to be with people who let church call them into a different way of being in the world.

I want to be with people who support, encourage and even challenge each other to higher and more ethical living.

I want to be with people who inspire one another to follow the call of the spirit.

I want to be with people who covenant to be honest, engaged and kind, who strive to keep their promises and hold me to the promises I make.

I want to be with people who give of themselves, who share their hearts and minds and gifts.

I want to be with people who know that human community is often warm and generous, sometimes challenging and almost always a grand adventure.

In short, I want to be with people like you.

Sermon

When you hear the word evangelism, what comes to mind? For many of us the word evangelism can have negative connotations, bringing to mind religious trauma from our pasts, in which we were maybe proselytized to or pressured into being saved. Indeed, nowadays the word evangelism has come to be associated with a particular sect of Christianity and not the actual dictionary definition, which means to spread the “good news” of the gospel. Evangelism no longer represents good news, but rather, has become a negative word with which we want nothing to do.

As Unitarian Universalists, our tradition has become a haven for those who have experienced trauma from evangelism. And yet, today I’m going to make an argument for reclaiming the word evangelism, specifically for the Unitarian Universalist tradition. Though many of you may cringe — I’d like to argue that evangelism is needed in the Unitarian Universalist church. Now, I realize that the thought of an evangelical Unitarian Universalist tradition may be triggering. Indeed, for many years, anything that even hinted at evangelism triggered me. But over time, as I have recovered from my past, the negative connotation of evangelism has slowly lessened.

Evangelism first became a loaded and negative word for me back in 1992, when I first moved to Georgetown, Texas. At the age of sixteen, in the middle of my sophomore year of high school, my parents uprooted my northern California family to relocate there. The culture shock was real. Whereas back home religion was something that people kept to themselves, at school, the “What’s your name?” question was inevitably followed up with “where do you go to church?”

Even the public school had undercurrents of Christianity. For example, one day the administration called a general assembly, and we all filed into the gym, prepared for the usual pep rallies, student recognitions and school announcements. The gym, however, had been transformed into what looked like a prototype of the modern CrossFit gym. Gymnastic mats lined the gym floor; one foot stacks of plywood were dispersed throughout the set; and a variety of weights, ropes and other props filled in the remaining spaces. This assembly was obviously no ordinary school function.

The principal excitedly announced that today we had special visitors. And as he gave introductions, ten, huge, Hulk-Hogan looking men entered the gymnasium and took up positions around the floor mats. They then proceeded to put on an electrifying show that involved karate chopping through stacks of plywood along with other feats of strength. At the end of the show, the students cheered with wild abandon, and the men invited us to another show that evening-a show that promised even more amazing strength stunts.

My friend and I decided that we would absolutely attend that evening’s show. After all, what else was going on that night in our small town? Hours later we pulled up to a church on the outskirts of town, which struck us as an odd venue for a muscle show. However, it could easily be explained by the lack of suitable venues in the area. We entered, took our seats and soon, the same muscle men were entering the auditorium, flexing and showing off their muscles, but this time, Christian rock and not heavy metal blasted through the speakers.

Things only continued getting weird. The muscle men led the audience in an opening prayer. What then followed was almost two hours fined with one testimony after the next. Each of the men got a chance to tell their stories. Stories about losing one’s path, finding Jesus, and God gifting them with supernatural strength; the latter of which allowed them to put on shows, travel around the United States and testify. As audience members, we were there to witness the abilities with which the Lord had endowed these men. The primary message was that the Lord provides-and even rewards-those who are faithful and willing to proselytize in his name.

Now, I’m not fond of bait and switch situations, and although 1 wanted to see them perform more feats of strength, I couldn’t handle the evangelism that was the show}s focus. I was also annoyed by the knowledge that the school knew what this group represented, and yet, never warned the student body that the evening’s show would have a Christian focus. My friend and I decided that we were done and headed to the exits to leave. As we stepped outside the auditorium, a huge guy — who looked like a bouncer — stopped us. He began to grill us on why we were leaving, and we tried to explain that we had seen the show earlier that day. Soon the conversation changed tones, as the man began to question us about our beliefs in Jesus and the power of God. My friend and I eyed the exit door with longing, calculating whether or not we could make it to the parking lot and lose this guy who was doing his best to keep us there. But we were intimidated by this man who towered over us. And finally, we decided to give up and hopelessly slunk back into the auditorium.

