Spray it Gold and post it on Instagram

December 17, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
December 16, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Everybody else’s life looks glowy and great. How do they do it? Perfectionism can really get its claws into us at this time of year. We compare our insides with other people’s outsides and it makes us feel bad. How can we see beneath the surface, grow our roots, and strengthen our core?

Reading

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life,… I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.

Sermon

It’s natural to want to put yourself out there in the most positive light. No one writes Holiday letters saying things like “We’ve been fighting a lot. My business isn’t doing too well. One of the kids dropped out of school and I think one is in some sort of a gang. The dog is still making messes behind the couch. It’s driving me crazy …. ” We like to present cheer and stability and success if we can.

I joined Instagram, a social media platform, because it’s where the pictures of my family appear.

You choose certain people to follow, so you can peek in on the parts of their lives they choose to share. Smiling on the streets of NYC, sunsets in La Jolla, Delicious looking food, concerts, parties, celebrations. All of that is lovely. Then you have the “influencers,” people who have gathered or purchased loads of followers in hopes of getting someone to pay them to put ads on their feed. One sylphlike blonde woman poses on her perfect bed in her perfect bedroom in soft pink pajamas. There is an untouched plate of strawberry pancakes beside her. “Strawberry pancakes,” she comments, “the perfect start to a busy day.” I think the odds of her being a pancake eating person are small, but you can’t always tell. What takes this to another place, though, is that she has tied eight or ten shiny pink heart shaped balloons to the pillows, so she’s surrounded by party radiance.

Really? For breakfast? Who does that? Who believes that? Who would think that is the way you’re supposed to do breakfast? There is a full bottle of Listerine on her bedside table, so they paid for that. I guess some people keep their mouthwash on the bedside table…

Social media is grand in many ways, because it’s supposed to connect people. I love it because it’s like reading a hometown newspaper where I know all the people in the stories. When you have friends all over the place, it’s a good way to keep in touch. Instagram, though, has filters you can use to make everything look homey, or glowing, or extra sharp and saturated, so your own life looks dull in comparison. Other people’s children look angelic and their partners have loving faces. Their trips appear festive and their bodies look pain-free. Mental health experts are now fretting that scrolling through these windows into other people’s perfect looking lives creates shame and depression about your own all-too-real experiences.

There is nothing wrong with presenting your life in the most positive way, but it behooves all scrollers to understand that this is what is happening. Some people get bitten by the fake perfection bug, and then they feel they must manufacture their own staged perfection, and make ourselves sick by presenting that. In fact, there is a web site called LifeFaker.com where you can buy packages of photos of parties, friends, travel and food to make your life look as good as the others on the platform.

We can get bitten by the perfectionism bug all by ourselves without Instagram though. We have ideas about how we are supposed to be, what we are supposed to know, the books we should have read, the thoughts we should understand and agree with. We see and admire other people, but, as the 12 step program people say, we are comparing our insides to their outsides.

Some people won’t do anything they aren’t already good at. I’ve told you about my mom and her violin. She practiced every morning from 6:00 to 7:OO before going to work as a second grade teacher. She never got much better, but she loved it. I’m glad she didn’t get shamed into stopping just because she wasn’t good at it. It brought her joy. And scratchy strings were my morning wake up alarm.

Some people fear mistakes so much that it makes them procrastinate, doing things finally under such pressure and with so little time that there will always be a reason for whatever it is to be less than perfect. That perfection is unattainable and unrealistic is something we already know, but all the staged pictures and the filters that make things look gentler or more real than reality continue working on us. We collect pictures on Pinterest of beautiful gardens, doorways, water features, clothes, jewelry, cakes, muffins, parties, etc. It’s so over the top that there is now a balancing site called “Pinterest fails.” You see the perfect photo from Pinterest, then you see a photo of how the cake actually turned out, or how the do-it-yourself project actually turned out. I bet there already is an Instagram balance site where people show the grittier realities of their lives, but I haven’t found it yet.

Many of us don’t try to have a perfect life with strawberry pancakes on a bed made with snowy linen, pink heart balloons attached to our pillows. Our perfectionism comes in feeling ashamed that we aren’t better justice warriors, that we haven’t read that book everyone else is quoting, that we aren’t loving enough or intellectual enough. Forget the pink balloons, we want to have read and understood everything, to make scintillating conversation, to make meaningful days.

Perfectionism is cunning, baffling and powerful. It waits around every corner. We have been raised within the air of our culture. We tend to focus on what is wrong with our work and the work of others, we have an easy time naming and describing what went wrong in a situation and it’s harder to name what went right. We hear things like “why should I thank them for just doing their job?” Thanking is one antidote to this culture of perfectionism. Practicing naming what went well, what is good in a situation or in a job of work. In Perfectionism culture, mistakes are personal. You making a mistake is almost the same thing as you being a mistake. We push back against this culture by being interested in mistakes, by being curious about mistakes, by taking time to reflect by ourselves and with others about how we can learn from mistakes, and then by forgiving ourselves and others for their mistakes, having the resilience to move on rather than crumple up and throw ourselves away.

This is a hard time for so many among us. Some are joyous, and others are rattling, dry and hollow. It doesn’t mean you are doing something wrong if your house is lovely and your food is beautiful and your family is well behaved, and it doesn’t mean you are doing something wrong if your reality is harder. There is a lot of pain in this world. Pain in the war zones and pain at our own border. Pain in our cities and pain in the farmlands. If we can fill our lives with thank yous, with appreciation of the good, with doing small good things for the people around us and far away, we grow love. We don’t ignore the pain, and we don’t ignore the goodness. We celebrate the darkest time of the year, we embrace the return of the light at the same time that we grieve the losses in our own families and the death of a 7 year old Jakelin Caal Maquin in US custody. Creation and destruction, intertwined, goodness and corruption, hope and despair. That is our gorgeous terrible world.

It’s our weak spots that give other people a place to hold on to us. The cracks are where the light comes in, as the poet Leonard Cohen says. The cracks are where the light comes in.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 18 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Glowing Embers

December 9, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons, Uncategorized

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
December 9, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

As we celebrate the holiday season, it is good to remember the origin of these traditions and rituals, why they still matter to us, and how they may ground us in wonder, awe, and mystery.

Call to Worship

“Determined Seed”
By Laura Wallace

As frozen earth holds the determined seed,
this sacred space holds our weariness, our worry,
our laughter and our celebration.

Let us bring seed and soul into the light of thought,
the warmth of community, and the hope of love.

Let us see together, hear together, love together.
Let us worship.

Reading

“One Small Face”
by Margaret Starkey

With mounds of greenery, the brightest ornaments, we bring high summer to our rooms, as if to spite the somberness of winter come.

In time of want, when life is boarding up against the next uncertain spring, we celebrate and give of what we have away.

All creatures bend to rules, even the stars constrained.

There is a blessed madness in the human need to go against the grain of cold and scarcity. We make a holiday, the rituals as varied as the hopes of humanity,

The reasons as obscure as ancient solar festivals, as clear as joy on one small face.

Sermon

Well, here we are, back in the church if not quite yet back in the sanctuary, after the church went dark for two weeks, literally, as the building contractors had to cut the electricity so they could install the new power system.

Last Sunday, we did our service over internet live steaming from our Senior Minister’s house.

That was fun, but your ministers, Meg and I, have missed getting to be with you in person, as have all of our church staff folks.

So, here we are, back in the building, but with the construction still ongoing and suddenly, (at least it seems sudden to me!) suddenly in the middle of the holiday season.

We do plan to be able give ourselves and each other a great big gift of being able to return to our newly expanded and renovated sanctuary at least in time for our Christmas pageant and Christmas Eve services.

Merry Christmas indeed! We hope!

I’d like to talk today about the history and origins of some of the Christmas rituals and traditions we will be observing here at the church, and for many of us, with our families and loved ones.

I will focus on Christmas traditions and practices because they are those that we have inherited most directly from both our Universalist and Unitarian forebearers.

I want to note though, that I found a listing of almost 40 different religious holiday observances from a variety of religions throughout the world that have been or will be observed between November 1 of this year and the middle of January 2019.

They include the Hindu Diwali festival of lights, as well as a number of other faiths that hold light festivals; Hanukka; Buddhists marking the day that the Buddha first experienced enlightenment; the Baha’i faith celebrating the birth of their founder; and the Zoroastrian faith observing the death of their founding prophet – just to name a very few.

Each of these have their own traditions and rich histories, and, like with Christmas traditions and rituals, whether or not one believes the religious stories associated with them literally or not, I believe they help carry forward cultural memory.

They convey understandings about the human condition and experience – indeed about what it means to be human. They carry forward a people’s values and priorities. They shape our relationships with one another and promote bonding and community building.

And knowing something of the history and origins of our holiday observances may help us better understand the cultural memories they are conveying and the deeper meaning behind why they remain important to us.

The rituals and traditions that we most commonly practice around Christmas here in the U.S. seem to have actually arisen from a variety, a sort of conglomeration, of sources.

We also seem to have melded practices with secular origins and traditions from non-Christian practices with the Christian religious story of the birth of Jesus.

Speaking of which, I love a meme that’s been going around that says, “Three wise women would have asked directions, arrived on time, helped deliver the baby, brought practical gifts, cleaned the stable, made a casserole and there would be peace on earth.”

