Big Gay Sunday

by Posted in Audio available, Marisol Caballero, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Marisol Caballero
August 21, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

August 20 is the Austin Pride Festival and Parade, and the party will continue on Sunday at First UU! Join us for a celebration of love, justice, and perseverance.

Call to Worship

Gratitude to My Ancestors
by Rev. Marta Valentin

With honor and respect, these eyes see for you
all manner of life you could have not imagined.
My lips move with the rhythm of your words
flowing through me,
my tongue caressing each morsel of wisdom
I am graced to pass on.
Your DNA rides my veins
and with every breath I take,
your cautious steps from the past
toward a fuller life become
bold moves I make toward my destiny.
Together, we wrap arms
around a new generation,
here to become who were born to be,
to cast their magic as we once did
and bless each day for their ability to do so.

For you, dear ancestors, we live this day.

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

Two years ago, I preached the Sunday before Austin Pride and called the service Big Gay Sunday- partly because this title was vague enough to give me plenty of wiggle room for the direction of my sermon while meeting our newsletter deadline, and partly because, let’s be honest, putting the words “Big Gay” in front of any event makes it sound like it’ll be ten times more fun! “Big Gay Lunch Buffet.” “Big Gay Grocery Run.” “Big Gay Tax Audit.” See? It works! And that service was so much fun. The Intergenerational choir sang Lady Gaga’s, “Born This Way” and wore feather boas, dangled a disco ball, and got us dancing in the aisle.

Last year, I wasn’t the one scheduled to preach on the Sunday before Pride, and I’m not sure if I would have called the service “Big Gay Sunday” again, but no fewer than five different people have asked me in the past year, “Why don’t we do Big Gay Sunday anymore? Is there a reason we stopped doing it?” Once. We had done it once before, but in the memory of at least several, Big Gay Sunday was a beloved annual church tradition that had inexplicably disappeared.

So, back by popular demand, is ye old tradition of yore, Big Gay Sunday, The Sequel: Bigger, Gayer, and Sunday-er than ever before! A pep rally, of sorts, to get us good and hyped for First UU’s participation in next Saturday’s Pride festival and parade.

Today also happens to be my Sunday swan song, as it’s my last Sunday with you all as one of your ministers. My last day on the job here is August 31st, and you will see me at Pride, but I won’t be at church next Sunday, so I feel a special responsibility to go out with a bang and give this service a real party feel.

Pride is an annual celebration of survival by people who, due to cultural saturation of both homophobia and violence, was never meant to survive. Yet here we are, together with our many allies, speaking, singing, dancing, advocating, simply living in ways that our ancestors never imagined. We are their eyes, their breath, their tongues, their arms, their help them bless the generations coming up.

In Spanish, the word for ancestors, antepasados, directly translates to “those who have passed before.” Circumstance has left my family many unanswered questions about our genetic relations, so I find this definition of ancestors appealing & quite useful. In this way, my ancestors; our ancestors, need not be blood relation, but rather those who have gone before, leaving us behind to continue their legacies.

I’d like to introduce you to one of our ancestors. Her picture is on your orders of service. Her name was Marsha P. Johnson. She was born Malcolm Michaels Jr. in 1944 New Jersey and lived as a transgender woman in lower Manhattan. Of course, back then, the terms she used to describe herself were, “transvestite,” “transsexual,” and “queen.” She spent much of her adult life experiencing homelessness. Sometimes Marsha slept at the home of friends, in Times Square movie theatres, or anywhere else she could find to lay her head. In the documentary about her online, “Pay It No Mind: The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson,” a friend recalls once seeing her asleep under a table in the Flower District. She was known for wearing elaborate crowns of fresh flowers on her head and was often given colorful varieties by the wholesalers she made friends with. Her friend recalls asking the vendor, “Why do you let her sleep under your table like that?” and the man answered, “Because she’s holy.”

It’s true. “Saint Marsha,” as she was called by folks in Greenwich Village, though poor, had no attachment to material things and would literally give the shirt off her back, or food, or money, to total strangers in need. Often harassed and brutalized, she somehow kept a genuinely cheerful disposition. She said that the P. in Marsha P. Johnson stood for “pay it no mind.”

She was spending the night of her birthday, June 27th, 1969 at the local dive bar in her neighborhood. Calling it a “dive” was correct, but calling it a “bar” was a stretch. It was illegal to operate a gay bar in New York City then. In fact, it was illegal to serve a customer if they revealed that they identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans*. Because of this, a few mafia-run establishments popped up along Christopher Street that catered to “the fairies,” without liquor licenses and the police were paid to look the other way. The gay men in most of these bars did not take too kindly to the presence of “queens,” so the Stonewall Inn became the place with a clientele made up mostly of young, gender variant and poor people of color. The Stonewall bar became a refuge and often makeshift LGBT homeless youth shelter. Kids who had to run away or were kicked out because of who they were could panhandle during the day to get the $3 entrance fee and spend the whole night inside and out of the cold. In a place with no running water, just a tub behind the bar to rinse and reuse glasses, no one monitored whether everyone inside was a paying customer.

No one who was there remembers exactly how it all started, but that night, the police raided the Stonewall Inn in the wee hours of the morning of June 28th, arresting 13 people for being caught either with three or more items of clothing that did not match their assigned gender or dancing with someone of the same gender. Everyone who was there agreed that Marsha and her friend and fellow queen, Silvia Rivera, were among the first to fight back. Someone threw something. Some say it was Marsha who through a shot glass and yelled, “I got my human rights, too!” at the police. Within minutes, the Stonewall Inn was fighting back in a full riot and the LGBT Rights Movement was born.

The riot went on for six days. At one point, a can-can line of queens formed and confronted the police with a song as they kicked their legs, Rockettes style, “We are the Stonewall Girls, we wear our hair in curls… ” It was this courage and daring by people who had very little to lose, like Marsha and Sylvia, that inspired such resistance. The amazing this about these riots is that yes, there was violence as these people fought back against years of subhuman treatment, but they also used camp humor, sarcasm, song, and dance. They didn’t lose themselves in the violence, but rather used the very essence of their community as an act of resistance. It reminds me of one of my favorite lines from the musical Rent, “the opposite of war isn’t peace, it’s creation!”

A year after the riots, New York’s queer community gathered for an anniversary march from the Stonewall Inn to Central Park. The organizers remember that they were so terrified or being attacked or arrested (or both) that first year, that it was more of a run than a march. But, when they arrived at Central Park and looked back at the crowd, it had grown to hundreds. This is how Pride marches and parades were born.

Today, Pride celebrations still employ the use of creative resistance. There are queer cable networks, well-recognized & well-funded LGBTQ rights advocacy organizations, there are LGBTQ Chambers of Commerce, softball leagues, legal firms, youth centers, you name it. When I was growing up, I did not know of one single out and successful celebrity. These days, it’s not completely without occasional serious professional consequences (remember Michael Sam’s NFL career), but it’s no longer shocking news when a major celebrity comes out of the closet. In fact, if a celebrity chooses to keep their personal lives private, as Jodie Foster did for so many years, they are negatively judged by the public as self-loathing and cowardly.

Of course, there are legal battles that have been won through our efforts, as well. We now enjoy the right to marry in all 50 states. We can adopt children. We can openly serve in the military. Our queer culture has saturated the arts so thoroughly that those among us who identify as straight no longer bat an eye to see a queer character on their favorite primetime TV shows.

Pride is about being celebratory, yet cognizant of the footsteps we travel in. A way has certainly been paved, by Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera and many other forgotten heroes of the Stonewall Rebellion. Hollywood depictions of the event emphasize white male characters, even though veterans of the event all agree that the LGBTQ rights movement was begun by trans women of color. Our predecessors laid their lives on the line, yet there is still so much work yet to do. Marriage equality did not do anything to ensure proper healthcare for LGBTQ people, or protection from employment and housing discrimination, and many other rights still denied us.

Our greater community, including our straight allies, is still shocked with grief over the Pulse nightclub shooting, which left 50 dead, the majority of which were queer people of color. I include in these numbers the shooter, who himself was a casualty of homophobic, hyper-masculinity that has arisen as a result of our LGBTQ community’s recent gains. As much as we would like to attribute 100% of the assassin’s actions to affiliation with a terrorist organization across the sea, such violence against queer people is historically as American as apple pie.

As society swings left on acceptance, there are those whose bigotry has not been given time to accept these new standards, though it has been almost fifty years since the Stonewall Rebellion. Such hatred has seen an increase in recent years, and trans women of color have borne the brunt of it. Last I checked, a few days ago, the death toll for trans women killed in 2016 had climbed up to 19. Almost all of them were trans women of color.

The majority of violence against the most vulnerable in our community goes unreported and/or unprosecuted. In fact, Marsha P. Johnson’s death by drowning in 1992 was quickly ruled a suicide, though her friends suspect foul play to this day.

To exist, and especially to exist joyfully, as a queer person, continues to be a radical act of defiance in a world and in a time that still tells us that we are not meant to survive. This Saturday, we will participate in the Pride Festival and Parade, as we have done the past several years. As a community of faith, we are unique positioned to demonstrate that celebration of life (ours and those of the dead) can coexist alongside the grief that we continue to hold. Our float is themed, “In Memoriam,” and will be a moving tribute to our gratitude to those who dared to live life as fully and authentically as possible and are no longer with us. We will be dancing, celebrating their fierceness, as well as carrying candles and signs that read the names of the victims of the Orlando shooting. Please consider showing up in great number, making a sign of your own, or carrying one that our middle schoolers are working on, and creating this important space for our community to hold the reality of the pain of grief and the joy of love.

It’s fitting that this will be my last act with this church community & such a holy act at that to march alongside you in this way. If UUs held “sacraments,” I’d like to think that this would be among them. Our participation in Pride is an act of humility around how little of this struggle we can attribute to ourselves, alone, as well as a commitment and show of our resolve to continue in the struggle that did not begin and will not end with us. It has been my honor to minister to you and beside you, and a blessing that I will complete my service here next Saturday on the revolution’s parade route. It is a deeply religious act to realize that we were not meant to survive, and yet here we stand.

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 16 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.

What holds us together?

by Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
August 14, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

When the Unitarians merged with the Universalists, they decided to write a list of ideas we all “affirm,” which means to say “yes” to, and “promote,” which means we talk about these things, not only amongst ourselves but with others as well. Let’s take a look at how they speak to what is going on today.

What a situation we have out there these days! The election is unlike anything we’ve seen, terrorism is affecting European people now, so it’s getting a lot of press. Folks feel somehow that they have to choose sides between suggesting that Black lives matter and honoring the dangerous job that law enforcement is trying to do. You have to have fine-tuned ears now because people all talk at the same time on the cable news shows. People on both sides act like the others have taken leave of their good sense. In a situation like this, we need to go back to basics. We need to turn to our Principles. When we talk every Sunday about what holds us together, we say our mission. That’s not the only thing at the foundation of our church. We have Principles, and a thoughtful commitment to the Principles will shape your life. Taking a deep refreshing a dive into them this year, we will see what treasures we can bring up from the depths, to aid our growing strength as spiritual/spirited people.

The Principles were adopted in 1960, when the Unitarians and Universalists were merging. They were hammered out with passion, fury, diplomacy, compassion and compromise. Their language was of the time, and, in the early 80’s the women let it be known that changes needed to be made. There were discussions, thoughtful and fruitful. Much smoother than before. There were several General Assemblies where votes were taken. I remember, in the early 90’s when I was just coming into this denomination from the Presbyterians, at my first GA I got to see the seventh principle, about” the interdependent web of all existence, of which we a part” was given its final positive vote, to allow it to be added to the original six. My sense of the truth of that Principle, my experience with Earth-based spirituality, found it deeply satisfying that this denomination had taken that step.

So our principles are the result of a lot of committee work. They can challenge and change us, and I want you to know that the work of teams of people thinking and acting together are the way all of the best church work gets done. The Principles are something we agree to affirm and we agree to promote them, but they are not a test of belief, as a creed is. Creeds, also created by committees, were originally crafted as a focus for Christians who were being tortured for their beliefs. People had a list of beliefs to hold onto as they were threatened with death. It was self-definition in the midst of a hostile culture. It feels good to some folks to be part of a group reciting ancient words.

Our principles are not commandments or a creed, but they do point to who we aspire to be. They are a big, inviting house where there are lots of rooms, lots of ways of being and believing within a structure, a container for our right relations.

In this election cycle, we watch Trump rallies, and it is easy to see the people who do not live by the principles. It’s not that they would not be welcome here, it’s that they would feel a lack of fit. They would understand, listening to the principles being read that this was a different place. About as different as you can get from a Trump rally. There is still the longing for fairness, just different thoughts on how to get there. Different methods for getting there. There is still the longing for safety, but different thoughts on who should be included in that safety. The Principles inform our lives, and, often, unless we were raised with them, the first time we heard them we felt ourselves rung like a bell.