When the show was finally over, I was fuming — I resented that we had been pressured to stay; I was annoyed that the man had intimidated us, and moreover, that he had intentionally done so. Instead of making me feel fired up about Jesus and God, I began to suspect that Christianity was a scam full of con artists that used scare tactics to elicit belief. Indeed, this experience had the opposite effect of what it had intended-instead of celebrating the gifts that faith can bring, it made me want to run as far away from Christianity as fast as possible.

Unfortunately, this incident was one of several evangelizing experiences that I had encountered in the first few months I spent in Georgetown. All of the experiences felt like someone was pushing views onto me — rigid views that did not invite discussion. Moreover, in several of these encounters, I was told that I was going to hell, despite the fact that — at that time –I was a Christian. Indeed, these experiences had the after effect of me leaving the Christian church for good. It took me years to recover from some of these experiences.

Fast forward to last year when I had to take a mission and evangelism class at my Presbyterian seminary. I dreaded taking the class, for despite the many years since my traumatic experiences, the word evangelism still elicited a negative reaction. However, the class surprised me. Instead of encouraging us to evangelize and find ourselves some Christian converts, it instead examined evangelism from an academic, colonialist perspective. When we were expected to read a book on evangelism and present our findings to the class, I was excited when my professor allowed me and two of my fellow Unitarian Universalists to form a group and research evangelism in our own faith tradition. The book we chose was entitled Seeking Paradise: A Unitarian Mission for Our Times, and it was written by Stephen Lingwood who is a British Unitarian.

The book focuses on Unitarian evangelism and missionaries in Britain. For example, it talks about Richard Wright, who spread the message of Universalism long before the merging of the Unitarian and Universalist churches in 1961; and Joseph Tuckerman who created a mission in London and worked on behalf of the poor. My favorite example, however, of Unitarian evangelism was Charles Dall, a Unitarian missionary who went to India to seek converts. Dall, however, ended up being the convert when he decided to join a liberal Hindu reformist movement. I find this anecdote to be particularly amusing, as Dall’s conversion is such a Unitarian Universalist move-his openness to the Hindu faith exemplifies our fourth principle, which is the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. In his attempt to spread the values of the faith, he remained open to truth and meaning and found it in Hinduism. This is all to say that the Unitarian Universalist church does have a history of evangelism, though as we have furthered ourselves from our Christian roots, we have also stopped evangelizing efforts. But today, my friends, I’d like to argue that it’s time to restart our evangelizing efforts, for in 2024, the Unitarian Universalist church has a heretofore unseen opportunity for growth.

According to the Pew Research Center, an increasing number of Americans are leaving Christianity and instead identifying as “Nones” (spelled n-o-n-e-s and not n-u-n-s). The term “nones” refers to those with “no particular religious identification,” which includes atheists and agnostics. Indeed, in 2019, the Pew Research Center showed that over the past ten years, Christianity had lost approximately 12% of their population. This Christian attrition can be seen across the northern hemisphere, although Christianity continues to grow south of the equator. Meanwhile, research tells us that 26% of people now identify as “Nones.” And although I have not conducted a formal survey, I can tell you anecdotally from my work in Religious Education both with children and adults that Unitarian Universalist Churches have a significant number of If Nones” in our congregations. Just because people are atheist or unable to identify with a mainline tradition doesn’t mean that spiritual needs do not exist. People long for communities and connections; for a space in which they can unite with others in the name of social justice. The Unitarian Universalist church can fulfill that need.