I also love how one of our Unitarian Universalist Ministers at First UU Dallas, Aaron White, recently summarized in one paragraph the biblical story of Christmas and the life of Jesus. He writes:

“Jesus is born to an unwed, teenage woman of color. She, the child, and her husband cross national borders without documentation, … fleeing violence in their home country. The child grows up to be a homeless teacher who leads a radical movement of people that refuses the boundaries of creed, class, or role in society. He travels around giving a version of free healthcare to anyone who asks and feeds the poor without judgement. He preaches a love so radical, and an allegiance to relationship over power so compelling, that it becomes illegal. The most powerful military force in the world deems him a threat. He is then tortured and executed by the state … ”

Not quite the version I was taught at the little Southern Baptist church we went to when I was a child. Something to think about as our government lobs tear gas at women and children seeking asylum at our border.

Anyway, let’s talk about how we think some of our Christmas practices may have originated and including how they might have come to be associated with that Christian religious story of Jesus’ birth.

Putting up Christmas trees reflects ancient practices of a number of societies that would decorate with evergreen trees, wreaths and garlands to remind themselves that life would return during this time of year when cold winters could make the world seem lifeless and bleak except for the evergreens.

Because it was also the time of year for many societies when the days were short and there was far less sunlight, folks would often light candles on or near the evergreen elements they had brought into their homes. This is likely one of the places where our practices of lighting candles at Christmas, as well as decorating with Christmas lights originated.

I’m sure glad we have LED lights now. Placing lit candles on tree branches seems like a fire hazard to me.

It is thought that the Germans of the 16th century originated the Christmas Tree as we know it today. A popular play of the time about Adam and Eve had a prop called a “paradise tree” – a fir tree hung with apples to represent the Garden of Eden. Entranced by the paradise tree, Germans began bringing trees into their homes and decorating them.

The Christmas Tree became popularized in America and Britain when in 1832, Charles Follen, a Unitarian Minister who had come here from Germany, and his wife put up a festively decorated tree, and their fellow abolitionist Harriet Martineau wrote glowing about it in the magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book.

In 1846, Queen Victoria and her German husband Prince Albert were sketched in the London newspaper standing around a Christmas tree with their children, which further popularized the practice both in Britain and in America.

Another of our traditions, Santa Claus, comes from several legends about a Bishop in fourth century Asia minor called St. Nicholas. Left a lot of money by his parents who died when he was young, he helped the poor and gave secret gifts to people who needed them, especially children. This is likely part of from where the tradition of giving gifts at Christmas comes.

In one of the legends, St. Nicholas helped the daughters of a very poor man who did not have enough money for a dowry so that they could be married according to customs of the time. St. Nicholas, so the legend says, secretly dropped a bag of gold down the chimney, and it fell into a stocking that had been hung by the fire to dry -likely the origin of both our current practices of hanging Christmas stockings and the idea of Santa Clause coming down the chimney to bring Christmas presents.

Over time, the stories and images about St. Nicholas blended with myths about a gift giving Father Christmas in England and Kris Kringle in the U.S., and eventually these all kind of got combined together to form the myths, stories and practices we now associate with Santa Claus.

So, how did these and other traditions get conflated the Christian story of Jesus’ birth get conflated, and how did we come to settle on December 25 as the date for it?

Well, the truth is we do not know for sure. In fact, Christians thought in around 200 A.D. that the birth had taken place on January 6, based upon calculations folks and done using events of Jesus’ life laid out in the New Testament. In fact, the modern Armenian, Russian and Greek Orthodox churches still celebrate it on this date.

I was not until the mid-fourth century that most Christians had moved the date to December 25. How and why that happened is still a matter of some debate, but here is the most common theory.

During this same time of year that many cultures decorated with evergreens, most of them also had celebrations and rituals centered around solstice, the shortest day of the year, but that also harbingers the eventual return of the sun and longer days.

Solstice falls on December 21 or 22 on our calendar, but in the Julian calendar of places like Syria and Egypt, it fell on December 25th and was celebrated as the Nativity of the Sun. It was observed with dramatic rituals where from within their shrines they would call out, “The Virgin has brought forth! The light is waxing!”. In Egypt, the new-born sun (that’s s-u-n) was even represented by the image of an infant.

In Scandinavia, they celebrated Yule starting December 2, igniting huge Yule logs that would burn for up to 12 days.

This time of year was also when wine and beer made during prior months was finally fermented and ready to start drinking – a fine tradition that many fine folks continue on Christmas even today.

The Romans celebrated Saturnalia, a time of drinking and general debauchery during which the social order would be reversed and peasants would party and demand that those who were their masters the rest of the year give them gifts, food and libations to avoid being the victims of pranks and great mischief.

As the theory goes, Christian church leaders kind of coopted these and other secular and pagan traditions and practices by placing Jesus’s birth on December 25, as a way to increase the chances that Christmas would get adapted through association with these existing rites.

After this, and down through the Middle Ages, the practice of the poor celebrating raucously in a drunken, Mardi Gras-like atmosphere and demanding sifts from the wealthy continued, but only on Christmas day and only after first attending church that morning.

Then, along came Robert Cromwell and the Puritans and spoiled the fun for everyone. They cancelled Christmas. Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity would have been incensed.

In fact, in the U.S., the Puritans even made it illegal to celebrate Christmas in the City of Boston.

Party animals our Puritan ancestors were not.

It was actually the Universalists and some Unitarians who later began to restore the practices that have become how we now celebrate Christmas, especially the focus on home, peace, family, gifts for children and charity (though both the gifts to children and charity could and can still be used to reinforce the social hierarchy).

So, that is a very abbreviated summary of at least some of the possible origins of Christmas traditions.

I said earlier, that whether or not we believe in the the story of Jesus’ birth and life in a literal way, these practices and traditions convey cultural memory, human truths in metaphorical ways.

Just in those that we have discussed today, a number of these human understandings emerge:

The cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth – the amazing, evergreen tenacity of life;
The magic and the creative potential of new life that a spark of the divine may manifest itself through anyone of us;
Moving between seasons and again the circular patterns of nature;
The values of generosity and charity, but also how these can be used to relieve social pressure and thus reinforce the existing social order;
The importance of staying connected with family and loved ones;
The power of ritual, communal bonding to hold societies together and support individuals even during challenging periods;
The need for balance between light and darkness;
And, finally, the ways in which we must prepare ourselves for moving through liminal times.

It strikes me that those last three hold powerful meaning and beauty for us as we move through changes and disruptions at our church during this holiday season.

Liminal times are those time periods when we are in transition, at a threshold, leaving one condition behind but not yet fully where we are going.

Like for some of the the societies we have discussed who were in the transition from the shortest days of sunlight to the eventual return of the sun, limited by the shortened days and the coldness of winter – no crops to plant or harvest yet – travel and other activities limited by the cold and weather – uncertain yet of when this all would change again, these liminal times are often times of uncertainty and mystery.

We are experiencing that here at the church. We have had to delay and reschedule activities due to the construction. We are worshiping in a temporary space, even as we dream of reclaiming a larger and more beautiful than ever sanctuary, where we hope to welcome many more from our area who might find a spiritual home here and join us on our religious journey.

I am moved that during this very time of the year, our church itself was in darkness for a while to literally create enough power to make something new and even greater possible.

That’s synchronicity.

I do not associate light with all that is good and darkness with that which is difficult. For one thing, 1 think there is racist cultural baggage inherent in such an association.

1 think, we need both. The seed needs darkness to germinate. The caterpillar goes into the cocoon before emerging anew as the butterfly. We need the night to sleep and restore ourselves.

Likewise, too much light will burn the crops in the field, deprive us of healthy sleep and disrupt nature’s necessary cycles.

For me, there is something mystical about this intermingling of light and darkness. This time of year, I love to sit at night with just the Christmas tree lights and fireplace on. There is something about that interplay between the darkness and the glowing but limited light that fills me with awe and wonder and binds my soul to those long ago ancestors we have been discussing today.

This Christmas Eve, after the sun has set, we will do a ritual in which we all hold candles, and then we will turn off the lights, and light one another’s candles until all of them are glowing, and sing Silent Night together. Again, that interplay creates such a powerful, mystical and spiritual communal experience for me.

I believe in the spiritual power of this religious community.

I believe we have the rituals and communal bonds that will move us with grace through this liminal time.

I believe we have the wisdom to value the interplay of light and darkness, knowing it is together that they bless us with amazing, evergreen tenacity and resilience.

I believe that as we move through this holiday season and beyond it together, we will rebirth ourselves again and again as a religious community – a First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin with all of the magic and creative potential of new life, manifesting the divine more and more in our world.

Well, here we are – happy, joyous, blessed holidays.

Amen.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Live from Pflugerville

December 2, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
Rev. Chris Jimmerson and Jules Jaramillo
December 2, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Meg, Chris, Jules, and Brent will be live-streaming from Meg’s house while you worship from your own cozy spot of choice since the church building is closed with no entry until Saturday, December 8th. We will be talking about mystery, family, and whatever else comes up as you call in on the live-stream page.

Call to Worship

THE FEAST OF LIGHTS
Emma Lazarus

Kindle the taper like the steadfast star
Ablaze on evening’s forehead o’er the earth,
And add each night a lustre till afar
An eightfold splendor shine above thy hearth
Clash, Israel, the cymbals, touch the lyre,
Blow the brass trumpet and the harsh-tongued horn;
Chant psalms of victory till the heart take fire,
The Maccabean spirit leap new-born.