The first Principle that we agree to affirm and promote is the inherent worth and dignity of every person. This does not hold for ideas, which have to prove their worth. We are not called to affirm or promote the worth or dignity of every idea, but of every person. There is no individual or group of people who are worthless, who are undeserving of dignity. This idea can guide our thoughts, and show us how to treat people. Just in case you think this just means “be nice,” let me spell this out for you. I like to turn up the heat on our understanding of the Principles by adding “beginning in our homes and congregations” to the end of each one. So, we recognize the worth and dignity of every person in our home, including ourselves. Does this mean letting everyone do what they want to until civilization falls? Clearly not. A colleague of mine in the state of Maine took a walk in her neighborhood. Hanging from an apartment building was an enormous rebel flag. A woman happened to come out of the building, and they began a neighborly chat.. My colleague asked about the flag and found out this woman’s boyfriend had hung it. My colleague asked, gently, whether the woman knew that, for a lot of people, that flag was not a symbol of the South, but an emblem of racism and white supremacy. The next day it was down. Gone. She didn’t harangue. Didn’t hammer or nag. Just kindly, without self-righteousness, gave her some information. In this, she respected the worth and dignity of the woman and her boyfriend. That’s hard to do, though, and the likelihood is that the racism didn’t change, it just went inside the apartment. What works better?

In the spring I talked to you about how new research seems to indicate that the brains of liberals and conservatives are wired differently. From tiny involuntary eye movements in reaction to various peaceful or provoking photographs, researchers say they can have a good idea about a person’s political leanings. The corollary of this is that words will not change someone’s mind. The only things that changes someone’s mind, we learn from the FBU hostage negotiators, is listening. Deep, active, sincere listening. Listening to the point where you can almost sense the need for security, the urge to rest in the familiar surroundings of only people you understand, to the point where you can almost see how giving the whole system over to someone who claims he knows what to do, who claims he can fix everything, where you want to believe that there is someone more grown-up than you who will take care of things. It’s that kind of listening that will give you the best odds of partnering with another mind in making a change.

We honor the worth and the dignity of other people by believing that they can teach us something if we engage in conversation, if we listen, if we say our piece when what the I Ching calls “the window of influence” is open. Say our piece and then leave it alone. We honor people’s worth and dignity when we do not infanitilize them because we don’t understand their language or their culture. We honor their worth and dignity when we not only treat people with fairness, but we work for more fairness in the laws of our land. We see so many examples of this not being done. We see mostly male legislators, with values shaped by ignorant preachers, encroaching on sensible health care for women. White folks are waking up again to the structures of white supremacy in our society. We don’t need to feel guilty, we just need to notice it and not fall back asleep, and we need to do what we can do dismantle unfair structures, and use the privileges we do have due to our gender, our skin color, our mainstream sexuality or our able-bodied ness in ways that help those without. And if you know someone who quibbles about whether the structures are still unfair, just as them whether they would like to trade lives and be treated the way people of color are treated. If they would like to live in a body that works differently from the majority of bodies.

What we are seeing in this election cycle is a high status person giving permission for the voicing of crude, cruel, racist, sexist and uneducated prejudices. There are thousands of these folks in every state. I’m not here to play “ain’t it awful” I’m here to say we have an enormous and difficult listening opportunity.

Most listening opportunities are easier than that, with people in your family and at work. My challenge to all of us is this. Knowing that words don’t change people who disagree more than a few degrees from you, or people who are not open to you, let’s put all our emphasis on listening for a few months. Can we do it? I don’t know about you, but I know I won’t be able to. But I’m going to keep trying. It’s my goal. Listening is such a gift. Become aware. Almost no one does it. No one, and I think it’s the key to health and happiness. Take a look at the front of your order of service.

Let yourself hear “shhhhhh.” And trust your good sense to tell you when it’s time. To shhhhhhhhh.

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 16 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.

 

What I learned on my summer vacation

by Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
August 7, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

My attempts at cooking and baking have taught me some things. More recently, Kiya and I spent three weeks in Mexico learning Spanish, which has taught me even more.

One of the things I do as a writer is to try to tell the truth as much as I can, at least to myself. There is one trick I use to get to underlying truth, and I’m going to use it this morning so you can see how it works. Then you can decide whether you might want to use it too. I write a sentence or so, and then I write “What I really mean to say is …. ” And wait to see what happens.

With the first part of my vacation, as those of you who are on Facebook with me will know, I started experimenting with cooking and baking. I learned something about how I like to do things. What I really mean to say is, I cooked every meal when my boys were growing up. What I really mean to say is I grilled every meal. The grill was in the carport, so rain or shine, summer or winter, I grilled chicken breasts or pork chops, steaks, hamburgers, ears of corn, onions, peppers and peaches. There is something satisfying about cooking over an open flame, and there is very little measuring involved. Measuring seems like too much when you have a job and two small children.

I was no good at cooking. What I really mean to say is that I had decided when I was in my teens that I was bad at it. I used to experiment all the time. I made my own yoghurt, I made bread, I put salads together with apples and sunflower seeds. The grownups mocked me. It was the early 70’s, when salad was mostly iceberg lettuce and thousand island dressing.

I got confident. What I really mean to say is that I got confident enough to make a mistake, which was trying to make an applesauce omelet. I know. I should have known it would be awful, and lo, it was. Awful. I left the kitchen. What I really mean to say is I left the kitchen to my mother and my sister, who were a pair, and went to do math and play chess with my dad, because that was the division of parents decided upon in the family. It was also the early 70’s, which was a time when Feminism was trying to find itself again, and young women were told not to learn to type, because if you could type, that’s what you would be doing for the rest of your career, and we were somehow shown that, in order to move beyond stereotyped femaleness we should scorn all parts of the stereotype, which included cooking, make-up, perfume, giggling, or whatever was associated in the culture with the “Mad Men” type of womanhood. It has taken the new generation of young women who can wear aprons, have tattoos, struggle with work and family balance, and still ask why struggling with work and family balance is more of an issue for them than for working men their age.

In sharing my adventures on FB, I got help. “Freeze the flour before you make the pie dough” was a good one, as everything must be very cool for it to work well. One person offered to come over and bake for me. That is not help, that is just — something else. Sharing your knowledge with someone, (if they are mature enough to be open to input, which I, of course, am) can be helpful. A friend in Richmond sent an excellent set of measuring spoons, and someone in Austin gave me an extra Cuisinart she had, which fulfilled a wish I’d thought was out of reach. Another person kindly told me I should not start with the hard things, but start with the basics. That doesn’t work for me. What I really mean to say is I learn best by being thrown into the deep end. Plus, I don’t really want to learn to cook. I’m a first born Virgo, which means I just want to cook. See the difference?

Fortunately, the deep end is where I landed at the Spanish Immersion school in San Miguel De Allende. We had to find a gay-friendly school, which is something many people don’t have to consider. There are UUs in San Miguel, and they helped us with a house to rent and good information about where to buy meat and vegetables, wifi, electricity, water and cell phones. The school was about fifteen minutes taxi ride through hair-raisingly crowded and narrow cobblestone streets. The first day I just showed driver the address on the screen of my phone. That’s how much Spanish I had. The school had said, by email, that we could start any Monday. Monday morning, we were shown into a class of four people. They had already been going two weeks. They were on p. 52 of a 60 page work book. Immersion means that Spanish is taught in Spanish, but I speak moderately good French, so I found I could understand nearly everything. 80 percent of the words used in the class were very close to the French, so I could follow along. I was happy figuring it out. That part of my brain that is good at remembering names lit up, and I remembered the vocabulary words well. Grammar, well, not so much. And speaking. OY. That is the hard part. Still, we had wide-ranging conversations about US and Mexican politics, about religion and the revolution, about Chinese herbal medicine. The teachers were professionally patient with my struggles to say things I wanted to say. We had been practicing with Duolingo, an app on the phone that teaches any language you like, and I’d learned to say “Los elefantes no beben leche” (The elephants don’t drink milk), and “Quiero mas ulvas en my pastil.” (I want more grapes in my cake,) but none of those sentences was of much use with taxi drivers or in class. Everything in class was in present tense, which keeps communication fairly simple, and it’s a good spiritual exercise. I enjoyed practicing with taxi drivers and waitresses. They were also professionally patient with me, and once in a while, with a smile, they would correct my words. I was telling one that, at the pool where we were going, ‘voy a sentarse en la sambra,” (that I was going to sit in the shade.) “A la sombra,” he kindly corrected. Then, “what is that in English?” he asked. “The shade,” I said. He practiced that word a few times. When he came back to pick us up, he said “That word again? Shike?”

“Shade,” I said, and felt much better getting one sound right in my words but not all of them. The words for Thursday and egg sound the same, and dog and but sound the same, etc. It’s comical for the Spanish speakers to hear me talk, which I’m glad about. I’m still very timid about speaking, because I hate to be a beginner, What I really mean to say is I think I should be able to do everything well right away, What I really mean to say is being a learner is fine for other people, but I’m very uncomfortable in that role, What I really mean to say is …. What? It takes courage to make mistakes. It takes courage to be a learner. Why does it take courage? It shouldn’t. What I really mean to say is everyone should know that when you are learning new things you are, by definition, not going to be good at them right away. What I really mean to say is I’m just like everyone else, and it makes me mad that I have to keep reminding myself of that. Life reminds me often enough.

I learn over and over that it’s ok to be a learner, that mistakes are inevitable if you want to grow, that some people learn best when they are over their head, that the kind of help that equips the person who is adventuring is better than the kind of help that takes the adventure away. What I really mean to say is I’m glad to be back sharing life with you, and this is going to be a learning year.

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 16 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.

 

Principled Magic

by Posted in Audio available, Marisol Caballero, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Marisol Caballero
Laine Young
July 31, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

“Hogwarts Intergenerational Service” We celebrate the closing of another Camp UU year by looking to Harry Potter and the lot from Hogwarts to teach us life lessons.

Call to Worship

– Nora Roberts

“Magic exists. Who can doubt it, when there are rainbows and wildflowers, the music of the wind and the silence of the stars? Anyone who has loved has been touched by magic. It is such a simple and such an extraordinary part of the lives we live.” Welcome to this magical hour.

Sermon

-Mari
Hey Laine, there were a bunch of little witches & wizards here this week, right? I heard that this church turned into Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, complete with professors. games of quidditch, and magical creatures. I even heard there was a magical pig here on Friday! Now, I like’ Harry Potter as much as the next gat welL.. maybe not if the “next gal” is YOU! You’re one of the biggest fans I know! But, we do this camp every year here & sometimes f like to think about why. When you think about it,. the characters in the Harry Potter series seem like they really live out our UU Principles. don’t they?

-Laine
One of my favorite characters is the Keeper of the Keys and Grounds of Hogwarts, Hagrid. He lived with his dog Fang, took in and cared for a 3- headed dog named Fluffy, hatched a Norwegian Ridgeback dragon from an egg, took care of Buckbeak the hippogriff, and one of his first pets was a giant tarantula. He also looked after the students at Hogwarts. I love when Hagrid meets Harry Potter on his 11th birthday, and brings him a homemade cake that says HAPPEE BIRTHDAE HARRY. Hagrid is one of my favorite characters because he always tried to do the right thing, and help everyone out. He believed in the best in everyone, and every living creature.

-Mari
Yes, he sure does! You know, it’s funny that you say Hagrid’s your favorite character because he reminds me that there are two meanings of the word “character.” He is one of the people in the story of Harry Potter, but he also has character, doesn’t he? I mean, he really has the qualities of a good person. If he doesn’t yet know about Unitarian Universalism, he sure behaves like he does! Think about the first and second principles – they teach us to remember that everyone is important and that they deserve to be treated with kindness. r remember when professor Dumbledore told Professor McGonagall that he would, “trust Hagrid with his life.” Because of this, I have referred to some of my best friends as “my Hagrid.” Everyone should have a Hagrid in their lives, huh?

-Laine
Absolutely!

-Mari
And then think about the third & fourth Principles. It’s all about helping each other learn and using what we learn to decide for ourselves what is true and good and what comforts us in tough times. Hagrid knew that Harry and Ron would be afraid of that giant Tarantula and of that three-headed dog, but he also knew that all animals should be cared-for and that Ron and Harry could learn and grow through getting to know these “pets.” Hagrid’s love for all creatures reminds me of the story of a Unitarian minister who lived a long time ago, Theodore Parker. When Theodore was a little boy, he saw the big boys hitting turtles and other small animals with sticks, but when he had the chance to do the same, his conscience stopped him from doing it. He knew it was wrong to mistreat animals. I remember a ton of lessons like this from the Harry Potter books and movies …

-Laine
Oh! OH. Do you remember in “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” when Hermione started the Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare after she saw how horribly house elves were being treated during the Quidditch World Cup? That’s such a great part of the series! Hermione saw that house elves were being worked very hard, without any payor holidays and realized that wasn’t right. I like when she says, “You know, house elves get a very raw deal! It’s slavery, that’s what it is! Why doesn’t anyone do something about it?” and I love that instead of waiting for someone to do something about it, she did it herself! And she didn’t give up when her friends didn’t want to join, or when they made fun of her group and started calling it SPEW, either! Hermione is one amazing witch!