And yet, few people know about the existence of our unique and welcoming tradition. Even at seminary — where I am surrounded by people who are smart and knowledgeable about faith traditions, many people are unfamiliar with the Unitarian Universalist church. Often people simply refer to us as Unitarians, while being unaware of how important the Universalist name is to our identities. While the word Unitarian reflects our belief in one God, no matter what the name, universalism reflects our belief that everyone is elected; our faith is one of universal love-a message that is much needed in today’s isolating and lonely world. In many ways, my fellow UU students and I have inadvertently found ourselves acting as evangelists on behalf of our faith, as we try to educate others on the meaning and importance of being both a “Unitarian” and a “Universalist.” And I must say that my peers have been nothing but curious and gracious.

But if even seminarians lack a full understanding of Unitarian Universalism, imagine the population at large. Many of my friends know that I’m involved in the Unitarian Universalist church and that I’m in seminary, working towards ordination. But no matter how many times I tell them that I’m not Christian, they inevitably forget; “church” only has one meaning to them, which is Christianity. When I explain what our Unitarian Universalist church is like, they often look at me in disbelief. “What do you mean there are atheists in your church? Why would an atheist go to church?” At this point in the conversation, I often point out that just because people don’t believe in God doesn’t mean that they’re not seeking meaning, truth and knowledge. Moreover, many people are looking for a community in which their questions and beliefs — no matter how unusual — will be welcomed with open arms. The Unitarian Universalist church is the answer that many people are inadvertently seeking, as we welcome all who are welcoming and affirming; all who are willing to enter into covenant as we work towards justice and truth.

Unfortunately, few people know of our existence and what we stand for. But it’s time to correct this problem; it’s time to tell the world of our existence. More and more I’m receiving questions from people who are interested in this faith. I suspect that even with our silence, word is slowly spreading.

Now is the time for the Unitarian Universalist church to come into its own. Our faith tradition is both beautiful and unique. It is a tradition that welcomes a” inquiry; a tradition that acknowledges the validity of all sources and experiences; a tradition that cares about equity for a” humans. Though it pains me to think of myself as an evangelist, I nonetheless can no longer be shy about sharing this faith with others, for the Unitarian Universalist truth is truly the Good News that many people seek.

SO, if you have friends or family who find themselves in need of a spiritual community-particularly one that embraces all those who are welcoming – please tell them about the Unitarian Universalist church. And though I know it may feel distasteful, I encourage you to invite people to our services. Studies show that people are more likely to attend a church service when they are invited by a friend. Or don’t be afraid to wear your Unitarian Universalist shirts whenever you can. Tell people what we are about; tell people that we are affirming and believe that everyone is of the elect; spread the good news that there is a place for everyone within our walls, for we are Unitarian Universalists, and we recognize the inherent worth and dignity of every person as they engage in the free and responsible search for truth and meaning.

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

Go forth in simplicity.
Find and walk the path
that leads to compassion and wisdom,
that leads to happiness, peace and ease.
Welcome the stranger and
open your heart to a world in need of healing.
Be courageous before the forces of hate.
Hold and embody a vision of the common good that
serves the needs of all people.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

First UU is Doing Justice

April 24, 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
April 21, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Our church and our faith have a long history of doing justice in our world. We will explore our current efforts to build the Beloved Community and how you can get involved. Our Unitarian Universalist faith calls us to do justice, as does our church’s mission. Our spiritual practices sustain us in that work. In turn, building Beloved Community can be a vital source of our own experience of spiritual nourishment and transcendence.

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

BELOVED COMMUNITY

“Dr. King’s Beloved Community is a global vision, in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth. In the Beloved Community, poverty, hunger and homelessness will not be tolerated because international standards of human decency will not allow it. Racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry and prejudice will be replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood. In the Beloved Community, international disputes will be resolved by peaceful conflict resolution and reconciliation of adversaries, instead of military power. Love and trust will triumph over fear and hatred. Peace with justice will prevail over war and military conflict.”

– The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change (Adapted)

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

Exerpt from MARTIN LUTHER KING JR’S WARE LECTURE to the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in 1966

I’m sure that each of you has read that arresting little story from the pen of Washington Irving entitled Rip Van Winkle. One thing that we usually remember about the story of Rip Van Winkle is that he slept twenty years. But there is another point in that story which is almost always completely overlooked: it is the sign on the inn of the little town on the Hudson from which Rip went up into the mountains for his long sleep. When he went up, the sign had a picture of King George III of England. When he came down, the sign had a picture of George Washington, the first president of the United States.