Reading

C. JoyBell

“I have come to accept the feeling of not knowing where I am going. And I have trained myself to love it. Because it is only when we are suspended in mid-air with no landing in sight, that we force our wings to unravel and alas begin our flight. And as we fly, we still may not know where we are going to. But the miracle is in the unfolding of the wings. You may not know where you’re going, but you know that so long as you spread your wings, the winds will carry you.”

Reading

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is the history of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage and kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst it destroys our capacity to do domething. If we remember those times and places, and there are so many, where people have behaved magnificantly this gives us the energy to act and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act in however small way we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinate succession of presents and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvel.

Text of this sermon is not available. Click the play button to listen.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

We Remember

November 25, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
November 25, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

The path that led us to where we are now informs all the possibilities of our continuing journey. We will explore how our memories, both those in our mind and those buried deeply within our DNA, ground as well as challenge our human potential.

Call to Worship

We Come to Love a Church
Andrew C Kennedy

We come to love a church,
the traditions, the history,
and especially the people associated with it.
And through these people,
young and old,
known and unknown,
we reach out —

Both backward into history
and forward into the future —

To link together the generations
in this imperfect, but blessed community
of memory and hope.

Reading

Joy Harjo, 1951

Remember the sky that you were born under, know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the strongest point of time.
Remember sundown and the giving away to night.
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.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their tribes, their families, their histories, too.
Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.

Sermon

Why is it that I can remember every word of Robert Frost’s poem, “Stopping by Wood on a Snowy Evening” even though I memorized it for a school assignment way back when I was in the second grade, and yet in the time it takes to walk from the living room to the kitchen in my house I often forget why it was I went to kitchen in the first place?

Well, that’s actually a more complicated question than it might seem, but, to oversimplify, the reason has to do with differences in how, where and what types of information get laid out in the brain for short versus longterm memories.

All of this month, our Life Span Faith Development programs have been exploring what it means to be a people of memory, which for the most part involves long-term memory.

This morning, I would like to also explore this with you here in worship because I believe that memory and how we construct, and sometimes deconstruct and then reconstruct it, is deeply spiritual in nature.

It is a huge topic. Whole sermons could and actually have been written just on dealing with traumatic or painful memories, for instance.

This morning though, we will be focusing on three areas:

how we construct memory as individuals,
socially, communally, culturally constructed memory.
and finally current research on the potential that memory may be transmitted genetically and/or epigenetically across generations.

At the individual level, what science is discovering is that we do not lay down memories like a computer records factual pieces of data onto a disk.

Rather, especially with long-term memory, our brains weave our memories into a narrative, a story that we are constantly creating to make sense of our world, create meaning in life and maintain a sense of an individual identity or self.

And we do not in reality lay down our longterm memories entirely as individuals but often in relationship with others and our environment, as we move through life experiences moment by moment.

This is the first of the reasons that I believe that memory is an essential and profound aspect of our spirituality. It is relational, and it helps us find meaning and create an ongoing story about who we are and how we fit in our world.

That we construct our memories in this way explains why the loss of memory associated with conditions like Alzheimer’s can be so devastating and so heartbreaking. It takes away people’s ability to make sense of their world, isolates them and disintegrates their sense of self and meaning in life. Several studies have found that being touched by loved ones, familiar music and being offered ritual-like communal activities can sometimes help such folks at least partially reconstruct their personal narratives and make greater sense of their world.

It also helps explain why our memories can be factually incorrect sometimes; how we can in fact have memories that seem real but that in reality never actually happened to us; and how different people experiencing the same event can come away with very different memories of that same event.

Let me give you a few examples.

How many of you have ever discussed a childhood memory with siblings, family members or childhood friends only to find yourself arguing over very different memories of the same event?

This happens to me all of the time with my younger sister, and she is constantly getting it wrong.

This is likely because neither of us laid down pure factual data – we each were creating our own narrative and so we each laid down a memory that made sense within that narrative.

In his book, “Uncle Tungsten,” Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and best-best-selling author wrote the following about memories his from childhood, living through the bombings of London by Germany in the winter of 1940-1941:

“One night, a thousand-pound bomb fell into the garden next to ours, but fortunately it failed to explode. All of us, the entire street, it seemed, crept away that night (my family to a cousin’s flat) – many of us in our pajamas – walking as softly as we could (might vibration set the thing off?)…

On another occasion, an incendiary bomb, a thermite bomb, fell behind our house and burned with a terrible, white-hot heat. My father had a stirrup pump, and my brothers carried pails of water to him, but water seemed useless against this infernal fire-indeed, made it burn even more furiously. There was a vicious hissing and sputtering when the water hit the white-hot metal, and meanwhile the bomb was melting its own casing and throwing blobs and jets of molten metal in all directions.”

Sacks was shocked, when later one his brothers read what he had written and told him that his memory of the first bomb was correct but that, in fact, when the second bomb had fallen they had both been away at boarding school.

How could he have such a detailed memory of an event, complete with images in his mind’s eye of his family members fighting the fire and the burning molten metal, if he did not actually experience it, Sacks asked himself.

It turned out that another of his brothers who had been there for the second bombing incident had written them a vivid and detailed letter about it, and that Sacks had been enthralled by the story – so much so that the images and details it aroused in his mind became laid down as a memory of having actually been there. And as a young child, it would have neatly extended the already existing narrative created by his memory of having actually been there for the first bombing.

Subsequent studies using brain imaging technology have found that scans of memories from actual experiences and scans of memories our brains have created will show exactly the same brain patterns.

Some of you may remember when Brian Williams, the news anchor, got into trouble after going on David Letterman and falsely claiming that he had been on a helicopter hit by ground fire in Iraq. He was accused of falsifying this story, lying, in effort at self-aggrandizement.

Now, we can never know for sure what went on in Mr. William’s brain, but many memory researchers believed a very similar thing may have happened to him. He was in a helicopter in Iraq when the incident happened, just not the one that got struck, and he had accurately reported the incident two years earlier. Overtime, though, as he had interviewed the people who were actually in the helicopter and learned the vivid details, it is possible his brain conflated his actual experience with the intense images generated by his knowledge of the flight that was struck.

So, by the time Mr. Williams went onto David Letterman, it is possible that his brain had constructed a memory that seemed every bit as real to him as having been at that second bombing had seemed to Oliver Sacks.

I think there is an aspect of the spiritual here also – a spiritual lesson about checking our recollections to make sure that the story we are telling ourselves is true – that our ongoing narratives have not distorted a memory, especially in ways that could be harmful.

For example, there are now numerous incidences of African American males spending years or even decades in prison, put there based upon the eye witness testimony of white people, only to be exonerated when DNA testing became available.

White people have been fed a narrative about who is most likely to commit crimes and that narrative can construct incorrect memories that have the potential to devastate black and brown lives.

And that leads us to social, communal, cultural memory, because the things we choose to remember as communities and societies and the ways in which we choose to remember them also can have profound effects upon our lives and those of other people.

We construct cultural memory as a group or society though the stories and histories we tell or choose not to tell; through the rituals, traditions and holidays we observe and prioritize and those we do not; through the arts, music, theatre, religious practices and the very use of what language, symbols and words we chose to employ.

And like with individual memory, it is important that we examine, question and sometimes deconstruct and then reconstruct what narratives we are following and reinforcing as we pass on cultural memory.

For instance, the ways in which we have minimized the brutality and savageness of the genocide committed against native Americans; our white washing of the cruelty and monstrousness of slavery and the subsequent treatment of African Americans in the U.S.; our avoiding the images of the lynchings of black and brown Americans and on and on and on; these create an incomplete and false narrative, an untrue story, a cultural memory that is steeped in denial and allows the continued supremacy of white culture and people over all others.

We fail to teach how white elites encoded the concept of race into law to slightly privilege indentured white people over enslaved African Americans so that they would not join together to rebel against such oppressive systems.

In our own state of Texas, it will only be in the next school year that our children will be finally be taught that slavery was the primary cause of the civil war rather than sectionalism and states’ rights.

Within Unitarian Universalism, we can also fall prey to this. For instance, we often pass on a cultural memory about our how Unitarian, Transcendentalist forebearer, Theodore Parker, was such a leading and passionate abolitionist. We less often convey that he also believed whites to be the superior race, called African Americans docile and lacking in intelligence and referred to the Mexican people as “A wretched people; wretched in their origin, history, character, who must eventually give way as the Indians did.”

And this is just one of many such examples.

This is a spiritual issue. We have a moral obligation to do our best to ensure that the cultural memories we are transmitting are not continuing harmful narratives – a real and daunting challenge as we are often caught within those same false narratives ourselves.

Now, I want to switch gears and touch briefly on some of the science being investigated regarding whether a transmission of another kind of memory may be possible epigenetically or even genetically. Some of the research is still pretty early on, and some of it is the subject of much scientific debate. Still, I think it also has potential spiritual implications involving ancestry and heritage.

Epigenetics is the study of changes in organisms caused by modification of gene expression rather than alteration of the genetic code itself. Some research indicates that in animals, emotional “memory”, such as a propensity toward anxiety or the opposite, a tendency toward calmness and resilience, can be passed down epigenetically through several generations by the transmission of chemicals, methyl groups, that attach to the DNA and regulate gene expression. Some studies claim to have found this in humans also now.

Over much longer time periods, some researchers are exploring whether a kind of memory might also be encoded through alterations to the DNA itself.