-Mari 
Are you sure Hermione isn’t Unitarian Universalist?! Fighting for justice, peace and equity in our world is what we do. In fact, it’s pretty much what our sixth principle is all about. Hermione reminds me of so many Unitarians and Universalists. Julia Ward Howe is famous for writing The Battle Hymn of the Republic, but she was also a fierce abolitionist long before the Civil War. She believed that it was evil to make people into slaves and wanted to make sure that black people in this country were freed.

Another gutsy woman is Clara Barton, who helped organize the American Red Cross, an organization that still helps thousands of people recover from tragedies and natural disasters every year. Right now, UUs an over the country are participating in a boycott of Wendy’s fast food, since the people who work in the fields growing their fruits and vegetables are fighting for fair treatment and pay. These workers have asked us to stop eating at Wendy’s so that the company will pay attention to what the justice-seeking farmworkers are saying.

But, let me tell you. Just like Hermione, doing what is right and being in solidarity with people who are fighting to be treated fairly isn’t always easy … I have really missed Wendy’s frosties! But, when I drive past a Wendy’s and think about all the frosties I missed out on eating this summer, I think of Hermione, Julia Ward Howe, Clara Barton, and other freedom fighters and especially those brave people who risked so much more whose lives they were hoping to help make better. When I do, I don’t feel so sorry for myself and my sad lack of frosties in my belly. I wonder if there are any other ways that the Hogwarts crew has things in common with UUs …

-Laine
The students of Hogwarts get to learn so many wonderful things, like Potions, Herbology, and Defense Against the Dark Arts! You know what class I would really like to take even though it is an elective? Muggle Studies, the study of non-magical folk! For awhile, “He Who Must Not Be Named” made this class mandatory, but he didn’t allow them to teach Muggle facts. Instead, the class was used to tell lies about Muggles so that wizards and witches would look down on Muggles and no longer associate with them. Some witches and wizards thought that Muggles shouldn’t exist at all: however, there were lots of witches and wizards that knew that they could learn, live, and work with Muggles. That’s part of why I think Arthur Weasley is so great! He approached things with an open mind and curiosity – including Muggles. He was a firm believer in the equality of magical and Muggle folk alike, and knew that they could live together peacefully.

-Mari
Yeah, the Weasley’s are such a cool family. I’ve kind of secretly wished that I could have been a Weasley kid, but it would have been so much effort to keep dying my hair red! I just loved the way that Mr & Mrs Weasley never let their kids talk bad about Muggles, even when so many witches and wizards were discriminating against Muggles. They would always rise above that sort of bullying. It reminds me of something that our First Lady, Michelle Obama, said this past week. She said that she teaches her girls not to be bullies, even when someone is being a bully to them. She said, “Our motto is, ‘When they go low, we go high.”

But like I said, taking the high road isn’t always easy, though, is it? Sometimes it means reaching deep inside and reminding ourselves of who we are when we are being the best possible versions of ourselves. I guess this is what Professor Dumbledore meant when he said, “We must choose between what is easy and what is right.” Harry and his friends seem to always end up in dangerous situations while they’re trying to do what is right, but somehow love and kindness always wins, even if it takes a very long journey to get there ….

-Laine
Speaking of Harry … Mari, did you know that today is Harry Potter’s 36th birthday?!

-Mari 
That’s awesome! I had no idea that Harry Potter and I were the same age! Does that explain the cake in Howson Hall? Thanks, Laine. I’m glad we had this talk.

-Laine 
Me, too! I learned about so many amazing Unitarian and Universalist leaders today! I hadn’t realized how magical our UU principles really are!

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 16 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.

 

Paving the road to Hell?

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons, Video available

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Andy Gerhart
July 24, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

We know that knowledge is power, and in our UU faith we emphasize the free search for truth. But what does it mean when answers lead to new questions and new forms of ignorance? How do we cope with our ignorance and simultaneously act in good faith? We’ll discuss our current climate crisis as we explore how uncertainty might ground our theology to inspire us and offer a basis for moral action.

Call to Worship

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical.
It is the power of all true art and science.
He to whom this emotion is a stranger,
who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe,
is as good as dead.
To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists,
manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and
the most radiant beauty,
which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms-
this knowledge,
this feeling,
is at the center of true religiousness.

Albert Einstein
(As quoted in Philip Frank, Einstein: His Life and Times, 1947)

Readings:

“Physical science has historically progressed not only by finding precise explanations of natural phenomena, but also by discovering what sorts of things can be precisely explained. These may be fewer than we had thought.”
-Steven Weinberg (Nobel laureate in Physics, and Austinite)

“If you’re a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience.”
-Al Gore, 2008

“Responsible action does not mean the certain achievement of desired ends but […] the creation of the conditions of possibility for desired changes… What improbable task, with which unpredictable results, shall we undertake today?”
-Sharon Welch, UU theologian, and Provost, Meadville Lombard

Sermon:

Good morning-

So, you all know our esteemed intern minister here at First UU, the honorable Susan Yarborough, right? And you also probably know that when she gives a sermon, often on a major holiday like fourth of July this year, she never fails to declare not only that it is a “seminarian Sunday,” but that they have brought out the B team. Well, I want to declare this a “pre-seminarian” Sunday! And I want to acknowledge the stark reality that if Susan is the B team, then I’ll be very lucky to be considered the C, D, or E team!

So… Shall we pave the road to hell? That is my question today.

Hopefully it brings to mind for you the popular maxim, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” This is the observation that the world is a far more complicated place than we generally imagine, and that a lot of bad stuff is done with the hope of improving it. Examples litter our lives. In fact just the other day, I had a moth breakout at home, and at a complete loss of how to protect my favorite sweater, I read that I could put it in the freezer while I went out of town, and that that would kill the wool moths. So I did, and when I returned, somehow my precious sweater had been pulled through the ice maker! Not only could I not extract it without cutting the sweater, but I broke the ice-maker.

Other examples are really familiar to us. We pour antibiotics into our agriculture in order to feed ourselves, yet in the end create new superbugs with antibiotic resistance. We burn fossil fuels to enable development that is supposed to increase people’s standards of living, but that same energy ends up trapping heat in our atmosphere. And now we are teetering on the edge of using very novel climate technologies, called geo-engineering, in emergency efforts; but these technologies may likely have even more disastrous consequences.

So we must underscore the amount of ignorance we confront whenever we try to do anything.

The photo on the cover of the order of service is of a courageous alliance of citizens putting themselves in front of bulldozers to protect Utah lands from a Canadian firm that the US has recently permitted to extract tar sands. And yes, we are literally paving ourselves, with fossil fuels, into the only type of hell I’ve ever been aware of, one here on earth. We just finished another record breaking June, which followed 13 months that each broke their respective month’s record. And it won’t stop. We are all drenched in oil, as our entire socio-economic system is built on it. We are heating our earth at a rate of 250 trillion joules per second, which is equivalent to exploding 400,000 Hiroshima bombs a day, 365 days a year. And in May, in Karachi, the Pakistani government began digging anticipatory mass graves to prepare for the deaths they expect from this summer’s heat wave.

We face incredible anxiety when we contemplate taking moral actions that may confront these seemingly impervious realities. And no matter which actions we are considering, we confront different types of despair that are commonplace in our society. There’s that we’ve just touched on, the fear of acting because you may make things worse, which underlies the precautionary principle. Another is what I’ll call existentialist despair: the near certainty that no matter what, all of humanity is one day destined for extinction. Either a superbug will get us in the next thousand years, or the sun will explode in a few billion; this is what Bertrand Russell called “unyielding despair.” And then there is a kind of despair, which is so common that I think I confront it in myself or others almost every day. This is perfectionist despair: that dread voice in our minds that dictates that unless we do something perfectly, there is no point in doing it at all. In the case of climate change and reducing carbon emissions, I can’t simply make a choice to do some action that seems good for the climate. Unless I stop eating animals, and stop driving a car, and then stop eating dairy, and then only adopt children who have already been born, and then raise them as vegans, and buy carbon offsets for their extra impacts, well, then there is no point.

I’m sure there are many more types of despair. But regardless of which type of despair you do battle with when you think of doing something inspired, and which type you lose your battle to, let’s face it, all forms of despair become a justification for inaction. And for many, including me, they are comfort. Bertrand Russell and all the existentialists love their despair. And I have at times as well. Despair lifts the burden of hope off of our shoulders, and what a burden that is! Despair frees us to worry about nobody, including ourselves. It helps us cope. In many ways, despair is a religion.

UU theologian Sharon Welch, in her book A Feminist ethic of risk, talks about how we can tackle these anxieties by working toward what she calls “the creation of the conditions of possibility for desired changes.”

But what are these conditions of possibility? For Welch, they are formed when we act in communities, which she believes tend to hedge against bad ideas and actions, but more importantly, have much greater resilience in the face of failure than individuals do.

I agree with Welch. But there is an individual step that must occur well before we build active communities. This is especially true in our increasingly more isolated and isolating culture.

We each individually must decide to join a community, before we can actually act as one. And this individual and radical decision to participate with others, in inspired moral action, for me, this is where the magic is. I don’t really feel like I understand how this happens very well at all, but for me the critical move begins by acknowledging our ignorance in the face of our uncertainty.

In his introductory essay to the new Norton Anthology of World Religions, Jack Miles states that “the discovery of ignorance” may have been the greatest human discovery of all time. As he puts it, “until our prehistoric but anatomically modern ancestors could tell the difference between ignorance and knowledge, how could they actually know they knew anything?”

Miles continues by noting that religions throughout time can be considered not as privileged forms of knowledge, as is commonly thought, but as “ritualized confessions of ignorance.”

Seeing religion in this way is, he writes, easily overlooked, for “the world harbors many a quiet believer and many a shy practitioner, reluctant to undergo cross-examination about a confession of inadequacy that defies ready articulation.”

“a confession of inadequacy that defies ready articulation”… Indeed, I feel that this is at the heart of religions the world over. And I feel that this is at the heart of inspired moral action.

I myself cannot make a special claim to religious knowledge, either affirming or disaffirming deities. I can however, confess my inadequacy, communally, and ritualistically.

I believe that science is a profoundly deep method for doing this. In fact I believe it is a religion. Science inquires passionately into the nature of reality, and confesses a great deal of ignorance, loving the questions it asks so much that it discovers kernels of reality along the way. Things literally become real through the scientific process. To me it is much like the story of the Velveteen Rabbit. As that wonderful straw-filled toy becomes real through the tried and true testing and constant love of a boy at play, knowledge is revealed to us by the scientific community’s persistent and rigorous inquiry into ignorance by the testing of our world. In this sense, science is a form of real and intense love.

And one of the great misconceptions of science is that scientists are perfectly rational dispassionate actors! Quite the opposite, they love mystery as much or more than any religious actor, and pursue their passions with irrational love and intensity. And thank the dickens that they do, for through such passionate exploration comes most of the knowledge we have to work with in our daily lives. Not just in our daily hum and drum, but as we confront realities like climate change.

And as we just heard in the readings, true science does a great job of acknowledging ignorance. Even Steven Weinberg, our local Austinite Nobel Laureate in physics, as we just heard, wrote that fewer natural phenomena can be precisely explained than physicists originally thought. And as Jack Miles puts it, “Scientific progress is like mountain climbing: the higher you climb, the more you know, but the wider the vistas of ignorance that extend on all sides. The result is that our ignorance always exceeds our knowledge, and the gap between the two grows infinitely greater, not smaller, as infinite time passes.”

Indeed, after so much physical inquiry, when we fit our mathematical formulas to find out that more than 90% of the mass in the universe is what we call dark matter, and is completely undetectable, our universe becomes a completely new mystery to us. And so do our lives within it.

The worst part is that we cannot even admit it. We are an arrogant species. And the last thing we want to do is relinquish our fundamentalist beliefs, whether they are quote unquote religious or, quote unquote scientific. The last thing we wish to do is admit how little we know.

The notion of ignorance has indeed taken on a very unique, and complicated, valence when it comes to climate change. This is because instead of acknowledging ignorance, many people today actually celebrate it when it comes to climate change. These days there are very few scientists that deny human-caused climate change, and those that do are paid handsomely to do so, as historian Naomi Oreskes makes very clear in her book Merchants of Doubt.