When Rip Van Winkle looked up at the picture of George Washington he was amazed, he was completely lost. He knew not who he was. This incident reveals to us that the most striking thing about the story of Rip Van Winkle is not merely that he slept twenty years, but that he slept through a revolution.

While he was peacefully snoring up in the mountains a revolution was taking place in the world, that would alter the face of human history. Yet Rip knew nothing about it; he was asleep. One of the great misfortunes of history is that all too many individuals and institutions find themselves in a great period of change and yet fail to achieve the new attitudes and outlooks that the new situation demands. There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution.

And there can be no gainsaying of the fact that a social revolution is taking place in our world today. We see it in other nations in the demise of colonialism. We see it in our own nation, in the struggle against racial segregation and discrimination, and as we notice this struggle we are aware of the fact that a social revolution is taking place in our midst. Victor Hugo once said that there is nothing more powerful in all the world than an idea whose time has come. The idea whose time has come today is the idea of freedom and human dignity, and so allover the world we see something of freedom explosion, and this reveals to us that we are in the midst of revolutionary times. An older order is passing away and a new order is coming into being.

Sermon

Sarah Frankie Summers

I always thought of the flame in the chalice as representing the spark of the divine within each of us. I guess that I came up with that as a kid because sparks, fire, yeah it made sense. I knew the story about the Austrian artist and fighting the Nazis and just figured it made a cool origin story but didn’t think about how that affected my life in the present day.

I also figured the chalice was vague enough to be open to interpretation, since a “free and equal search for truth and meaning” is a core of our religion, so people were going to have their own interpretations of it, and that’s a good thing.

Interestingly, a pamphlet about the flaming chalice by Susan Ritchie says this about it:

When we light the chalice in worship, we illuminate a world that we feel called upon to serve with love and a sense of justice. The flame is what one of our beloved congregational hymns terms “The Fire of Commitment.”

Well, now that resonates with me too. Especially because the story I was told while interning at the Unitarian Universalist United Nations Office was that the Unitarians and the Universalists started working together at the UN before the organizations even finished merging. So I have been describing this religion as a “social justice faith” since I was nineteen.

At least from this perspective (and of course we can tell our stories from many perspectives that shed different lights depending on what we want to convey) – so at least from this perspective, the present day iteration of Unitarian Universalism is largely predicated on our work for justice and making the world a better place. But I always framed it as work the church was doing – again, not necessarily thinking beyond my own passion for recycling and ethical eating. But thinking of this flaming chalice as the Fire of Commitment also recognizes the significance of our own First UU chalice lighting, particularly the part that goes: “As our struggle becomes our salvation.” and here is where I was finally moved to action.

I admit when I first came to this church, two things stuck out to me that I wasn’t too sure about. I don’t know that they rubbed me the wrong way per se, but they were new and therefore uncomfortable. They were also confusing because they seemed a little too connected to a Christian theology with which I had no connection.

The first thing was that part of the chalice lighting “as our struggle becomes our salvation.” And the second thing was this bit of the mission about Beloved Community.

I guess I’ll be completely honest. I thought something along the lines of what the heck are these people on about? Beloved Community sounded exclusive. And why was it capitalized?

I stuck around, trusting it would make sense in time. Sure enough, Meg and Chris took to explaining this idea from time to time during the Moment for Beloved Community. They would often point to the King Center for more information on Beloved Community, so I turn there now for some of Dr. King’s words.

King said that

“Agape [love] does not begin by discriminating between worthy and unworthy people…It begins by loving others for their sakes” and “makes no distinction between a friend and enemy; it is directed toward both…Agape is love seeking to preserve and create community.”

He felt that justice could not be parceled out to individuals or groups, but was the birthright of every human being in the Beloved Community. “I have fought too long and hard against segregated public accommodations to end up segregating my moral concerns,” he said. “Justice is indivisible.”