Because my life is ruled by three terribly spoiled Basenji dogs, I was fascinated by the study of how humans and dogs have co-evolved over likely tens of thousands of years. Dogs and humans now seem to be born with an ability to read and interpret correctly each other facial expressions and vocal tones. When humans and their dogs interact, both species release oxytocin, the same bonding hormone released when humans interact with their new born children.

I was also fascinated by research with savants, people seemingly born with musical genius, artistic brilliance or even complicated mathematical skills who display such abilities without any training and at too early an age for their abilities to have been learned.

Likewise, scientists are studying people who after experiencing a head injury suddenly develop prodigious musical, artistic or mathematical ability, again without ever having had formal training in these areas. Is this evidence of some kind of genetic memory? We will have to stay tuned as the exploration continues.

I’ll close by sharing with you an experience I had recently that I think illustrates a number of these concepts about memory and demonstrates just how powerful memory can be.

Many of you have heard me talk before about how important my maternal grandparents were in my life and the love they gave me as they helped my mom raise me.

My grandparents, Leo and Ann, often took us on camping trips with them, and I have wonderful memories of being with them in the piney woods of East Texas and elsewhere.

They loved to travel and drove all cross the U.S., stopping to spend time in forests, including many a pine forest.

And, like Oliver Sacks had from his brother’s letter, I have these secondary memories from the images I created in my mind when they would return from one of their trips and share with us vivid descriptions from their adventures.

Last month, I spent a week exploring the white mountains of Arizona. One morning, I got up very early and drove way up into the mountains to a nature park called Wood Canyon Lake.

As drove into the park, I found myself in the middle of a beautiful pine forest. It was rocky, and small patches of snow reflected the morning sunlight, which was steaming through the trees at a slightly sideways angle because it was still so early.

And suddenly, I had this experience that was as if Leo and Ann were present there in my rental car with me.

I was such a powerful experience that I had to pull the car over and stop, and I struggle even now to put it adequately into words.

I can tell you though, that my grandparents had built their clothing closet out of cedar, so they had always carried a slight smell of cedar with them, and that faint aroma of cedar came back to me again under the beautiful canopy of pine trees.

And there had always been a way that I felt when I was with my grandparents that I never felt any other time. And that feeling swept over me again – an unexpected blessing and reminder of being worthy of their great love.

This is the spiritual power of memory. I got to spend a few moments with my grandparents once more, even if only through that great power of recollection.

And the ethics and values that they instilled in me were renewed and reignited.

My beloveds, this is one more aspect of the spiritual power of memory.

Not only can we remember, and when necessary, deconstruct and then reconstruct memory in ways that are more life giving, so too, like my grandparents, can we construct much of how we will be remembered.

May ours be a legacy of love, justice and stories truthfully told. Amen.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Come, ye thankful people, com

November 19, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 11, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

As Thanksgiving approaches, let us talk about gratitude in the midst of difficult circumstances.

Call to Worship
Laura Ingalls Wilder, “Writings to Young Women”

As the years pass, I am coming more and more to understand that it is the common, everyday blessings of our common everyday lives for which we should be particularly grateful. They are the things that fill our lives with comfort and our hearts with gladness — just the pure air to breathe and the strength to breath it; just warmth and shelter and home folks; just plain food that gives us strength; the bright sunshine on a cold day; and a cool breeze when the day is warm.

Meditation reading
Sharad Vivek Sagar

Let’s be grateful to all those who came in before us. Grateful to all those men and women, young and old alike, who paved the path forward for us, brick by brick. To those men and women who marched across the bridge in Sehna on that great day, those men and ,vornefi who rallied behind the Gandhis and the Maficrelas eVery single time they were needed, to those men and women who stood up for voting rights and civil rights and gay rights and equality and justice and a free world, those men and women who invented the future by inventing things that fundamentally changed the world from the electricity to vaccinations, from airplanes to birth control pills, from the printing press to the internet.

Sermon

Sometimes, around the Holidays, your soul just gets tired. You’re excited, yes, happy that all the Hallmark holiday movies are starting up, or entering into the Little Drummer Boy contest, where the person who goes the longest without hearing that song, but you can also feel irritable and tense, nothing looks fun, you can’t think. When your soul is getting sick, it’s time to dust off your spiritual practice. Not that you dust it off just when you are sliding into a sink full of the dirty dishwater of despair, but that’s as good a time as any.

A lot of people on Facebook are practicing gratitude by naming one thing they’re thankful for each day. I really like reading those posts. Gratitude is one of my favorite spiritual practices. It doesn’t require equipment, and it’s so simple that you don’t really have to feel guilty if you forget it for a couple of weeks and pick it back up. When I stop to think about what I’m grateful for, it brings me into the present moment. We suffer sometimes when we live in the past with the things that hurt us or our family, and when we live in the future with all of the bad things that may happen.

Most spiritual teachers urge us to stay in the present moment as much as we can, and to fill our minds with the things that are good, and the people who are good. It’s easy these days to get addicted to outrage, and it’s all appropriate, but it strengthens me to better deal with the outrageous events if I hold on to my spirit, and gratitude helps me do that. That is the purpose of a spiritual practice: to build your resilience, to make your spirit sturdy so you are not as easily knocked off balance. When I think about balance, I think about the martial arts training I had years ago that taught me I was harder to knock over if I kept my center of gravity low. To me this means not trying to live up here in my head more than I live in my heart and my gut. It means not having to be perfect in all things, which makes you brittle and defensive. It means having the humility to get peaceful with saying “I could be wrong.” It means being okay with learning from other people, and with leaning on other people. It you can’t be wrong, and if you hate to be helped, you are more of a pain to everyone around you. People who are grateful are easier and more fun to help. Their center of gravity is lower because they are reminding themselves that they are not doing all of this by themselves, that they have help, that they are not alone. Gratitude trains our habits of attention.

Habits of attention are your go-to things to notice in a situation. Some people can go to a nice restaurant and only remember the loud couple at the table nearby Ð they gave them their whole experience. Some people can go on a drive and hold on to the guy who cut them off in traffic, fuming and missing all the beauty and fresh air. Some people look out a window at a gorgeous autumn day and say “Oh my goodness, this window needs cleaning!” We need to notice these things, we need folks who can clock what’s not working well in a system, but it has to be balanced with a habit of noticing goodness and beauty. And being grateful for it.

Medieval mystic Meister Eckhart says if you only ever said “thank you” as a prayer, it would be a good prayer life.

Cicero, born about a century before Rabbi Jesus, wrote: “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others,” he said. By the 18th century, the free-market thinker Adam Smith, in his “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” supposed that people who did not feel gratitude were only cheating themselves out of happiness in life. And in the 19th century, Immanuel Kant described ingratitude with “the essence of vileness.”

We certainly don’t want to participate in the “essence of vileness,” so let’s take a moment to think about something for which we are grateful. Now take another deep breath and try to feel it in addition to thinking it. ….

One of the things the board of trustees does here is write thank you notes to volunteers who have helped hold up the sky here at First UU. It’s fun to sit around thinking about the events that have been brought to the community, the people who help with fixing things and chairing ministry teams and helping with our sanctuary work, people who go to meetings and reach out to other organizations in town and who visit with Alirio and who decorate for Thanksgiving Dinner here which is happening on Thursday at 3:00 and people who teach the children and some who teach adults and people who coordinate justice work and welcome folks who come to the church or call on weekdays. So many people do so much, and its nice to think about them with the board and then write and sign notes to them. It feels good.

Now I’m going to ask you to breathe together with me for a moment and think of a person who has helped you, a teacher, a mentor, a friend, a supporter, someone who made a difference in your life. I’m going to invite you, if you have a phone with you, or if you want to write it on your oos, to make a thank you note right now to them. If they are still living, you might want to send it. If not, it will do the universe some good anyway for you to write it. You are welcome to write while I’m talking. It will not hurt my feelings. It will make me happy.

In the Jewish scriptures, in the book of Proverbs (17:22) it says “A merry heart does good like a medicine: but a broken spirit dries the bones.” Social and psychological research is beginning to bear this out.

Psychologists are beginning to take gratitude seriously as a field of research. Robert Emmons of the University of California at Davis, says: “Psychology has generally ignored the positive emotions. We tend to study the things that can go wrong in people’s minds but not the things that can go right. Gratitude research is beginning to suggest that feelings of thankfulness have tremendous positive value in helping people cope with daily problems, especially stress, and to achieve a positive sense of the self.”

Studies are beginning to indicate that people who describe themselves as feeling grateful to others and either to God or to creation in general tend to have higher vitality, more optimism, suffer less stress, and experience fewer episodes of clinical depression than the population as a whole. These results hold even when researchers factor out such things as age, health, and income, equalizing for the fact that the young, the well-to-do, or the hale and hearty might have “more to be grateful for.”

Psychologist Dan McAdams of Northwestern University, whose specialty is well-being research, says he recently became interested in gratitude when he saw studies suggesting that increasing a person’s sense of thankfulness could lead to lower stress and better life “outcomes,” meaning success in career and relationships. Gratitude isn’t even listed in the 1999 addition of the presumably encyclopedic “Encyclopedia of Human Emotions,” a standard psychology text. “But if a sense of thankfulness can turn someone’s life from bitter to positive,” McAdams notes, “that makes gratitude an important aspect of psychology.”