To my mind, the critical reason we must acknowledge our ignorance, is because it enables us to recognize what we actually do know. I do not know what God is, or who she, he, they, or it is or isn’t; I do not know what dark matter is, or whether what lays beyond our universe are parallel universes through infinite space. Just as I do not know how to speak the Basque language (or any other language other than English and some Spanish for that matter).

I don’t know the mystery of the world, and it terrifies me. But I do know that I am alive. And in the same instant that I recognize my vitality I also recognize that I am, simultaneously, grateful for my life. This is the essential recognition. Gratitude for living, to my mind, is the natural result of a confession of ignorance. And it is the seed from which grows inspired actions.

I don’t know exactly how climate change will play out in what remains of my lifetime, but I do know that it will play out most disastrously for those who cannot afford to cope with it, and that we will have many reenactments of what happened in the 9th ward of New Orleans during the flood that many call Hurricana Katrina. I don’t know all the places this will happen, but I do know that many, many more of them will happen in Bangladesh, in Vietnam, in China, in India, and along the coasts of Africa. For those who are impoverished on the coastlines of this world, I do know that sea level rise will mean refugee status. And I now know, that people in large cities in deserts like Karachi will be preemptively digging mass graves.

I don’t know who will set aside the money to help these people, and I don’t know how our energy economy will transition from fossil fuels. But I do know we need hundreds of billions of dollars set aside to help them, and I know that we need to change our fossil fuel lifestyles.

Those who deny climate change are not acknowledging ignorance. They are not loving anything. They are closing their eyes, and their hearts, out of tremendous fear for old livelihoods. They come in many forms, but all are putting their heads in the sand. But its not just sand, it is sand along a beach, at low tide.

Still, the problem isn’t so much them, it is the rest of us, standing right next to them. Our heads may be out of the sand, and we may see the tide rising. But we are in despair, and we are paralyzed.

So how do we act amidst uncertainty? How do we collectively pull our heads out of the sand? How do we open our eyes to inquire into mystery and ignorance? And once we have done that, how do we open our bank accounts, and our homes, to environmental refugees.

Well, I don’t know. I too tend to despair. And I don’t think that is going to end anytime soon. I just want to learn to do it with more humor. I’m going to seminary, as an agnostic, because I yearn to know, why exactly, do certain people act courageously in a world full of mystery and uncertainty, and often at great personal risk, in such inspiringly ethical ways? Because it does happen. I am particularly wondering about why a village in the Netherlands, called Nieuwlande, so courageously hid Jews during the Holocaust; and so quietly, without even talking about it. They just automatically began doing it, at exceptional personal risk. There are many other types of examples. Yet often folks who do these things describe their actions in a double negative, as having “acted when they simply could not not act.”

But what grounds such moral action? An article by the ethicist Bill Greenway recently introduced me to the Jewish philosopher Emmaneul Levinas. Levinas, a holocaust survivor, characterized these types of actions as being passionately taken hostage, by the “face” of the other through a type of love. This is the same love that Jews and Christians might call agape love. Seized by the suffering of another, we are compelled to act not out of some a priori dispassionate rationality, but precisely the opposite. Our moral response takes priority and comes first as we grapple with the reality of the suffering before us.

I know about the Karachi graves thanks to a direct action a few weeks ago that Tim DeChristopher and Karena Gore staged so that we would know it amidst the hell-on-earth we’ve had closer to home. Tim, a UU seminarian, and Karena, the daughter of Al Gore, and a bunch of other ministers were arrested for lying in a ditch being dug for a fracking pipeline in Boston. And as Tim put it in an interview with Democracy Now, when he heard of the anticipatory mass graves in Karachi, “…it just broke my heart in a whole new way… it just really weighed on me and wouldn’t let go…You know, it was one of those things that just settled deeply into my heart, and I felt really compelled to take action. Tim did not ask the question, “Why act morally?” because the question never even surfaced for him. And when we act, like mad scientists, we do not do it so rationally either. Often, we have either already acted, without free will, taken hostage by the faces of the other; or we have hardened our hearts and not acted all. It is only from this last place that that dispassionate question “Why act morally?” arises.

I agree with Levinas about the hostage taking that happens. Inspired moral action is indeed doing that which one cannot not do. If a confession of ignorance amidst mystery is the soul of religion, and that confession provokes deep gratitude, then simply living with your eyes open is at the heart of the religious experience. It really is a form of witnessing.

So what are the preconditions of possibility for inspired moral action that Welch talks about? I believe they begin with acknowledging our inadequacy, such that when the sensation of gratitude for our existence arises in juxtaposition with the uncertainty of our universe, we’ll see Levinas’ faces, and a few among us spontaneously, passionately, and rather irrationally will make risky and responsible moral actions.

As Jack Miles puts it, “even the most reasonable among us must close the gap between indecision and decision, paralysis and action, not with knowledge but with something else. I expect the darkness of ignorance to continue to surround me until my dying day. In a sense, that darkness is my enlightenment.”

True despair, or paralysis in grief or fear, is a severance from our acknowledgement of mystery and uncertainty. It is a rejection of the gratitude and awe that such uncertainty provokes. Frequently that rejection takes the form of certainties, of know-it-all fundamentalisms, built almost exclusively on fear, like those of some climate deniers. Fundamentalist certainties are the opposite of the kernels that make up the steps on our small mountain of knowledge. They are the opposite of inquiry, and of love. They are more like the Dementors in Harry Potter, sucking all questions, and with them, all reality and love, away from us.

A huge problem with the way climate issues are discussed is through their negativity, through their apocalyptic tones. Talking about it in apocalyptic tones doesn’t help us address it. Hearing that it will make humans go extinct only creates an incredible amount of fear, despair, and more paralysis. Humans are like deer in the headlights in front of these kinds of headlines. And the denial these headlines produce is exactly the same denial that climate deniers have. David Sobel calls this ecophobia. The inability to psychologically process the dread.

I am not interesting in dread, or apocalypse, or hell at all. Instead, let us acknowledge what we do, and what we don’t know. We don’t know that humans will go extinct from climate change, in fact, it seems very unlikely since we do know that the rich are very likely to adapt with little trouble. We do know that the poor are the ones who will bear the brunt, and may experience massive devastations. So let’s own up to it, and take the attitude of David Byrne of the Talking Heads, the writer of the song our musicians just rocked out to, and find some joy amidst doom on our Road to Nowhere.

Instead of being paralyzed by grief, let us acknowledge our grief-stricken state while we come up with good ways to cope with our changing climate. Let us actively grieve, and listen amidst our uncertainty, refusing to deny what we do know.

There are many good avenues available to us. If you want to empower our youth, the ones who face the greatest burden amongst us, and are often willing to take the greatest risks, support the UU Young Adults for Climate Justice, organized by Aly Tharp based here in Austin, and join Commit2Respond. They are on fire. If you are interested in affecting policy, get involved with the Citizens Climate Lobby. If you might like to take direct, peaceful actions, which are often the most powerful: join Peaceful Uprising, Karena Gore, Tim DeChristopher.

But whatever you do, please don’t do it perfectly, and please do it in community.

I’ll conclude with the question Sharon Welch so brilliantly asks us to consider: “What improbable task, with which unpredictable results, shall we, shall we, undertake today?”

“Will you join me in paving the road to hell?”

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 16 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.

Sacred promises

by Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons, Video available

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
July 17, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

As a religion without creed, one of the cornerstones of UU spirituality arises from the covenantal nature of how we gather our religious communities. The covenant, a set of promises we make with one another about how we will be together, comes out of an ancient tradition.

Sermon

Our preeminent Unitarian Universalist theologian of the 20th century, James Luther Adams said the following, “Human beings, individually and collectively, become human by making commitment, by making promises. The human being as such is the promise making, promise keeping, promise-renewing creature.

Another way to put that is that we are covenant-making creatures. A covenant is an ancient concept that described most simply contains a set of promises concerning how we will be together. For Unitarian Universalists, this ancient concept becomes particularly vital. Because we do not have a creed, a prescribed set of beliefs to which we must all adhere, our ecclesiology, the way in which we structure ourselves as a religious people, is rooted in the covenantal. Our theological perspectives are necessarily grounded in relationship.

I have great admiration for James Luther Adams and his work, but I think he left one important thing out.

As human beings, we are also promise breaking creatures. We are imperfect and we fail each other sometimes.

That does not make our covenants less important. It makes them more so. Our covenants, like this church’s covenant that we read together earlier, provide us with the ways in which we may get back into right relationship with one another when we have failed – they provide the standard we can call ourselves back to.

The concept of covenant goes back to even before the times described in the Hebrew Scriptures and was likely borrowed from ancient civilizations that predated that of the Israelites or even their ancestors. We humans have been making and breaking promises for a very, very long time.

And we have through the ages also been making covenants with our Gods, and they with us.

Early in the Hebrew Scriptures, in Genesis 9, God makes a covenant with Noah to never again flood the earth, killing everything on it, save that which was on the ark with Noah.

“Whoops. I may have overreacted a bit there. You know me. Temper. Temper. Here’s a lovely rainbow so that every time you see one, it will remind you that I promise never to flood the entire earth ever again. We good?”

Next comes God’s covenant with Abraham, which seems to have two versions, one in Genesis 15 and one in Genesis 17. God promises Abraham a grant of land upon which God will raise up a new nation from Abraham’s descendants.

Never mind that there are folks already living on said land – God will take care of everything, and all Abraham has to do is wander aimlessly on faith for an unspecified distance and time.

Never mind that Abraham’s wife is barren.

Never mind that Abraham does not know where exactly this land is or when exactly the new nation will get raised up. Oh, and also circumcise himself and all of his male descendants and them their descendants and so on and so on in perpetuity.

And also all of the male slaves in any of his family’s households.

Bummer.

And then, of course, there is the whole thing where God allows Abraham’s elderly wife, Sarah to bear a son, Isaac, only to later demand that Abraham sacrifice Isaac, which Abraham prepares to do until God sends an angel to say pretty much, “Dude, we didn’t think you would actually do it. Here’s a ram, sacrifice that instead. It’ll do.”

Continuing the fun in the book of Exodus, God next made a covenant with the entire ancient Israelite people, Abraham’s decedents. This is the famous story of Moses going up to the top ofMt. Sinai, where God gives him the ten commandments and binds the Israelites to obey them, as well as the other laws laid out in the Torah – the first five books of the Hebrew Bible.

Often called the Mosaic Covenant, it was similar to the treaties, contracts or oaths that sovereign rulers of the time made with their subjects, and it stipulated the really good things God would do for the chosen people if they were obedient to the oath and the really dreadful, horrible things God would do to them if they violated it.

Which they did and which God did. Temper. Temper.

Finally, in Samuel 2, God makes a covenant with David that he and his lineage will be the kings, the royal line of Israel. Unlike the Mosaic covenant, God made this covenant unconditional. Even if David and his descendants misbehaved, while God might punish them in other ways, he would never take their royalty away from them.

And once again, misbehave they did, and punish them severely God did.

David even had a very special “friend” named Jonathan, who upon meeting David, and I am quoting scripture here, “made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul. Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that he was wearing, and gave it to David … “

Later, when the two “friends” learned that they must be separated from each other to save David’s life, the scriptures say, “They kissed each other and wept with each other.”

And after Jonathan was killed in battle, David wrote a song in which he says of Jonathan, “Greatly beloved were you to me; your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.”

Apparently, some of those so called abominations God supposedly spelled out in Leviticus have been getting ignored for a very, very long time, and by some of God’s favorites.

I’m just sayin’.

Finally, I’d like to talk a bit about one more of the times the concept of covenant comes up in the Hebrew Scriptures. You may have heard the story of Job, a good and righteous man who fears God and shuns evil. Job is living the good life – he’s healthy, has a successful business, a wonderful wife and family.

One day God is bragging on his faithful servant Job, when one of his angels says, “Well, you know, maybe Job is only so righteous and pious because you have blessed him with so much cool stuff. Take it all away and let’s see how pious he is then.”

And so they kill Job’s children and destroy his business, and property. When that’s not enough, they also inflict his entire body with terrible, painful sores.

Long story short, Job clings to his righteousness and, after some arguing back and forth with some rather unhelpful friends, he basically brings a serious breach of covenant lawsuit against God. He sues God for God having failed to uphold his end of the contract even though Job has remained righteous even after all these terrible things God has allowed the angel to do to him.

So, God answers Job’s lawsuit out of a whirlwind, saying, “Who is this who darkens counsel, speaking without knowledge.”

Sounds a little testy and defensive already if you ask me.

Anyway, God continues, “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations? Speak if you have understanding. Do you know who fixed its dimensions … Have you ever commanded the day to break, Assigned the dawn its place, … Have you penetrated to the sources of the sea, Or walked in the recesses of the deep?”

In other words, basically saying, “I don’t have to adhere to any stinkin’ covenant, because, well, I’m God.”