There is so much more information about Beloved Community on the King Center website – I encourage you to check it out for yourselves. This radical idea of Beloved Community makes sense to me. And it was during one of these moments for beloved community, when Meg had taken to driving home the ways white supremacy thrives on inaction – the relative comfort of a status quo that keeps the power structures stable – that the chalice lighting finally clicked.

How does our struggle become our salvation in the Unitarian Universalist faith? For me, that “struggle” is to stop turning away from the discomfort of looking in the mirror and seeing how I still carry the invisible backpack of white privilege. For me, that struggle is to overcome the inertia of inaction and to get up and do what I can to create change. For me, that struggle is meeting others whose ideas and values differ vastly from mine and listening with compassion, the work of finding common ground.

Recall the reading that Ani did a few minutes ago. This was Dr. King speaking directly to the Unitarian Universalists. Directly to us! He could tell we were inclined toward justice, but perhaps a little lazy about it. “Don’t sleep through the revolution!” he said.

Well, I’d been sleeping. I’d been resting on my UU upbringing, thinking that just being a part of this church was enough. That the church was doing the work of justice. But of course WE are the church. And we are the ones who have to do the work.

But do not despair in the overwhelm of all there is to be done. There are so many awesome ways to get involved here!

First UU has an amazing history of social action work, which I know was promised we would discuss, but in the interest of galvanizing you to take your own actions, I will tell you instead about the work that is being done at present. Our pillar leaders will be in Howson Hall after service with resources and ways to get involved, as well as microactions you can take TODAY. A microaction is a small step you can take with the potential for big impact, especially when many people take part.

Peggy Morton is our point person for Immigrant Rights. Visit the Immigrant rights table to sign-up to receive a link to sign a petition from Austin Sanctuary Network that calls for everyone in Travis County to have an attorney at their first appearance before a magistrate judge, including individuals targeted under the controversial SB-4 law.

Elizabeth Grey spearheads the team working for Reproductive Justice. Stop by the Reproductive Justice table to learn about the anti-abortion clinics posing as resources for pregnant persons and how to get the word out about these places known as crisis pregnancy centers that target vulnerable teens in particular with unscientific information.

Richard and Beki Halpin are the fearless leaders of the Environmental Justice arm, with many thriving programs aimed at addressing the climate crisis. Stop by their table for tools to reduce your carbon footprint. The time is critical and celebratory! Earth Day is tomorrow. A blessed day for many of us here to remember the interdependent web of life of which we are all a part.

Ginny Fredericks leads the Racial Justice group in tandem with Scott Bukti. Stop by their table to pick up a list of Black Owned Businesses and head over to one this week. We want this year to be First UU’s first ever Juneteenth service, so sign up if you want to lend your support to our BIPOC group who is working hard to plan this in tandem with TXUUJM.

Vanessa McDougal is our resident Voting Rights and Democracy expert. Stop by her table today to pick up a sample ballot for Austin’s upcoming election and make your plan to vote. For the first time, Travis County is electing 3 TCAD appraisers. Early voting starts tomorrow and runs through April 30th; election day is May 4th.

Leo Collas is our LGBTQIA+ Rights Pillar Leader (as well as one of our congregation’s TXUUJM reps). He has invited you all to join the Community Heart Circle today at 2pm in Room 13. They follow a format similar to Chalice Circles, so if you’d like to get a feeling for UU spiritual discussion groups, please join us and make new friends!

Each of these groups represents a pillar of social action here at First UU. We formed the current pillars after conducting a survey and analyzing the data to see where people were presently galvanized and where we already had leadership, but there is always more room for work to be done! For example, we had an awesome team of First UUers at iACT’s Hands on Housing event earlier this month. This is an interfaith action group that supports low income Austin homeowners. Any way you want to get involved and share your time, we could use your talents! I look forward to talking with you all after church at the tables in Howson about staying awake through the struggle of how you can help with the work of building the Beloved Community.

Chris Jimmerson

I’d like to start this morning with a story that I first told many years ago, I think the first time I shared this pulpit with our minister emerita, Meg Barnhouse, right after she had promoted to full-time minister with the church.

I also shared it at the installation service of a dear friend.