Gratitude reminds us that there is more going on than just our one life. When we say thanks, as we did last night at our elegant Thanksgiving dinner in this room, thanks for food and drink, for friendship and sustenance, for beauty and for love, we acknowledge that we are part of a web of life, that the Spirit of Life flows through it all. Some call that God, and believe that it is benevolent toward us. For others, it is enough just that Being is so large and powerful and mysterious. That in itself makes it worthy of our awe. A grateful heart keeps us open, so thanks can flow out to those who are working hard, toward those who have offered our gifts, and so we can receive the next thing that is coming. It reminds us that we do not control all of what happens, so we enjoy it while it is here. “He who binds to himself a joy doth the winged life destroy. But he who kisses the joy as it flies, lives in Eternity’s sunrise.” (William Blake, 1757 – 1827).

Enlightened travelers of life don’t mourn because joy fades; they smile because it happened. Watch, this Holiday season, for joy to fly around you. I hope it does.

We start by being grateful for things. We move into being grateful in all things. Let me end with the words of Dag Hammarskjšld: To Everything that has been–thanks For Everything that will be–yes.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Fall down 7, Get up 8

November 11, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 11, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Persistence, endurance, resilience, grit – is it a mistake to be goal-oriented? Is there a better way to think about forward movement?

Call to Worship
– Rabindranath Tagore

Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers
but to be fearless in facing them.

Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain
but for the heart to conquer it.

Let me not look for allies in life’s battlefield
but to my own strength.

Let me not crave in anxious fear to be saved
but hope for the patience to win my freedom.

Grant that I may not be a coward,
feeling Your mercy in my success alone;

But let me find the grasp of Your hand in my failure.

Reading
Ralph Waldo Emerson

A person will worship something – have no doubt about that.

We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts – but it will out.

That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and character.

Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.

Text of this sermon is not available. Click the play button to listen.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

A Little Mercy

November 5, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 4, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

What does the word “mercy” mean to you? When do you need it? When do you give it? Where does it come from?

Meditation Reading
Gretchen Haley

Before reaching out
Start by sinking in
Before lifting your eyes
To strangers and friends
Before scrolling still another headline,
another status update,
another family photo,
another election prediction
Still your heart here
For a time
Take stock of your breath, your pulse, your body
Give thanks
For all of these things that have conspired
To bring you here
Where there is no problem to be solved
No news to absorb
No worry to turn over and over and over
In your mind
No wondering what you came here for
Or what you were meant to do, or buy, or say
There is only the remembering who you are
And to whom you belong
And the space
For bringing in, and letting go
For mending, and waiting
With a purposeful patience
So that here in the vast, unfamiliar quiet
We might awaken again
To this wide world
and the light that breaks
through the thick autumn sky
And the beauty that
Persists
and the partners that are
everywhere
breathing, and remembering too

Sermon

My friend and colleague Joanna Fontaine Crawford, the minister at Live Oak, posted this on Facebook this week.

I don’t know if we’re all conscious about it, but right now, we’re just waiting for Tuesday. I see so many posts where people are commenting on how hard it is to get motivated to do their normal routines. We’re waiting for Tuesday. Because next Tuesday is bigger than the politicians we’re voting for.

On Tuesday, we find out about us. About the US. We find out what kind of country we’re living in. Is it a country that shrugs (or cheers) at hate? Or a country that firmly says NO?

And so it’s really no wonder that we’re having trouble continuing with “normal life.” We’re not quite sure that what we thought was normal life, is. Our country is in Schrodinger’s box right now, It could be that the last two years have been a fluke, a temporary reaction to progress, OR that they are the reality of who we are as a nation. “This is not normal,” we’ve been saying. Next Tuesday we find out.

The mass the choir is singing this morning begins with Kyrie Eleison, Lord have mercy. I’ve been thinking hard about mercy this week.

I’ve had a Mary Gauthier song, Need a Little Mercy Now, stuck in my head. Rolling Stone called it “the saddest song ever written.”

Mercy Now
Mary Gauthier

My father could use a little mercy now
The fruits of his labor fall and rot slowly on the ground
His work is almost over it won’t be long, he won’t be around
I love my father, he could use some mercy now
My brother could use a little mercy now
He’s a stranger to freedom, he’s shackled to his fear and his doubt
The pain that he lives in it’s almost more than living will allow

I love my church and country, they could use some mercy now
Every living thing could use a little mercy now
Only the hand of grace can end the race towards another mushroom cloud People in power, they’ll do anything to keep their crown
I love life and life itself could use some mercy now

Yeah, we all could use a little mercy now
I know we don’t deserve it but we need it anyhow
We hang in the balance dangle ‘tween hell and hallowed ground
And every single one of us could use some mercy now
Every single one of us could use some mercy now
Every single one of us could use some mercy now

Mercy was such a creamy word, such a balm, a healing sound. I think about the refugees and asylum seekers on the long walk, hot and weary, blistered and hopeful. I read about the kindness they are being shown by the people in Mexico, the mercy they are being given along the way. I see the UU Service Committee raising funds to meet them with mercy at the border. My heart cries out for mercy for the people of color terrorized by racist violence, for the Jews who have lost eleven people to US racist violence, for the transgender people who are threatened more intensely by individuals and by policies under this administration.

We are living in another ugly time for vulnerable people. My heart cries for mercy. I suffer for the suffering, but then I ask myself whether my being twisted up and anguished helps them. No. My actions help them. The money I can send can help them. My being in pain only adds to the pain of the situation, and I am having a very good life right now. I want to stand against the ugliness, but I’m going to burn out if I keep feeling like I have been feeling. If I burn out by suffering over other people’s suffering, I’ve made it all about me, I’ve centered myself, my feelings, and that doesn’t help the people who are in danger.

Too much in me is riding on this election. For survival in the struggle for the long haul, I need a little mercy for me, for you, for our hearts and our spirits now. So many of us have been so twisted up, so horrified. We watch what’s been happening to our country, and we can’t stand it. Some of us are impatient with that despair, and say “Just work, just call, just write, vote vote. Some will have scorn for this longing for mercy. Some people have told me they worry about having any kind of Mercy on themselves for fear that if they started they would end up in a puddle on the couch for the rest of their lives.

The word as it is used in our culture comes from the Hebrew hesed, meaning long running loving kindness. It’s a word that is used when someone has more power than someone else. The powerful one can have mercy on the one who is less powerful. A parent can have mercy on a child. A teacher can have mercy on a student. A judge can have mercy on the accused. Husbands wives and partners can have mercy on each other. What does that look like? We can not keep score of every slight. We can make as many excuses for them as we do for ourselves. We can seek to understand the other before seeking to be understood. We can speak sweetly, with love. We can refuse to “bring a lawsuit” against them. That is the language used in the I Ching to talk about deciding someone is hopeless, that they will never change, making a bar they have to reach, and always watching and evaluating to see if they have reached it. Having mercy on your partner or spouse also may mean letting them go if you realize you are out of love or hope for the relationship.

I wonder if I just long to have mercy on myself. Sue Monk Kidd wrote,

“The world will give you that once in awhile, a brief timeout; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life.”
– Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

Many among us have been in the struggle for years. Many among us in this congregation were active in the civil rights work of the 60’s. In the struggle for reproductive rights in the 70’s and all along the way until we get here. The struggle will continue, as rights have to be won over and over. I didn’t know that, really. I heard Congressman John Lewis say that a few months ago. It’s a long haul, without a steady trajectory. It feels like we’re moving backwards now, on LGBTQ rights, on voting rights, on protections for the environment, on relationships with allies, on aid given to help other countries … Some people like that we’re moving backward. It feels safer to them.

I think mercy must be there for our opponents. Susan Sontag said

“10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.”
– Susan Sontag

That helps me, to think that the people at the rallies, yelling “Lock her up” and hating the media have just been radicalized, infected with the terrible joy of being with other like minded people who say out loud something that you have thought and felt ashamed of thinking …. And the permission to not be ashamed is given, and for a time you are a member of the religion of your baser instincts. We might try Mercy on ourselves and our families our friends. Does mercy mean to look at someone with soft eyes? To hold on to the goodness in them? Maybe Mercy for humans means just understanding that there are creative and destructive impulses within you. That if it were the culture of progressives to have a big rally and start shouting your anger about current elected officials, can you see yourself in an ecstasy of togetherness shouting “lock him up! lock him up” with other progressives? Do you have fun at football games shouting things with other people? Exhilarating “Harass them! Harass them! Make them relinquish the ball” – nerd cheers.

Mercy doesn’t mean going to the mushy moral middle, it can mean disagreeing fiercely, standing against wicked policies, and it means not giving up on the goodness of the middle 80% of people who can be persuaded toward kindness or cruelty, some of whom are in an ecstasy of cruelty right now. And let us pour out mercy on those their cruelty is hurting.

Hate cannot convince hate to end. Mercy could? Maybe. That is what Lincoln said when he wrote:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
– Abraham Lincoln

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Those who have gone before us

October 29, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 28, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

We will have a Clootie Tree again, from the Scottish/Irish/Appalachian tradition. We will put our wishes and our remembrances on pieces of cloth and drape them on the tree. What would we like to claim from our ancestors? What would we like to let go?

Text of this sermon is not available. Click the play button to listen.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Safe Space/Brave Space

October 22, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 21, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Our second End (goal) as a congregation is “We support and challenge one another in worship, spiritual growth and lifelong learning to practice a rich spiritual life” What forms can a spiritual life take? The job of a church is often described as “to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.”

Call to Worship
Richard Jefferies

It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it as the butterfly in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come; it is now. Now is eternity; now is the immortal life.