To which Job pretty much replies, “Well, you do kind of have a point there,” which pleases God, so God restores Job to his old life but even better than before.

Now, I’ve been having a bit of fun with these ancient covenant stories by providing one possible interpretation of each of them that is far too literal. They have to be read as poetry or allegory, not as being literally true. For instance, a more poetic reading of the story of Job would get at the idea that the world does not operate on a system of retributive justice, wherein if we only live decent, ethical lives then we will somehow be rewarded with lives that are carefree and without tragedy.

It is much more complicated than that.

And, even though this ancient concept of covenant is an important one for us, I think these stories, especially the story of Job get at another potential warning about covenants. It can be problematic when the parties to a covenant have a highly unequal balance of power. Can the less powerful party truly consent? How does a human hold a God accountable to a covenant?

I think of our current struggles with our criminal justice system which promises “to protect and to serve” – a covenant by which in return we cede to that system many powers and resources. Now that we’re seeing that system disproportionately arresting, convicting, imprisoning and even taking the lives of people who are not white, we are witnessing a great struggle to hold the justice system accountable to its promises, its side of the covenant.

But the system has been militarized and monetized and has over time been granted almost God-like powers by law makers and court rulings, so we face a mighty struggle indeed to bring about such accountability.

But engage in this struggle we must because to be fully human we must become promise-fulfilling creatures.

Another potential problem with a belief that a God made a covenant with a select group of people is that it can foster a sense of what scholars have called “chosenness” within that people. And scholars have found that this sense of chosenness can become woven into the very symbols and language of a culture, so that, even as the culture may become more secular, that sense of chosenness can still remain deeply imbedded within it.

Some scholars have claimed that this was at least a part of the Zionist movement of the late 19th and early 20th century that was otherwise often progressive and secular.

Other scholars have pointed to the lineage of Jesus that is detailed in the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew, establishing Jesus as being in the linage of both David and Abraham, as providing Christians with a similar sense of chosenness. It creates a kind of ultimate fulfillment of the covenants from the Hebrew Scriptures – or a new covenant with Jesus as the ultimate savior and King, and Christians the chosen people. Such scholars attribute Western Europe’s and the U.S.’s historical tendencies toward imperialism at least partially to this sense of chosenness.

And I think we have to be careful not to fall prey to a similar way of thinking and being if we were to focus only on our internal church covenant that we read together earlier – if we were to forget that our principles that we also read together earlier are expressed in the form of a covenant with our fellow Unitarian Universalist congregations – a covenant to affirm and promote those principles together out in our wider world. And even our mission is in its own way a promise we make to each other to work together in shared purpose both within these walls and beyond them.

If we were to forget these things, our covenant, the promises that we make can become too narrow and internally focused, we could be in danger of becoming a social club of the self-chosen.

I am pleased to be able to say that currently I do not see that happening here at this church.

And I am thrilled that there is a movement afoot within our wider Unitarian Universalist denomination to live out a greater sense of covenant among and beyond Unitarian Universalists more widely.

We can trace the way that we organize our churches and the covenantal heritage of what would become Unitarian Universalism in the U.S. all the way back to the Cambridge Platform of 1648. The Cambridge Platform was an agreement among our Puritan ancestors that among other things said that independent churches should be organized among members who covenant to walk together in the ways of love. Each of these churches, like we still do today, would choose its own officials, call its own minister, govern itself and own its own property. And since it is a stewardship testimonial days, I should also mention that all this means we get to provide the contributions to pay our own bills also.

But, the Cambridge platform did not stop there. It also called for churches to work together for each other’s welfare and to promote the greater good.

What if we take that part of our heritage truly to heart?

What if we promised to walk together in the ways of love not just within our church, but also with our other local Unitarian Universalist churches?

What if we covenanted to walk together in the ways of love with our fellow Unitarian Universalists in our Southern region?

What if we did so even at the national and worldwide level?

And what if we expand this idea about promising to walk together in the ways of love beyond Unitarian Universalism, finding interfaith partnerships and secular friends that would join us in an ever-growing covenant of mutual love and support?

What more might become possible? How much more power might we all have to bring about beneficial change in our communities, our country and our world?

These are the questions that are being asked within Unitarian Universalism as a whole. These are the efforts in which our denomination will be engaging as we move into the future. I hope our church will be an active part of the discussions and the effort. I know I plan to do so, and I promise to keep you informed as I learn more. And, yes, you can take that as a covenant.

We humans are promise making, promise keeping, promise breaking and promise-renewing creatures, and if we expand this idea of covenant-making to a much broader level, further and further beyond our own tribe and maybe even to this entire planet on which live and depend, as well as all of the creatures upon it, almost anything becomes possible.

Suddenly, God’s rainbows become abundant.

As we move in that direction, I look forward to continuing to walk with you in the ways of love.

Benediction

As we go forth into our world now, we hold in our hearts our covenant.

We carry with us the sacred promises we have made among ourselves and with our larger world.

We walk together in the ways of love not just today but through all of our days.

Until next we gather again, be blessed.

May the congregation say, “Amen” and, blessed be.”

Go in peace.

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 16 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.

 

Making sense of the senseless

by Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
July 10, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

When senseless violence happens like what we’ve seen so much in the news recently, when the unexpected and unwelcome occur in our personal lives, how do we continue our search for meaning and beauty? What do we do with our grief and anger?

Meditation

After the blinding rains came and washed away the foundations;

After the howling winds blew through windows, shattering glass and tearing apart wooden blinds and curtain fabric;

Once the bombs had knocked down even the walls made of such precise and rugged stone, and fires had ravaged wooden rafters.

I stumbled amidst the rubble of what was left, crying out at all that had been lost, unable to make repairs and build anew, searching for some new materials that might withstand such devastations.

And then I saw you, and also you, and the all of the ones following each of you, each carrying with you your own fragments of what had been.

Some of you bringing new elements to strengthen our possibilities – replace what had been lost.

And together, we built new structures of meaning.

We created soaring towers of beauty; deep wells of understanding; walls held aloft by an infrastructure of love.

And there we dwelt for a while, fortified once more, having chosen our new place and our new way of being.

Prayer

Spirit of love and life, breathe into us this day an understanding that, even amidst the violence and bloodshed we have been witnessing, love has not lost, beauty is still to be found in our world, meaning is still ours to create.

Soothe our breaking hearts.

Remind us that hope is not a feeling. It is to be found in the actions we take – the ways of being, which we offer, to one another and our world.

Raise up our compassion and carry it to those who are suffering because of the senseless violence and bloodshed that we have witnessed in the past months, weeks and days.

Soften our hearts that we might direct our outrage toward transforming ourselves and our communities for the better.

May we bring more peace, more understanding more love into our world.

We manifest this prayer in the name of all that is holy.

Sermon

Six years ago, my spouse Wayne and I attended the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly (or GA) together for the first time. While at that GA, I purchased a small chalice. I wanted to have a chalice to light during my own spiritual practices, a symbol to connect my individual practices with my Unitarian Universalist religious community.

I could not have known that my little chalice would soon take on a different and much greater meaning in my life.

For weeks before we had left for GA, Wayne had shared with me that he had been experiencing a sense of foreboding, a seemingly irrational fear that something deeply disturbing was about to unfold.

On the Wednesday after we got back from GA, I came home to find Wayne nearly in tears.

That morning, Wayne had turned on his cell phone to find the phone number of his good friend, Teresa, showing on the screen. It was a seeming accident, as neither Wayne nor Teresa had called the other recently.

Wayne and Teresa had been in medical school together and had remained great friends every since. I had grown to know and love Teresa also, along with her two beautiful daughters, Tara and Jenna, whom we had first met when they were small children. In the warmth of Teresa’s love, Jenna and Tara had grown into beautiful young women. They were both physically beautiful, but more importantly, they were loving, dynamic, smart, funny and talented. They exuded a wonderful capacity to fill those around them with joy and laughter.

Thinking it was too early to call Teresa, Wayne nonetheless punched the number that had shown up on his cell phone. The voice that answered was one of agony – of the deepest sorrow and sense of lost purpose human beings can endure.

Jenna had fallen and hit her head. She had died less than 24 hours later. She was 22 years old.

In less than a moment, in a random flash devoid of any apparent meaning, a beautiful part of our world, our interconnected web of existence was taken from our lives, from the lives of her family, from the lives of so many who loved her.

As Wayne told me this, I stood frozen in disbelief and horror. It was as if the random, meaningless cruelty of it was ripping at everything I had come to believe, tearing into shreds my ability to feel any sacred beauty at all in the world. I was filled with sorrow for Teresa and Tara. I was devastated by the pain I could see in Wayne’s face and how the way he carries his body had changed – the grief that filled his voice.

I did not know what to do with this. I could not process it, could not understand it, could not fight back against the urge to rage against the arbitrary injustice of it.

I had to sit down. I had to stare blankly at walls. I had to be with Wayne, so we would take care of each other.

Later, after Wayne had gone to sleep, perhaps the only real refuge in such situations, I got out the little chalice I had bought at G.A. and lit it for Jenna.

I sat alone in our living room, staring at the flame and thinking of her. The flame cast beautiful reflections of its light and enchanting dancing shadows on the stone wall behind it.

And as I sat and watched the dancing light from the little chalice, I began to sense in its beauty, the loveliness that Jenna had injected into the world – a beauty that might still be there in some way, if only through our memories of her.

It helped to think about things this way, but the thoughts were incomplete and not enough. At some point, I still had to extinguish the flame and go to bed, still filled with sorrow.

Another day came and went with both Wayne and I sleepwalking through it. That evening we spoke more of Jenna and what had happened, struggling to make sense of it and find some way to grasp at meaning when all meaning seemed to have been shattered and destroyed, if it had ever existed at all.

And then, on Friday morning, I got an email message from my good friend, Nell Newton. For me, one of the great mysteries in life is how sometimes we come to the aide of those we love without even knowing we are doing it. Certainly, Nell had no way of knowing how much her message would help or even what was happening in our lives. She was out of town and sent the message for a different reason.

Still, there it was, sitting in my inbox, a ray of light and a renewal of hope from a friend in a far away place, just when it was needed most.

The email contained a link to a video of Senator Al Franken from when he had spoken on the last day of GA, which we had missed because we had to leave early to catch our flight home.

In part of his speech, Senator Franken spoke lovingly of his father. He spoke of his father’s belief that we must not only be just, but DO justice – of how his father thought that nature and the earth and everything are so beautiful that there must be something behind it all, and we might as well call that something, God.

The Senator spoke proudly of his two children. He told the story of his young son who had received an award for being such a good, nice kid. When asked why he was so good, the son answered, “I think it has something to do with Grandpa”.

With deep emotion in his voice, Senator Franken continued, “To me, that’s where God is… I think God is my dad’s in me and he’s in my son… “

As I watched him and listened to him say those words on the video that Nell had sent, my own thoughts about Jenna from that night staring at the light from my chalice began to crystallize and become complete.

I had been reading A House for Hope, a wonderful book by John A. Buehrens and Rebecca Ann Parker. I looked back at something Reverend Dr. Parker writes in the book:

She writes, “The divine is not a despotic monarch, ruling through coercion and threat, sanctifying violence. This is not an unchanging, eternal reality from which the imperfect can be condemned. This is not merely a metaphor, but an actual presence, alive and afoot in the cosmos, an upholding and sheltering presence that receives and feels everything that happens with compassion and justice, offering the world back to itself, in every moment, with a fresh impulse to manifest the values of beauty, peace, vitality and liberation… everlastingly emergent, alive, responsive, creative, at one with the chaotic, messy universe we live in.”

My heart expanded and my thoughts grew much calmer. Whether metaphor or actual presence, I thought, if there is God in the sacred beauty of our shared existence, ever changing with our experience of that unfathomably interconnected web, then God weeps with us, I thought.

And that image was somehow comforting.

God weeps.
For Jenna.
For Teresa and Tara.
For all who knew and loved this amazing young woman.
For the injury to the divine that her unexpected, untimely and all too heartbreaking death had caused.

And yet, I thought, if there is God in the sacred beauty of our shared existence, then there is the joy and light and love and laughter that was Jenna, also in our web of interconnectedness.

There is the beauty of Jenna, always, in the beauty of shared existence.

I don’t know if this is merely metaphor or actual presence as Dr. Parker says it is, and it does not take the sorrow away completely even now, but it does help me remember to be grateful for life and our powerful interconnectedness, even those lives cut way too short, even at times when life seems senseless.

Now, every time I light my little chalice, I remember Jenna; I am reminded to try in my less than perfect way to carry forth her capacity to fill those around us with laughter and joy.

And, in that way, still, there is Jenna in the experiences of her that those of us who loved her cannot help but carry forward into our continued shared existence.

There is great, divine joy, in the beauty of being always interconnected with Jenna.