To offer some context, I’ll start with another quote from the Rev.

Dr. Martin Luther King, “Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.”

And, of course, Dr. King also made popular the term “Beloved Community”.

I think that, especially for Unitarian Universalists, we often experience the spiritual or religious when the two meet, those experiences of unutterable fulfillment, of which Dr. King spoke and the creation of Beloved Community – the bringing of love into our larger world as justice and liberation for all.

So, back in 2013, a Texas state senator named Wendy Davis became nationally famous when she held a long filibuster against a proposed bill that at the time we thought imposed unbelievably draconian restrictions on women’s reproductive freedom in Texas.

My spouse Wayne and I joined a group of Unitarian Universalists from across the state to support a large rally held on the steps of the Texas State Capital to protest the bill, as well as other attacks on women’s rights.

We all showed up in our bright yellow Unitarian Universalist tee shirts, and folks from our church gathered around our big, bright yellow First UU Church of Austin banner.

The women’s rights groups that had organized the rally absolutely loved it, so they put us right behind the speakers for the rally.

The event drew a huge crowd, and near the end of it, we noticed that all eight of us holding up the banner at the women’s rights rally were men.

That didn’t seem so unusual for UUs, so we just shared some amusement about it.

After the rally though, as I was walking to my car, a woman I had never met touched my shoulder. I turned to her. She looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, “I just want you to know how moving it was for me to see a group of all men holding up your church banner.”

Then she looked away briefly, turned back to me and said, “You know, I don’t think of myself as religious, but I’m going to have to find out more about you folks.”

I guess we were both stunned by the movement of something sacred that was occurring between us in that moment, because neither of us said anything for a while.

I don’t remember how long we just stood there or which of us broke the silence first, but I do remember that at some point she asked where she could get one of our bright yellow Tee Shirts, so I gave her the web address for that and some information about our local churches.

I don’t even think if we exchanged our names.

I will tell you though – I still have never been happier to call myself a Unitarian Universalist than I was in that moment.

I have never been more grateful to be reminded that the religious&; can happen anywhere and at any moment and that we are called to be there for it.

“Unutterable fulfillment” and doing justice, building the beloved community are inseparably linked, and it is in this interrelationship between the two that I believe our Unitarian Universalist faith flourishes.

That event was over 10 years ago, and if anything, I have come to believe this even more now and to believe it is even more vital now that our Unitarian Universalist faith flourish like never before.

The bill which Wendy Davis filibustered eventually got passed in a special session of the Texas Legislature.

We thought it was so horrible at the time because it did things like banning abortion beyond 20 weeks and imposing stringent requirements on physicians and clinics, making it much more difficult for them to continue providing abortions services.

Little did we imagine then, how much worse it would get by now. And of course, it’s not only reproductive justice that is at risk these days.

Which is why we so critically need all of the social action pillars you heard about earlier:

Reproductive Justice
Racial Justice
Environmental Justice
LGBTQ Plus Rights
Immigration Rights

Our very democracy itself are all under seige.

I’ve got some news for the forces of bigotry and oppression though Wendy Davis’s filibuster has never really ended. More and more of us have just picked it up and are expressing it in a multitude of ways.

It is not over.

This is not over.

You have awakened the sleeping giant. There is a great rumbling across the land. We are seeing it in elections and voting and public action over and over agaIn.

We are coming for justice and liberation. And we will not be sleeping though this revolution – a revolution that will once again alter the face of human history – a revolution that has already begun.

This is our moment for unutterable fulfillment. We shall overcome. We shall all be free. We shall live in peace.

That dream of Beloved Community lies just upon our horizon.

And love – love will guide us there.

Amen.

Extinguishing the Chalice

We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we hold in our hearts until we are together again.

Benediction

As we go out into our world today, may we know the spiritual fulfillment of working together to do justice.
May we find solidarity beyond these church walls with the many, many folks in our community and our world, who like us, are striving to build the Beloved Community.
Guided by love, may we remain ever awakened to the revolution.
And in doing so, nourish souls and transform lives, including our own.
May the congregation say, “amen” and “blessed be”.
Go in peace.

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