Reading

Invitation to Brave Space
Micky ScottBey Jones – inspired by an unknown author’s poem

Together we will create brave space
Because there is no such thing as a “safe space”
We exist in the real world
We all carry scars and we have all caused wounds.
In this space
We seek to turn down the volume of the outside world,
We amplify voices that fight to be heard elsewhere,
We call each other to more truth and love
We have the right to start somewhere and continue to grow.
We have the responsibility to examine what we think we know,
We will not be perfect.
This space will not be perfect.
It will not always be what we wish it to be
But
It will be our brave space together,
and
We will work in it side by side.

Sermon

When I was looking around at the churches searching for ministers nine years ago, I was struck by this church’s materials, which said, about seven times more than any other church, that you wanted someone who could help you create a safe space in church. I took that seriously, and we’ve all been paying good attention to that since I got here eight years ago. Last year the congregation and the board revisited the Ends/Goals of the congregation, and, since the feeling of safety has been there, a great deal of courage was expressed. Now, we have a safe space which also wants to be a brave space. This has always been a justice-seeking church, and now the language of its goals reflects that even more sharply.

About once every ten years I re-read the book “Full Catastrophe Living,” by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Many of you know he teaches Mindfulness-based meditation at Johns Hopkins, one of the finest medical centers in the world. I read the book because I love to read, and I always hope that reading it will be the same as meditation, which I haven’t been able to do well, even though I’ve been giving it a try on and off for my whole adult life. I want to start meditation again because, not only does it help your brain, even to the point of creating new gray matter, it helps with inflammation. According to their studies, which are too significant to ignore. Inflammation makes my life harder, so I’m giving this another try. It’s a challenge to me. Why is it a challenge? I like reading and I like working, and just sitting there being aware of my breath feels like doing nothing. Even though it might be doing something really crucial for my body and my spirit, I have continued not to do it. Frustrating. I’m reminded of the letter by Paul in the Christian Scriptures where he says “the things I don’t want to do, I do, and the things I want to do, I don’t do.” As long as I’m squarely in the midst of the human condition, though, I know I’m not unusual in this regard.

In reading his book, though, one line jumped out at me, because I’m talking this morning about our church’s new Ends/Goals. We talked about the first one last month. The second goal the board wrote after listening to the congregation is this: “We support and challenge one another in worship, spiritual growth and lifelong learning to practice a rich spiritual life. ” The part that strikes me is that we support and challenge one another. What that means is that the board wants me to practice both sides of the preacher’s job. Those two sides are to be pastoral, which is related to the word for shepherd. To comfort, to heal, to speak tenderly to, to care for, to teach gently. Pastoral, and the other side is Prophetic. That is related to the word “prophet.” You could have told me that. Prophets are always shining the light on people’s shortcomings, calling people back into righteousness, scalding those who just want to be secure in their sense of themselves. People hate prophets. In the Jewish Scriptures, they get chased into the desert, thrown into holes, yelled at, jailed and even killed. To be pastoral and prophetic is the job of the minister of a church. An old saw says that the preacher’s job is Ôto comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” That always sounded a little smug to me. In my 35 years of being a minister, I’ve met very few people I would call comfortable. Life afflicts the comfortable.

I don’t like to scald people. I don’t like to scold people. I don’t learn well from being shamed or yelled at. I am called, however, to challenge people and to challenge the culture; ur broken culture, which is so busy trying to worship money and power, which is so engineered to keep the heavy-footed on top of everyone else. “You dress the mortal wound of my people as if it were superficial, saying peace, peace, where there is no peace.” That is the prophet Jeremiah.

We support and challenge each other, our goal says, toward growth into a rich spiritual life. We know how to support one another, I think, better than we know how to challenge. That’s what my experience tells me. It’s certainly what FB tells me. We roughly “call each other out” for infractions, we stomp on a person’s ignorance, we mock people’s attempts at solutions to problems. It can be ugly out there. Here is the line from the book that jumped out at me: “People blossom when challenged and wither when threatened.”

When I put this quotation on Facebook for my friends to chew on, the responses were wise and well thought out. Challenges involve hope, not fear. A threat is something intended to harm, and a challenge is intended for good. What about people who perceive the challenge as a threat? Even though it wasn’t intended that way? Does the responsibility lie with the person offering the challenge or with the person receiving the challenge? One of the most elegant responses said “Challenges are invitations to grow. Threats are warnings not to grow.” The place where most UUs are feeling threatened is in our trying to get right about whiteness culture, so I’m going to talk about that for a minute. Those of us who are people of color, people of the global majority, know a lot about the way things are arranged in this culture, to favor whiteness, and those of us who identify as white are trying to keep up. For some reason a lot of us who identify as white don’t react to the new knowledge about whiteness culture with curiosity and courage. We act as if we feel like something is going to be taken away from us, and we clutch our lives and list our liberal credentials and shut the windows tightly. It takes practice to respond with curiosity and courage. I’ve thought a lot about my various privileges over the years. When I ended my marriage to a man and came out, I noticed the loss of heterosexual privilege. I’ll talk about that in another sermon.

We all are complicated intersecting privileges: youth, health, race, gender-typical, neuro-typical, sexual preference, socio-economic background, and many more. We all have some and not others. Those who have more are playing the game of life in this culture at a lower level of difficulty than others. It behooves us to notice and talk about our level of difficulty, but whiteness culture seems to forbid it.

There are so many challenges in our lives, it seems a shame to add to them here in worship, but look. Our country is wicked, and it has been forever. We have made it our mission to try to help build the Beloved Community. If we ae going to do that, we are going to have to be uncomfortable some of the time – with sermon topics, with the music, with expressions of emotion in worship or lack of them. That’s what challenge feels like. No one is trying to take anything away from us. Wait, that’s not true. I experienced my world view taken away from me as I began to wake up to the situation of women in this culture, and in the global culture. Once I woke up to seeing the war on women, I couldn’t unsee it. It was everywhere. Once I woke up to seeing the war on brown, black and native people I couldn’t unsee it. My naivetee was taken from me.

That’s what I lost. Is that bad? Why do I feel rude in mentioning that every 28 hours in our country an unarmed black, brown or native person is killed by police? Why do I feel strident pointing out that three women a day in the US are killed by their husbands, partners or boyfriends? The hesitancy to point out facts is one of the symptoms of this culture. Shhhhh, and talk about the American Dream.

This is a hard world for many among us. You look at people’s outsides and they look so together, but so many people are hurting. We need one another’s support. I would ask you to think about giving ten times the support to people you know as you give challenge. I would ask that we challenge one another rarely, and with huge love and humility. The culture, on the other hand, has all the support it needs, it seems, and we should rise up and challenge it with loud intelligent voices, with reason and disruption and skill and all the power we can muster together.

If we can hold one another in love and respect, if we can meet challenges with curiosity and the courage to make mistakes and go on, if we can build a strong spiritual life, where we root our hearts in compassion, where we slow down to take a deep breath when we are confronted by something new, where we do what we say we will do, where we know who we are and who we want to be, we will enrich our own experience of life, and we will live better and be better to live with.

If We Do Not Venture Out
Marni Harmony (excerpted)

If, on a starlit night,
with the moon brightly shimmering,
We stay inside and do not venture out,
the evening universe remains a part of life we shall not know.

If, on a cloudy day,
with grayness infusing all
and rain dancing rivers in the grass,
We stay inside and do not venture out,
the stormy, threatening energy of
the universe remains a part of life we shall not know.

If, on a frosty morning,
dreading the chilling air before the sunrise,
We stay inside and do not venture out,
the awesome cold, quiet, and stillness of
the dawn universe remains a part of life we shall not know.

[…]

If we stay inside ourselves and do not venture out
then the Fullness of the universe
shall be unknown to us….

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Love’s Sanctuary

October 15, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
October 14, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

We have talked about the ancient history of offering sanctuary as we have with Sulma and Alirio. In the broader context, we all need sanctuary, a respite, a sacred place to get re-centered. We will discuss what it means to be a people of sanctuary.

Call to Worship

This place is sanctuary
Kathleen McTigue

You who are broken-hearted,
who woke today with the winds of despair
whistling through your mind,
come in.
You who are brave but wounded,
limping through life and hurting with every step, come in.
You who are fearful, who live with shadows
hovering over your shoulders,
come in.
This place is sanctuary, and it is for you.
You who are filled with happiness,
whose abundance overflows,
come in.
You who walk through your world
with lightness and grace,
who awoke this morning with strength and hope,
you who have everything to give,
come in.
This place is your calling, a riverbank to channel
the sweet waters of your life, the place
where you are called by the world’s need.
Here we offer in love.
Here we receive in gratitude.
Here we make a circle from the great gifts
of breath, attention and purpose.
Come in.

Sermon

“Yeah though I walk through the valley of the shadow, thou art with me.
Though my heart’s been torn on fields of battle thou art with me.
Though my trust is gone and my faith not near In love’s sanctuary thou art with me.”

That’s the first verse of Austin-based, singer/songwriter Elyza Gilkyson’s song, “Sanctuary”. Gilkyson also wrote the beautiful song, “Requiem” that you just heard.

I wanted to share the song “Sanctuary” with you this morning, because even though I do not sing it anywhere near as well as she does, I think the song captures so much about the concept of sanctuary and it’s different meanings.

I saw Gilkyson in concert once, and she said basically that she has intentionally left the the “Thou” in “thou art with me” in a sense of mystery and the unknown.