I wrote most of what I just shared with you 6 years ago, just after Jenna’s death but until now had only shared it with a few people, and my own theology has changed some since then. I got Teresa’s permission to update it to present tense and share it with you, because I can’t think of a stronger example in my own life of when I struggled with our topic today – trying to make sense of what seems senseless.

When something like that happens, when horrific events like these we have witnessed in our country and our world lately occur, it can cause us to question our worldview; reconsider the way in which we find meaning and beauty; lose faith even in how we perceive that which is ultimate and provides structure and a sense of cohesiveness in our lives. Whether or not it involves a concept for the divine, we can end up being forced to revise and reconstruct what could accurately be called our own, personal theology.

And life can throw so much at us that can seem so senseless:

The sudden earthquake, storm or tsunami that rips through a populated area and takes so many lives.

Terror attacks in Paris, San Bernardino, Istanbul, Dhaka, Bagdad just to name a few.

A sudden, life-threatening diagnosis when we are not even known to have been at risk.

Police continuing to shoot and kill African Americans under highly questionable circumstances – twice in just the last week. Five police officers in Dallas killed in apparent retaliation.

A very disturbed young man who enters a nightclub in Orlando with an automatic weapon and takes out his own self-hatred on 49 innocent people.

These are just a few examples. There are so many more.

And some of these really are senseless, in that they are at least partially random. They are just weather patterns or life’s chance events. The creative unfolding of our universe can include events that both give us a perception of beauty and meaning and events that threaten to destroy that perception.

Others of these involve senseless loss, but, in reality, they are the products of our own human systems that perpetuate violence, loss and destruction. Laws, institutions and foreign policies that combined with an economic system of intense inequality an unfettered capitalism run amuck that are threatening life on our planet and continuing to create the conditions that lead to extreme poverty, civil unrest and strife, oppression, war, hatred, religious extremism and acts of terrorism.

These may seem senseless, but they are, in fact, not the products of random chance. They are human creations.

So, in either case though, how do we make sense of the senseless? Is it even possible sometimes, or do we at times have to look the other way for a while?

I don’t pretend have all of the answers. I do think though, that one of the things we have to do, especially in the face of great losses such as those we have been witnessing, is to allow ourselves to feel the emotions – to dwell in a worldview torn and shattered for a while. We have to process the grief and the heart sickness and the confusion.

And we have to accept the anger that often comes with it so that we can channel that anger in healthy directions that avoid more destruction, as we saw with the killing of police in Dallas this past week. Directions that can, instead, be our motivation to create change, whether in our private lives or in the public sphere.

Perhaps, for instance we will channel that anger toward demanding sensible gun laws that will keep automatic weapons out of the hands of average citizens so that our country might one day no longer be the gun massacre capital of the world.

When events like the latest gun massacre or that unexpected diagnosis strike, life can feel like the rug has been pulled out from under us at such times. We realize that we are fragile creatures, and the events of our lives are unknown and uncertain and often outside of our control. Our agency then is to be found in how we respond to them.

And I think that, like I had to do, after the senseless accident that took Jenna’s brilliant life, sometimes, sometimes we have to reconstruct our worldview out of the rubble that is left of what we had believed before.

And we do that both as an individual quest, examining and reexamining our own inner spirituality and we also need a community – a community to lament with us, to celebrate the memory of that which we have lost together and to hold us when we are in danger of falling into unyielding despair. Communally, we provide each other with the building blocks for creating a new, more nuanced and mature understanding of our world that none of us can find alone amidst that rubble that was left from how we had made meaning and found beauty in the past.

That’s exactly the process those of us who loved Jenna found that we needed.

That’s exactly how so many people are responding to the senselessness in Orlando, Baton Rouge, Dallas and elsewhere. Muslim and LGBTQ communities that have reached out to one another and found themselves coming together in shared purposes even greater than each had known before environmental groups declaring solidarity with Black Lives Matter. I find reason for hope in this.

For thousands of years, humankind has imagined gods and goddesses that brought all that exists, including us, into being. I am beginning to think that it works in the exact opposite way.

Maybe, when we reach out with love toward one another, across our differences, and, even in the face of the tragic and inexplicable, together, we find new, more creative and life giving ways of constructing meaning and finding beauty in our world, maybe we co-create the divine – bring blessings into our world that so badly needs them right now.

Amen.

Benediction

Now, as we go out into that wide, beautiful world we are working to save, know that together, we can make a difference, Together, we create the courage to act, the power to make life-giving change, the nourishment that sustains our spirits.

Together, we discover the sacred that already exists within the web of all existence, of which we are part.

May the congregation say Amen and Blessed Be. Go in peace.

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 16 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.

Who’s Calling, Please?

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons, Susan Yarbrough, Video available

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Susan Yarbrough
July 3, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

“Who’s Calling, Please?” These are the words I always use when I don’t recognize the caller ID number or the name of the person on the other end of the line. This Sunday, let’s think together about what we have been called to do as individuals and as a congregation, who or what is calling us, and the fact – yes, the fact – that we are all called and are all ministers.

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.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 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.

 

It ain’t broke…but we can still fix it

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Nell Newton, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Nell Newton
June 26, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

So much around us seems fragmented and unsustainable, like the world around us seems broken. But is it? We will look at theology and possible responses to the idea that our world is a broken mess.

Reading:
The Truth About Stories; A Native Narrative pages 21-22
by Thomas King

Reading:
Adrienne Rich

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
So much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
Who, age after age,
Perversely, with no extraordinary
Power, reconstitute the world.

Sermon

One of my favorite bumper stickers asks “Where are we going? And why are we in this hand basket?!” To some it would seem like everything is falling apart and changing for the worse at every turn. The alarmists in our midst assure us that we are facing End Times.

The revolution will NOT be televised, but Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo.

Even for us Universalists, this hand basket seems to be heading someplace hot. But what everything is not falling apart? What if this is just business as usual and it’s up to us to reframe our response?

In some religious circles, people have expressed a desire to “heal our broken world”. This sentiment is usually couched as part of a mission statement – along the lines of what the Salvation Army has as its mission: “The Salvation Army – a growing, loving community of people dynamically living God’s mission in a broken world.”

This language is pretty popular among justice-seeking Christians. You can find it in colleges, mission trip groups, and from folks who are working to improve the lives of the poor. It generally can be summed up as “Together we share a quest for justice, peace, reconciliation and healing in a broken world.”

(Honestly, they lifted the term from the Judaic concept of “tikkun olam” which translates as “world repair” but they took some liberties in the translation and theology.)

So there are people who see our world as broken. These are good and loving people, and they want to make things better. But something about it just sticks in my craw…

What is it? Why does that language make me itchy? That’s what’s happening… I’m getting itchy.

I really don’t have a problem with people who are motivated by their understanding of the holy to go out and do some good work. I deeply respect people of any faith tradition who are called to address injustice.

So why the itch over this language? Our Broken World…

What’s wrong with recognizing that things are messed up and we can become a blessing to our world by walking humbly and doing justice?

It’s the “broken” that sets me on edge. Casting our world as “broken” irks me.

I find myself growling – that’s how I know something is serious – growling: “It ain’t broke! It was built this way!”

Built this way – in our natural world and our human society.

Rockslides and typhoons are part of the entire system of Nature. They cause disruption of human activities – even death and illness – but they are how this whole system works. It’s not broken. It’s complex but not broken.

But scientists are pretty much in agreement that global climate change is directly caused by human activity. Wouldn’t that show that we’ve broken our world? Yes and no. Yes, our activities have changed the system. But it’s not broken, just different. Not very comfortable for us and many other species, but still a full system. No missing pieces, nothing removed, just all of the interlinked parts responding to the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels. The natural world is not broken… it’s working quite well. And with or without us it will continue following its deep, old laws.

So, if anything, it’s not that we need to fix anything but we do need to get things back into balance if we, and all of the bears and bees and beavers are going to survive.

So what about our human society? What do I mean by “It’s not broken – it’s built that way?”

Well, our brains are hardwired for xenophobia. As a species we are inherently mistrustful of people outside of our immediate clan. We’re built that way.

But when it becomes institutionalized and rationalized, it moves from being a residual part of our lizard brain, to becoming racism that prevents us all from accessing the richness of life. Both the oppressor and the oppressed are limited by institutionalized racism. And our laws and financial practices have been built to hold groups of othered people away from resources like education, work, or medical care.

Why did so many people of color wind up in foreclosure during the Great Recession? Because of a complex system of practices, all legal, that kept them hemmed into certain neighborhoods and then made a lot of money off of them through predatory lending. It wasn’t that anyone said “How can we engineer a system to perfectly oppress people we are uncomfortable with?” But that’s pretty much what happened.

It’s what happens when we don’t examine prejudice or the way our brains work. Nothing was broken. The system worked quite well. In fact some systems work better when they are unexamined.

And that’s how evil moves about in this world, buried so deep into our normal that we don’t notice it until a person close to us cries out.

Many of the worst parts of our human society are not really broken, just unexamined prejudice. Any fixing to be done is the hard work of unpacking and naming and trying to do it better it over and over until there’s less unexamined stuff around to trip us up.

Okay… deep breath…

So that’s what I mean when I say “It ain’t broken.”

Now, here’s another reason why the phrase “broken world” just irks me: It implies that there is a more perfect, more preferred state that has been broken. It presumes that there is a norm that is better than a variation. Which is okay as long as you fit the norm….

And, here’s the real reason I get itchy: it is based upon an underlying theology that is problematic.

That theology – the one where our world is “broken”. It comes from an interpretation of the Judeo-Christian creation story. You know this one:

In the beginning there was perfection…
(Except that actually, if you read Genesis you find two beginnings…)
In The Beginning There Was Perfection in a Garden.
And eventually two humans, who were somehow too human, not perfect, despite having been made in God’s image…
(Do you sense a set up here?)
The two humans transgressed a rule…
(Really, this was a set up – eat anything and everything except THAT.)
And perfection was broken.
Because humans were not perfectly obedient.
Because they were too human.
Despite having made their god in their own image…

This break, this rupture, this banishment and punishment… this is the underpinning of what many Christians interpret as Our Broken World. Inherent human sinfulness broke God’s perfect world. And it continues to break this world.

This suggests that they have some assumptions about what Perfection would look like. They are trying to fix something they perceive is broken, and restore it to what they would consider whole or mended.

So, the problem with presuming that our world is broken is that it is based upon a theology that casts us as inherently bad children who broke something, and now we’re trying to fix it, but, of course, we can’t because there is an omnipotent god who is really in charge but seems to be waiting for us to live up or down to his expectations.

Can you see why I get itchy here?

So… here’s where a different kind of theology might change our response.

What if, instead of a single omnipotent, omniscient, judging sky god, what if there was a theology that accepted that perfection includes things that are outside the norms, things that appear imperfect? We’ve all seen leaves that simply grew asymmetrically or trees that have been misshapen by terrain or weather and yet they still grow and photosynthesize and bring beauty.

We’ve all seen imperfection and loved it more dearly because of its uniqueness. Think of a beloved – is it their perfection, their adherence to a norm that you love? Or is it their crooked smile – the way the left eye crinkles more than the right eye when they grin and laugh?

So, what if our understanding of perfection included some things that appear broken, or imperfect? And what if our understanding of the divine included our having to help create and recreate this perfect imperfection? Rather than always failing at restoring Eden, what if we are actually tasked with joining in as a part of Nature to create with wild diversity? Our job becomes less about fixing and more about participating!

Whew!

Okay, now I’m going to recognize that brokenness is real. There really is brokenness in our world. More specifically, covenants can be broken, and people can be broken.

You’ve known people who were broken. Most families have someone who isn’t quite okay. Maybe it was trauma or odd neurological wiring, or both, but there’s someone in the family who wound up broken. And that old judging sky god doesn’t seem interested in helping.

How we respond to broken people is how I’ll measure our gods.

Here’s an example – Cousin Guido. In one branch of my extended family one of our broken ones was Cousin Guido. He wasn’t really my cousin. He was my step grandfather’s second cousin but in an Italian American family, for better or worse, everyone is family.

When I was a little kid I really couldn’t tell how old Guido was. He seemed like a young man right up until the moment he became an old man. That was because when he was a young man, he was sent over to fight in World War II. He was a poor Italian American kid who was probably a little neurologically vulnerable but had no one to speak up for him or assign him to non-combat work. So, like too many poor young men, he was issued a pair of boots and a gun and sent to fight. And, when the bombs started exploding and guns firing all around him, his mind snapped. It was all over. It was what used to be called “shell shocked.” He got stuck in the middle of that terror and stayed there for the rest of his life.