Love is the Spirit of this church, and Service is its Law

October 7, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 7, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

“Love is the Spirit of this Church, and Service is its Law.” Most people look for ways to feel useful, to find good meaning in their lives, and to connect with others as they seek to leave the world a better place than they found it.

Call to Worship

This House
by Kenneth L. Patton

This house is for the ingathering of nature and human nature.

It is a house of friendships, a haven in trouble, an open room for the encouragement of our struggle.

It is a house of freedom, guarding the dignity and worth of every person.

It offers a platform for the free voice, for declaring, both in times of security and danger the full and undivided conflict of opinion.

It is a house of truth-seeking, where scientists can encourage devotion to their quest, where mystics can abide in a community of searchers.

It is a house of art, adorning its celebrations with melodies and handiworks.

It is a house of prophecy outrunning times past and times present in visions of growth and progress. This house is a cradle for our dreams, the workshop of our common endeavor.

Reading

A Litany for Survival
By Audre Lorde

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

For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.

And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid

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

Sermon

Useless Fury. Have you been feeling some of that? I don’t think I have seen such distress in many years.

How long can you live with such distress? Lifetimes, if you read the writings of historically marginalized and powerless folks. Lifetimes. Feeling like the heavy-footed are silencing us.

I’m going to tell you something about women. Something most of you already know.

“We were imprinted with fear like a faint line in the center of our foreheads. Learning to be afraid with our mothers milk.” For by this weapon the illusion of some safety to be found the heavy-footed hoped to silence us. The heavy footed have reinforced this lesson now. It might be easy to give up. But we won’t, because we have a voice together. Together is the first word of our mission. Together is powerful. From time to time, individuals are called to step forward in Courage. Almost always, though, this courage has its roots somewhere in together.

We come to this place with our pain, our fears, or limits, and our strengths. we come to this place to learn to love and just serve. We come to this place to build the Beloved Community. Together. In order for this place to be here, we have to work together.

Sometimes when we are distressed and afraid, our first instinct is to shut down, to become isolated, to get depressed.

At my house what we do is watch a garden show called “Gardeners’ World.” The show has Golden Retrievers and volunteers. It has old ladies glowing with gardening and older couples discovering new species of orchids.

Transformation through service

Today is about transformation through service. That’s the name of a new program we have been beginning.

Every time we light our chalice, we say together, “Love is the spirit of this church and service is it’s law.”

There is so much service that has been done here. People help with the stewardship campaign, people help with Fellowship, people teach, people clean, people pitch in to proofread things, too right cards, to sit at the welcome desk so that everyone always gets a human voice when they call the church, I have a volunteer who assist me and helps me do more than I could do by myself. We have people who help us count the money and keep it safe as it comes in so that it can all be used well, we have people who write cards and make visits to those who are ill or in distress. Just to get an idea of how much human power it takes for us to make this congregation work, would you please raise your hand if you have done any volunteer service for this congregation?

I ask this so we can look around and see how many people it takes. Some people are in a position in their lives and spirits to do more than others people are temperamentally suited as givers. Other people are in a place in their lives where it’s all they can do to keep the home fires burning. We are all in different life stages.

There are many different kinds of jobs to be done in this congregation. Some require physical presence and others don’t. How can you tell if there is a job that might suit your life stage your spirits energy your gifts and talents? Transformation through service program.

Give and You Receive

“It is better to give than to receive” may have a biological basis. A new study found that the brain’s pleasure centers became activated as people decided to donate part of a new stash of money to charity, rather than keeping it all for themselves. The findings may shed light on why some people contribute to the public good, even at a personal cost.

Researchers at the University of Oregon took advantage of an advanced brain imaging technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which shows when specific regions of the brain are activated. Their study was supported by NIH’s National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the National Science Foundation. At the start of the experiment, 19 women received S 100 and were told they could keep whatever money remained at the end of the session. They then lay in an fMRI scanner for about an hour, while a computer screen displayed a series of possible money transfers to a local food bank. About half of the proposed transfers were voluntary – participants could decide whether to accept or reject the donation. In other cases, the proposed transfers were required, similar to a tax. Occasionally, additional money was unexpectedly added or taken away from either the woman’s or the charity’s account.

As described in the June 15, 2007, issue of Science, the brain scans showed that three very different situations – receiving money, seeing money go to a good cause or deciding to donate money – all activated similar pleasure-related centers deep in the brain.

Greek philosopher Aristotle once surmised that the essence of life is “To serve others and do good.” If recent research is any indication, serving others might also be the essence of good health.

According to a recent study conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The research revealed the following about each of the study’s populations:

Men Enrolled in Baltimore Experience Corps – This group experienced the greatest increase in brain volumes over the two-year study.
Women Enrolled in Baltimore Experience Corps Women showed modest gains in brain volumes, but they also began the study in generally poorer physical condition than the men. By the study’s end, women had made the most significant improvements in physical activity. Dr. Carlson noted this could lead to future increases in brain volume and improved executive function among the women.
Control Group Members – This group showed typical age-related shrinkage in brain volumes.

The study involved 702 retired men and women, 352 were trained to serve as Baltimore Experience Corps volunteer mentors. They worked in libraries at Baltimore City Public Schools, helping young children learn to read. The remaining 350 study participants – control group members – were not involved in Baltimore Experience Corps. Volunteer work involved:

Working in teams
Problem solving
Walking throughout the day
Sharing their knowledge

Within this larger study, researchers also conducted a “nested study” (a study within a study). This involved 111 of the research participants, 58 from the Baltimore Experience Corps group and 53 from the control group. These people underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans – an exam that uses a magnetic field and radio waves to produce detailed brain images – and memory tests at scheduled points during the research.

“We expected the brains of study participants to shrink as part of the normal aging process,” said Michelle Carlson, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Mental Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Core Faculty at Johns Hopkins Center on Aging and Health. “Instead, after two years in a program that involved them in meaningful, social activity, their memory centers either maintained their size or grew modestly.”

“We learned that activity with a purpose may benefit cognitive function and memory in older adults,” Dr. Carlson said. “The magic ingredient seemed to be getting out of your home and getting out with a purpose.”

Learned helplessness

Learned helplessness can be taught. The way that you get taught learned helplessness is that nothing you do seems to make any difference to your situation. You get a shock whether you press the little paddle or not. You get your food or you don’t get your food; it doesn’t matter what you do. And you learn that nothing you do makes a difference.

We will not let them teach us this. This is a place where we can be together. We can learn that we are not helpless. We can learn our powers. We can join our voices. We can keep going TOGETHER.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

What I Learned from Being a Writer

September 30, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
September 30, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Being edited, rejected, praised, criticized, inspired, and uninspired; I’ll create circumstances in which you have to just keep your head down and write anyway.

Call to Worship
Navajo Tradition

Beauty is before me,
and beauty behind me
Above me and below me
hover the beautiful.
I am surrounded by it,
I am immersed in it.

In my youth I am aware of it
and in my old age I shall walk quietly
the beautiful trail.
In beauty it is begun
and in beauty it is ended.

Reading
Kathleen McTigue

May the light around us guide our footsteps and hold us fast to the best and most rightous that we seek. May the darkness around us nurture our dreams and give us rest so that we may give ourselves to the work of our world. Let us seek to remember the wholeness in our lives, the weaving of light and shadow in this great and astonishing dance in which we move.

Sermon

Think about your life, and ask yourself what your art is. Do you garden? Paint? Theater? Actions? Do you make music? Are you a dancer? Do you make businesses, do you teach, do you write? As I’m talking about being a writer, I invite you to think about your art form and how the things I’m talking about pertain to what you do.

The book I’m using for this sermon is called Art and Fear. It’s a small book, but it packs a lot of wisdom, and I notice new things each time I read it over.

I’m going to speak in broad brush strokes here. I may say something like “everybody struggles with fears as they create.” You may think “I bet Mozart didn’t. He was a genius.” We’ll get to that. Is your art going to be like Mozart? No. Ok, let’s get on with it.

We’ll talk about genius for a moment. There are some, no doubt. They are not most of us. Let’ s talk about talent. Malcom Gladwell says maybe talent is made up of interest or focus. It doesn’t make you good at something by itself. What makes you good at something is spending ten thousand hours at it. Whatever you spend ten thousand hours on, you will be good at. Putting in the time is what makes good art.

Some people have a picture of an artist, a writer, a dancer, a business starter-upper, who has a flash of inspiration, goes to the studio or the office, works feverishly for a few days, and brilliant things are born. There are flashes of inspiration, for sure. Many people have a great idea for a garden, a painting, a book, a business, but if they don’t have the training, the tools, the craft, the muscles, the experience, they can’t make that idea happen. The art of art is a mystery, intangible, but art is mostly made up of craft. Craft is what gets you the farthest. That’s not true. Keeping going is what gets you the farthest.

There are so many things that make you want to stop. Whereas art happens in some times and places as part of community, in our culture mostly it happens when individuals are working alone, without feedback or support, not knowing whether they are any good. It used to be that the community needed you to paint that bison on the wall of the cave, or the king needed the music for his party, or the tribe or clan needed the bard to write the song that told the history of the people, or the church commissioned you to paint the ceiling. Now a lot of people work alone. The questions and fears can make you stop. “Am I any good? Will I be a success? What does that mean? Is this going to mean anything to anyone? Are people going to be angry with me? Will I be misunderstood? What is the point of this? Is it just self-expression? Is that selfish? Is it going to be helpful to anyone?”