Guido’s father finally found him in a hospital. Back then there was no real treatment for that kind of trauma, so his father simply brought him home and resigned to care for his son. In fact, Guido’s father married a young woman with the understanding that she would care for his son after he died. And she did. And the rest of the family cared for him too. My step grandparents always included Guido in the big family dinners and took him places. They’d include him exactly as he was – not leaving him in a back room, not waiting for him to get better, not expecting him to change – just including him and loving him as the rocking, moaning, terrified person that he was.

Have you ever seen that kind of love? The love that keeps loving someone even in their brokenness?

What makes it astonishing is because it means finding the holy in the spaces God seems to have deserted.

If we’re going to live and love brokenness, it’s going to take a different kind of theology that asks us to just live into what is, not in guilt or as punishment, but in a steady renewal, over and over again of what family and love and connection can look like.

It took the rest of Guido’s life, and he did have tranquility and kindness in his later years. He knew he belonged. It became the work of a family to hold his brokenness, his fragility. It showed us, the younger members of the family, that we didn’t have to be perfect to be loved; we simply had to be present.

This is the work of creative people who take what is imperfect and add to it with their love. Not to fix it, but to simply keep creating alongside their god.

And such is a god that I will measure us by.

Rev. Nell Newton was ordained by the San Marcos Unitarian Universalist Fellowship this past June. A lifelong Unitarian Universalist, she lives in Central Austin with her husband, assorted teenagers, too many cats, a mess of chickens, and one sweet dog.

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 16 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.

Tender Mercies

by Posted in Audio available, Marisol Caballero, Sermons, Video available

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Marisol Caballero
June 19, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

The word rahmah appears more times in the Qur’an than any other to describe God’s attributes. In English it is often translated as “mercy,” but that doesn’t begin to describe what it means to a Muslim.

Call to Worship

Kindness
Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

Reading:

“My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears”
by Mohja Kahf

My grandmother puts her feet in the sink of the bathroom at Sears
to wash them in the ritual washing for prayer,
wudu,
because she has to pray in the store or miss
the mandatory prayer time for Muslims

She does it with great poise, balancing
herself with one plump matronly arm
against the automated hot-air hand dryer,
after having removed her support knee-highs
and laid them aside, folded in thirds,
and given me her purse and her packages to hold
so she can accomplish this august ritual
and get back to the ritual of shopping for housewares

Respectable Sears matrons shake their heads and frown
as they notice what my grandmother is doing,
an affront to American porcelain,
a contamination of American Standards
by something foreign and unhygienic
requiring civic action and possible use of disinfectant spray
They fluster about and flutter their hands and I can see
a clash of civilizations brewing in the Sears bathroom

My grandmother, though she speaks no English,
catches their meaning and her look in the mirror says,
I have washed my feet over Iznik tile in Istanbul
with water from the world’s ancient irrigation systems
I have washed my feet in the bathhouses of Damascus
over painted bowls imported from China
among the best families of Aleppo

And if you Americans knew anything
about civilization and cleanliness,
you’d make wider washbins, anyway
My grandmother knows one culture – the right one,
as do these matrons of the Middle West. For them,
my grandmother might as well have been squatting
in the mud over a rusty tin in vaguely tropical squalor,
Mexican or Middle Eastern, it doesn’t matter which,
when she lifts her well-groomed foot and puts it over the edge.
“You can’t do that” one of the women protests,
turning to me, “Tell her she can’t do that.”
“We wash our feet five times a day”
my grandmother declares hotly in Arabic.
“My feet are cleaner than their sink.
Worried about their sink, are they?
I should worry about my feet!”
My grandmother nudges me, “Go on, tell them.”

Standing between the door and the mirror, I can see
at multiple angles, my grandmother and the other shoppers,
all of them decent and goodhearted women, diligent
in cleanliness, grooming, and decorum
Even now my grandmother, not to be rushed,
is delicately drying her pumps with tissues from her purse
For my grandmother always wears well-turned pumps that match her purse,
I think in case someone from one of the best families of Aleppo
should run into her-here, in front of the Kenmore display
I smile at the midwestern women
as if my grandmother has just said something lovely about them
and shrug at my grandmother as if they
had just apologized through me

No one is fooled, but I
hold the door open for everyone
and we all emerge on the sales floor
and lose ourselves in the great common ground
of housewares on markdown.

Sermon: Tender Mercies

It has been a tremendously sad week for so many of you who have been deeply affected by the massacre in Orlando last week. We are becoming ever-numb to news of gun violence, as CNN reports that “136 mass shootings in the first 164 days of this year.” But, the scale of this attack, with its final death toll still uncertain as several victims remain in critical condition, along with the fact that it took place in the assumed safe-haven of a gay club during Pride month, have rattled many of us to the core. In an interfaith vigil, I shared that to me, knowing how sacred Latino nights at gay clubs can be, what a sanctuary they are to the gay Latino community, it felt as if blood had been spilled on holy ground.

During June Pride month, LGBTQ folks tend to go out dancing more than they typically do. Even the homebodies are dragged out of their slippers and into a pair of skinny jeans. We are celebrating our community’s courage and resiliency. We are affirming the worth of ourselves and of each other. We dance knowing that there are still LGBTQ elders alive today that could never have imagined being so bold. We dance because so many who fell victim to the AIDS epidemic are no longer here to dance, themselves. We dance in their memory. We dance because we are surrounded by others who also have to choose daily whether to come out to anyone and everyone who presumptively inquires about relations with the opposite sex.

We dance because, in that club, we don’t have to watch our backs like we do in the streets. We dance to celebrate, and especially during the month of June, the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, the modicum of progress some of us have made in being fully accepted by our family of origins. There is a peace, a freedom, a camaraderie in a gay club that, especially during Pride month, gives way to level of joy that can legitimately bring about a religious experience. I don’t mean this in a drunken, euphoric sense, but think about how or when you have felt connected or united with God, or Humanity, or the Universe, or whatever you call it. Where were you? What were you doing? Maybe you held your newborn child for the first time … Maybe you sat in quiet solitude on a mountain peak and breathed in the sweet air. .. Maybe you won a sports tournament, or ran a marathon, or experienced divinity while making love … All of these experiences can bring us close to what I often call the Divine Mystery by reminding us that we are part of a whole and that we can do things and feel love in ways we never imagined. This is what can be experienced in the safe haven of a gay club. Even more so, for Latino LGBTQ folks, the remnants of brutal colonialism – traditional gender roles and hyper-masculinity reinforced by conservative Christianities create a need for spaces where LGBTQ Latinos can reconcile these two identities. The guys can speak Spanglish in the women’s bathroom while applying eyeliner and the girls can be anywhere on the gender expression spectrum and be no less Latina for it, and the gender queer Latinos can feel free to bring new gender-neutral words into Spanish’s very gendered grammar, such as elle instead of el or ella, and Latinx, instead of Latina/o.

The Pulse nightclub was no less sacred than this sanctuary, or any synagogue, mosque, cathedral, or temple. So, when violence happens in a sacred space, when people are most at ease and have a sense of safety, it is surely a heinous act.

Also like many of you, I’m sure, cringed when we saw that the gunman was a young Muslim man. Before we had information that might point to him being something of a self-loathing homophobe with a hyper-masculine, verbally abusive father, all we heard was his name, his interest in ISIS, and that he was Muslim. We knew all too well what would follow. It’s why we have the banner up in Howson Hall that reads, “We stand with our Muslim neighbors.” And, sure enough, it took nanoseconds for the internet and cable news networks to be filled with Islamophobic rhetoric and frightening threats to Muslim communities. I was so proud by the turnout for our second annual Ramadan fast-breaking Iftar this past Wednesday! It was such a show of solidarity!

This year, June is more than Pride month because this year Pride happens to coincide with the holy month of Ramadan on the Muslim calendar. Many people in the US know very little about Islam. I will admit to knowing more about Buddhism and Judaism than I do about Islam. When I went before the Ministerial Fellowship Committee of the UU Association to be deemed ready and fit for ministry, I was asked the question, “What are you most drawn to about Christianity, Judaism, and Islam?” I had a small panic and then answered, “Christianity – the radicalism of Jesus and his bravery to stand up against a powerful empire, Judaism – centuries of tradition and the emphasis on ritual and on family, and Islam – the huge focus of universal the Love of God.” I thought I’d remembered a concept in Islam like this, but couldn’t be paid to recall anything more than I said.

Last month, one of my Muslim friends posted an article about the Muslim concept of Rahmah. It turns out, Rahmah was the idea that I had in mind when I took an educated guess at the interview question, but universal love of God seems to be an inadequate interpretation of the word. In fact, Rahmah is often interpreted as “mercy,” in English, though this, too, does not fully capture what it means. Rahmah is one of the most central teachings of the Messenger, Muhammad. He said, “I am not not sent here to curse, but I was sent as a Rahmah.” Not only is the word and words derived from the root the most prevalent word family in the Arabic Qur’an, but it is also the most commonly used term to describe the attributes of God, Allah. There are famously 99 different “names,” or attributes of Allah. Some include, Al-Basir, The All Seeing; Al-Ghafoor, The All Forgiving; and Al-Hakeem, The Wise. But the first two, Ar-Rahman, The All Beneficent, The Most Merciful in Essence, The Compassionate, The Most Gracious; and Ar-Rahim, The Most Merciful, The Most Merciful in Actions, are in the first sentence of every single chapter of the Qur’an except for one and that is the chapter devoted to Rahmah.

Bismillah’I-Rahman’I-Rahim. Is that first line. It is often spoken in conversation between devout Mulsims. It means, “In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.” These are very similar attributes, but Ar-Rahman means, “The One who is defined by complete and universal Rahmah,” and Ar-Rahmin means, “The One who continuously shows much Rahmah.” But, to understand this difference, we need to gain a better understanding of what Rahmah is if it isn’t fully explained by being translated as mercy. Like many English-speakers, when I hear that someone is being “merciful,” I usually assume that they are in a position of power and they have the authority to punish but have decided to be lenient. This doesn’t seem like a godly attribute. Aaron Persky, the judge in the recent controversial rape case could be called merciful by this definition, since he delivered a ridiculously mild sentence to an admitted rapist. Also, oftentimes leniency is not granted out of compassion. There are often ulterior motives, such as maintaining the ‘Old Boy’s Club’ as in this case, or for political strategy.

Guner Arslan, the speaker and one of the main organizers of last Wednesday’s Iftar, spoke to me a bit about Rahmah. “Does Rahmah mean that God is ever-forgiving of our sins?” “No” he said. “Rahmah speaks to the fact that God regards us with mercy and He has mercy for everyone and everything in creation. He has more mercy than is possible for anyone else to possess; Supreme Mercy.” I was still confused. I was stuck in my understanding of the meaning of the word ‘mercy.’ When I asked him if that is what he meant by mercy, he said enthusiastically, “No! Not at all.” “Well, then what does mercy mean?” “That’s hard to talk about” he said with a chuckle, “It’s like trying to explain to you what Love is.” He went on, “mercy is what a mother feels for a child. The child has never done anything to earn that love, but they are just freely given it, even before they are born. When the child is hurt, the mother aches, as well. Well, fathers, too, but Rahmah is often regarded as a mother regards her child.” “So, is Rahmah “Love?” “No. It’s this type of mercy. It contains love in it, but there are many types of love. Muslims must regard every person with this same feeling of mercy to try to please God.”

In the article, “Rahmah- Not Just ‘Mercy” Adnan Majid explains:
Of course, this connection of rahmah and motherly love is linguisticolly unsurprising, for rahmah is related to the Arabic word rahm, which means “uterus,” “womb,” and figuratively “family ties.” This close linguistic connection is so eloquently expressed in Allah’s statement as transmitted in a hadith qudsi, “I am al-Rahman and created the rahm (uterus) – And I named it after Me.” Therefore, if we are to grasp the rahmah that is core to God’s very nature, we must look to what this feminine organ symbolizes – the nurturing emotions we find in mothers and the bonds that tie families together. However, mothers are not the only ones characterized by rahmah; the Prophet himself embodied the quality when he would hug his grandchildren, kissing them.

In the patriarchal Bedouin culture of his day, this was considered an effeminate characteristic. “I have ten children and have never kissed any of them!” retorted a proud, disapproving Bedouin. But the Messenger, knowing the beauty of parental love in Allah’s eyes, warned the man, “He who shows no rahmah will be shown no rahmah (in the hereafter}.” And in another instance, he reiterated, “He who has no rahmah for children is not one of us. “

I am trying, still, to fully understand this view of mercy, but upon reading that Ar-Rahman is the attribute of Allah that means God’s grace, blessings, love, and yes, this new-to-me definition of mercy encompass everything and everyone in the universe. While I don’t personally believe in a deity that is a who? What? When? Or where?, I can begin to see strands of my theology in Ar-Rahman. Ar-Rahmin is a measurable, observable act of compassion by God. If a Muslim is in a terrible accident and walks away unscathed, they may then pray a prayer of thanks, invoking the attribute Ar-Rahim. On the other hand, according to the attribute, Ar-Rahmah, just like a parent has to pour stinging hydrogen peroxide or alcohol on a scraped knee, so does God sometimes place us in situations whose favorable outcome we cannot see for the awful current state of affairs. This, of course, falls in line with the Muslim belief in predestination.