I started writing in journals, combing through my thoughts. I lucked into a gig writing commentaries for the local WNC NPR station. They said “Make it 600 words, make it deep, and make it funny.” I did one every three weeks for years. I wrote them with little kids running around scattering legos, I wrote while they asked what was for dinner. I wrote when I was sick and when I was well. When my inspiration ran dry I had to write about when your inspiration runs dry, because I had a piece due. The same thing with sermons. I need to have something to talk to you all about on a Sunday morning. That’s a serious deadline. No extentions.

What this book says is to wonder whether you’re any good, whether you’re going to be successful, whether you are better than that other artist over there, and do you art anyway.

It’s the most Buddhist thing ever. In order to write, you have to write. You don’t have to build a writing shed, clean off a desk, clean the house, water the garden, you just write. Ruthlessly. If you wait for inspiration you’re lost. Many artists quit because there is so much business involved, paperwork, fund raising, taking things to the post office, looking up writing guidelines to figure out whether they want one inch margins or one and a half inch margins. One successful artist figured he actually painted about 6 full days a month, even though he was working on it full time.

Many artists quit because they don’t realize how much doing nothing is involved in creating. Your brain has to get into that part of it that is the daydreamer. You can’t go straight from the decision-making planning brain to creating, usually. You need to spend some time doing nothing. That’s why I need Fridays and Saturdays to write a sermon. There is the reading to be done, of course, but there is a lot of wondering. “What would I want to hear about if I were in the pew for a sermon about this? How can I not bore people to slobber? Why did I ever think I could write anything about this? It’s too complicated, too multi layered. Maybe it’s just going to be meaningful for me and no one else. Let me watch one episode of this BBC detective series. Maybe one more.” Then there is the time when you put everything together and it’s sixteen pages when it needs to be five. Then there is time when you just let it cook for a while. Then you have to have time to panic. Then you write.

The main thing is to feel afraid and to write anyway. What will people think? Wonder that and do you art anyway. Keep putting in your hours. In the book is the story of the ceramics teacher. He announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

You learn to do your art by doing it. A lot of it. Stephen King, in his great book “On Writing,” talks about doing the “closed door” draft of the book, the one only you will see. Natalie Goldberg talks about the bad first draft.

Everyone talks about that. If you get stuck trying to make the first paragraph brilliant, the first version of the painting brilliant, if you try to put the garden in all at once, you are setting yourself up for frustration. Some thing just slip right out as if they were channeled, and other things have to come out messy first.

I think doing church is a kind of art. The same rules apply. You have to just keep doing it. There are 20 days of team meetings to 10 days of hands on justice in a month, 20 days of planning and shopping and talking to 10 days of hands on teaching, fellowship parties, amazing music and other experiences that hold within them the possibility of nourishment and transformation.

We have our eyes on the goal of Beloved Community, but we must learn to love the process, the cleaning of the brushes, the trips to San Antonio, the relationship building with other churches and organizations. This is the way things grow and change. A church will create the skills in the people to do community well by doing it clumsily at times. You celebrate your triumphs, while always feeling that divine discontent artists talk about, never being satisfied, still following the vision. Building the Beloved Community by doing church, dancing, parties, painting, speaking, writing, singing, moving money around, knocking on doors, registering people to vote, teaching, voting, getting good at love and compassion in the midst of our efforts – it’s a process we’ll be engaged with for decades. We are making a lot of art so that some of it will be brilliant. We keep going, because that is what all veteran artists have in common. They didn’t quit.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

UU101, UU201, UU301

September 23, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
September 23, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

This Sunday will be a party. We will talk about UU 101, 201, and 301 with original songs and stories from Rev. Meg. We will all be invited and encouraged to make our pledges together as a celebration of faith and hope, expectation and promise.

Text of this sermon is not available. Click the play button to listen.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Faith Out Loud

September 17, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
& Rev. Chris Jimmerson
September 16, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

As we begin a sermon series on our church’s ends/goals, we will talk about living our UU faith and values, teaching them to our children, and acting on them in the world.

When you think about your values, your personal values, what are they? Honesty? Authenticity? Busy-ness? Kindness? Winning? Compassion? Security? Power? Connection? Knowledge? Skill? Wisdom? Experience? Health? Inclusion? Fairness? How did you get those values? Did your parents teach you directly? Were there teaching stories? Was it a matter of watching the grownups and deciding you want to be like that, or not be like that?

I was taught through the stories of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. Wisdom is more valuable than money. Kindness and love are paramount. We will be judged on how we treat the poor, the widows and the orphans. No group of people is better than another based on anything but character. Except people who don’t like classical music, and people who do think they are better than other people. So there are the big values and then there are the tiny ones. Jar with golf balls, beads and sand?

This congregation named its values, and the list is here in your order of service:

Transcendence – To connect with wonder and awe of the unity of life
Community – To connect with joy, sorrow, and service with those whose lives we touch
Compassion – To treat ourselves and others with love
Courage – To live lives of honesty, vulnerability, and beauty
Transformation – To pursue the growth that changes our lives and heals our world

Children learn values mainly by interactions with us. When I was working as a family therapist, parents would talk about their hopes for their kids. “Well, odds are they are going to turn out pretty much like you, “They would grow pale and quiet. Yes. Be the person you’d like your child to be. You want them to say please and thank you? Say it to them. You want them to be kind? Be kind to them. How do you want them to handle frustration? You handle it that way. How do you want them to express anger? You do that? How do you want them to treat their friends? You do that. Does that make sense? This doesn’t always work. Sometimes there are organic issues, chemical imbalances, etc. that throw you a curve. Sometimes substances get involved, and each substance has its own “personality,” Alcohol is self-despising, accusing, pitiful and angry. When a substance gets involved, you are dealing with your loved one’s personality plus the personality of the substance.

When I was working as a family therapist, I would ask people what their parents’ expectations had been. “They just wanted me to be perfect,” they’d say. When I asked people what they wanted for their children, they would say “I just want them to be happy.” There is a disconnect there. I began to ask parents to create a “job description” for their children, a list of qualities and values that, if their children were to move toward those, they’d feel they had done a good job as parents. For my children, I make this list: be kind, strong and brave, joyful, useful loving honest and healthy. No one can be all of those things every moment, but it can be your goal, your constellation of stars by which you steer your little ship. We would say this list in our prayers every night. Now my grandchildren have their own list they say every night.

How are our values going to be transferred to our children here?

How do you teach someone to treat themselves and others with compassion and love? How do you teach someone to connect to the world with awe and wonder at the unity of life? Well, you teach them to extract DNA from strawberries, to make a volcano from lemons, you teach them about worm farming and the cycle of life, about water, about other people and their religions, about helping others and being fair, how to be an individual and also part of a group, how to look after the interests of yourself and your people, but balance that with looking after the interests of the community. We teach them about what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist in this world.

We have to talk about our faith. We make a family chalice and light it at meal times or in the evening while we’re going about our activities. We say things like “As Unitarian Universalists, we don’t act like that.” Or “As UUs, we treat our friends this way, we treat our elders this way, we disagree with curiosity and respect.”

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Wade in the Water

September 17, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
September 9, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

We bring some water from a place special to us for the common bowl as we speak together about places that move us, have meaning for us, or hold comfort for us.

Intergenerational Sunday

(Sing) — Wade in the water

This is a spiritual song from the Africian American tradition. Women and men in Africa were enslaved and brought over in ships to be sold in people in South America and North America. Enslaved people in the US were allowed to go to church, and some of the songs they would sing had layers of meaning. They mean one thing, and they also mean another thing.

First verse: See that band all dressed in white. The leader looks like an Israelite.

The Israelites were people we learn about in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Jewish Scriptures. Their people had been enslaved in Egypt for 400 years until a hero named Moses helped them escape. They went across a sea to the place where they could be free. In the story, God pushed the water out of their way, and then when the bad guys chased them, all the water fell back on them. Wade in the water.. God’s going to trouble the water. What does that mean, trouble the water?

Story in the Christian Scriptures, in the gospel of John. There was a pool in Jerusalem, and the legend was that God would make the waters choppy and rough, troubled, from time to time. If you could get in or get your friends to put you in when the water was troubled, you would be healed. The story goes that Rabbi Jesus had a conversation with a man whose legs hadn’t worked for 38 years. He told Jesus he didn’t have anyone to put him in the water when it was stirred up. Jesus told him to rise, take up his bed, and walk. He did. The religious people told the man he’d broken the law by carrying his bed on a day people were supposed to rest. He said that the man who healed him told him to do that. They looked around for Rabbi Jesus, but he had already left.

This Scripture, which the men and women in church all knew, teaches that the laws people make up are not important to Rabbi Jesus, who they worshipped. The laws said they were slaves, and that they should obey the people who owned them. This song says if a law is not right, not just, it’s okay to break it.

Wade in the water…. God’s going to trouble the water

See that band all dressed in red… Looks like the band that Moses led. There was a woman who was a hero to the enslaved Africans. Her name was Harriet Tubman, and she led groups of people escaping through fields and swamps, through mountain passes and friendly houses with hiding places so they could get to the Ohio River and cross over into states where enslaving people was against the law.

For these enslaved believers, water meant baptism and it meant a way to throw the dogs off your trail and a way to get to freedom. Their lives had plenty of trouble, so having a faith story that troubled waters were the time when healing could happen was very strengthening.

Those of us who are physically free still have rivers to cross in our lives and inside ourselves. The waters around us get troubled. We can remember that these are times we can ask for help from our friends, teachers, and family, and that the Spirit of Love is loving us.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.