Learning about this while listening to the constant stream of news coverage of Orlando was actually comforting to me in a surprising way. No, I don’t think that the Divine placed those happy, dancing people in the path of those bullets to make way for a predestined favorable outcome, but I do like to think that, in reevaluating what mercy means and how we can all strive for it, I felt personal agency in a crippling grief that could have very well given way to feeling utterly helpless. If we can both mourn the dead and maintain an unconditional love for humanity, as a whole, disturbed mass-murderers don’t come out on top. There is, of course activism to take part in, policy change to effect, but for the emotional helplessness, that remedy is needed. We will never make sense of such a massacre, but there are ways of moving forward that both honor and mourn the dead and experience a personal spiritual transformation in our mourning, through striving to know and love Rahmah, that feeling we can nurture that allows us to allow our hearts to ache alongside others in pain. We need not loose ourselves to that pain, but to feel it, even fleetingly, is a Rahmah, a nurturing, compassionate love.

During this Holy month for both our LGBTQ family and our Muslim family, and especially for LGBTQ Latinos and for LGBTQ Muslims, may you love Rahmah and may Rahmah be bestowed upon you. May it be so.

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 16 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.

 

Revolutionary Love

by Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Guest Speakers, Sermons, Video available

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
Phil Richardson, Nicole Meitzen, Julie Gillis
June 12, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Rev. Chris Jimmerson and leaders from the Austin Area UU White Allies for Racial Equity will examine how, in the words of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

Call to Worship
by Steve Ripper

Che Guevara once said, “At the risk of sounding ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.”

It begins and ends with love. If there is one lesson, one key to being all you can be – and I don’t mean being a soldier, I mean being a warrior – it’s learning to love. But just what does that word, love, mean? It has become so fraught and loaded with double meanings and empty promises that many are justifiably cynical at the mere mention of love. I’m not talking sentimental love, I’m not talking hallmark love, I’m not talking ‘luv.’ I’m talking about a fierce love, a revolutionary love, a true love, a love beyond illusion, a love that is not afraid to freak you out with the truth, even when it hurts like hell. This Big Love is agape love, it’s a universal love, and it is, I believe infused in all of creation.

Meditation Reading
by Steve Ripper

When I asked Archibishop Desmond Tutu one of my favourite questions, “what is the meaning of life”, he replied, “The God in whose image we are created, is a God of love. We are the result of a divine loving. Ultimately we’re meant for love… we’re meant as those who will communicate love and make this world more hospitable to love.”

You don’t need to believe in God to feel the power of this truth – somewhere deep inside us all, is a bonfire of love, that we are here to embody, to unleash, to liberate from captivity.

Take a moment and send your awareness down to your heart, and see if you can feel a little taste of this vast love which is hidden there, like a shining diamond – your diamond heart. Can you feel it burning within?

Homily 1
by Phil Richardson

We were challenged by Dr. King to find a Revolutionary Love that could defeat the hate of racism. The inter-racial love that Michael and I share is an example of such a love.

I don’t know why I fell in love with Michael 36 years ago. I knew that I was attracted to men of color but the deck was stacked against us. … According to 1970’s social norms and our respective parents … Our age difference was too great ( ageism), we were both men (homophobia) and especially we were of mixed races (racism.) … My mother pleaded: Couldn’t you please pick someone less ‘obviously controversial?’ Thankfully we stayed together overcoming pressure from culture, family and friends … our Love prevailed.

In our 36 years together we’ve lived together, raised children together, shared intimate hopes and dreams together, practiced medicine together, vacationed together and grieved together as we lost friends to AIDS. Michael is my ally, friend, companion and now legal husband after four very public wedding-like commitment ceremonies.

Is Michael Really Black?
The short answer is yes. His skin color is a rich tan. That said, I see Michael more as a friend, lover, husband and confidant who happens to have darker skin. Our Revolutionary Love transformed black Michael into Michael who happens to be black. … Close proximity, frequent interaction, mutual trust and respect, (elements of our Revolutionary Love), caused me to see Michael’s character rather than his skin color … that was Dr. King’s dream. This Revolutionary Love transformed us both to see each other as our true selves, rather than what we looked like.

A telling anecdote occurred several years after Michael and I got together. We were at a large social gathering when Michael whispered to me “We’re the only black people at this party.” It took a minute for Michael’s Freudian slip to sink in … We had become to each other, members of the same human race.

The take away in this example is that our initial recognition of our racial difference caused our relationship to begin. As love drew us closer, we each became less aware of our skin colors, seeing more each other’s true essence. This pathway of first acknowledging, then accepting racial and cultural difference followed by long lasting mutual admiration, compassion, and trust defeated the very meaning of racism.

Road Blocks
Two major roadblocks to defeating racism are White Privilege and an unequal Race Based Justice system. Understanding these roadblocks has been the focus of our White Allies studies.

We’ve discovered that most white people, myself included, are totally unaware how we exercise White Privilege … unless it’s pointed out. In our Allies group we regularly share White Privilege scenarios we’ve observed in ourselves and others.

Race based inequality under the law has been publicized by the Black Lives Matter movement. … “Stop and Frisk,” “The War on Drugs” and supposedly “non-existent” racial profiling all claim to be race neutral but with implementation are racist.

Loving Away Racism

– I believe that the pathway to a tranquil diverse society must first start with a full awareness and acceptance of race and cultural differences. With purposeful proximity, genuine friendship, admiration, and trust we can defeat racism.

– We need to learn to recognize and condemn White Privilege wherever we find it.

– We need to be prepared to change ourselves whenever we discover our own exercise of White Privilege.

– We must insist upon truly equal enforcement and justice under the Law.

– We all need to accept, respect and follow leaders who happen to be POC. As Victor Hugo wrote … “To Love another person is to see the face of God.”

Homily 2
by Nicole Meitzen

Through my experiences in the racial justice movement in Central Texas, I have seen that revolutionary love is a verb, the act of choosing everyday to meet the world, each other, and our activism with an open heart and a consciousness of whether the impact of our actions is upholding white supremacist systems or dismantling them. Activist, scholar and author Angela Davis said “walls turned sideways are bridges.” The conscious choices inherent in revolutionary love are what turn the walls between us into bridges so we can embrace our shared humanity.

Revolutionary love is the choice to show up for racial justice everyday even when it feels scary, hard, and overwhelming. It is a love that grows through our presence and connection… putting our bodies on the line for our black brothers and sisters and declaring with them that Black Lives Matter. Racial justice activist Reverend Hannah Adair Bonner wrote “what’s a solidarity that doesn’t break? When you’re tired, when you’re scared, when you’re heart hurts: you’re still there.”

Revolutionary love is recognizing that David Joseph, Gyasi Hughes, and Sandra Bland are not “their” children but our children. It is choosing to stand with the families of these young people and demanding justice… demanding a society where young black people will be safe, respected, and loved not just at home but when they are in the midst of one of their most vulnerable moments, when they are walking the halls of their school, and when they are driving down the road. A society where black people will see their inherent worth, dignity, beauty, and power reflected back at them by the people and institutions they encounter in daily life.

Revolutionary love is the choice of white folks to explore white supremacy, its impacts, and our part in perpetuating it whether we claim to be anti-racist or not. It is taking the time and effort to read articles, blogs, books, and to engage in tough conversations without expecting peoples of color to take on the burden of educating us. It is challenging racist comments, actions, and systems and pushing through the discomfort of doing so. It is realizing our impact matters more than or “good” intentions and apologizing, making amends, and doing better next time when we are confronted for racist remarks and/or behavior. It is also remembering to offer ourselves and others a bit of grace because unlearning a lifetime of socialization in a white supremacist culture is a daily challenge. We will make mistakes along the way and these are the points where we learn and grow and develop the ability to engage with each other and the world in a way that supports racial justice rather than oppression.

Revolutionary love is the choice to raise a race conscious, rather than colorblind, family. It is white families realizing that while discussing race and racism is challenging, black families have no choice but to talk with their children in order to prepare them to safely navigate a world designed to treat them as less because of the color of their skin. It is white families teaching their kids that racism is systemic and that people have different life experiences and face striking inequities because our society is shaped by the violence inherent in white supremacy and racism. It is demonstrating with our actions and words that black lives matter and reminding our children that their actions and words can either support their black friends or endanger them physically, emotionally, and/or mentally. It is teaching our children that racism and slavery are not gone and that there is a vast history excluded from textbooks… especially in Texas. It is taking the time to teach our children this history to put the injustices they and their peers will encounter in true context. It is living our lives and engaging with our families in a way that our youth know their voices matter and that they are capable of challenging racist systems and creating a more just and loving world… and that they deserve nothing less.

Racism dehumanizes us all and the choice to love is what will reconnect and heal us.

As social activist bell hooks said, “When we choose to love, we choose to move against fear, against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect, to find ourselves in the other.”

Homily 3
by Julie Gillis

Looking back over my life, my activism has always had to do with the body. I’ve been a staunch supporter of reproductive justice, of LGBT intersecting rights, of worker’s rights, and of ability rights, anti-racism work. It is often frustrating work, and it can feel hopeless at times, especially in a state like Texas. Love, and its revolutionary power are vital to that work and for those who do that work.

I believe it’s revolutionary to love the body. The body gets complicated in our culture. From Original Sin to Pauline Theology to Dualism (and even other religious paths aiming to free to soul from its earthly form, the physical body gets a bad rap). I can admit to feeling fear when I share some of the storytelling work I do (it’s about the body and sexuality and pleasure) because our culture is so shaming, about what bodies should and shouldn’t do. But I do it anyway. I often feel fear when I confront my own racism, because I know it is a poison in my body, and in our larger cultural body. I wonder how to heal any of it while suffering from it and being, even inadvertently, a cause of it.

We may not always think of it that way, but racism is completely tied up in the body – people, centuries ago, decided that black and brown bodies should serve white bodies. The body itself was supposed to be a mirror of god, or we created god as a mirror of the dominant body at the time. In our culture it was a Christian, white, able bodied, straight, cis gendered men.

Thus we had bodies that were superior and other bodies to serve them. We had bodies with uteruses serving bodies without. Poor bodies made to work for rich bodies. Bodies to be sold. Or impregnated and given away. Or locked up in facilities for not being perfect. Laws were passed delineating who gets to pee where, who gets to decide when or if to stay pregnant. Who gets to ride a bus, who gets to drink out of a water fountain.

And if those disuniting decisions were being made by individuals, what happened next was that those isms solidified into institutions like the church body, which then reinforced personal beliefs in a toxic mobius strip effect. It’s also revolutionary love to confront the body politic.

I do this work because of the body. I have one. You have one. We all have one and they are precious. If our body as a church isn’t in alignment with the bodies of its people, we are going to have a hard time sustaining our mission statement of gathering together in community to nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice.

To stay in communion and complete that mission requires the revolutionary love that only our bodies can bring. Can you imagine what it would be to live in a world that LOVED each body? That loved the body of earth? Really LOVED it, like a parent loves a child or a lover loves the beloved? We wouldn’t hurt each other. We wouldn’t destroy our water, our air. We wouldn’t sell each other, or use each other like products based on gender, or melanin, or age.

We’d take delight in our differences. Take joy in shades of skin, textures of hair, wrinkles, sizes of bodies. Celebrate romantic unions of various genders happily and with grace. Honor choices. Share food and resources and lift each other up. We’d look back and be ashamed and heartbroken over what’s such disunity. We must wake up to that revolutionary love and real communion.

Our larger human body is only as healthy as our individual ones. The more we can heal and support the individual, the more impact on the institution, leading back to cultural bodies that truly support individual ones. That’s what nurtures me, this vision of love reversing that mobius strip into a healing cycle that support human beings and back again. It starts with love and with us.

Homily 4
by Rev. Chris Jimmerson

Text of the homily will be posted as it becomes available.

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 16 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.

Talking to the trees

by Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 5, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

What can we learn about community from pecan trees? From the three sisters: corn, beans, and squash?

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.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 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.

 

Flower Communion

by Posted in Audio available, Marisol Caballero, Sermons

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Rev. Marisol Caballero
May 29, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

We bring flowers to church for this UU tradition of resilience, renewal, and celebration of our individual gifts that create the bouquet of this church community. An all-ages intergenerational worship service.

Call to Worship
By Thomas Rhodes

We come in a variety of colors, shapes, and sizes.
Some of us grow in bunches.
Some of us grow alone.
Some of us are cupped inward,
And some of us spread ourselves out wide.
Some of us are old and dried and tougher than we appear.
Some of us are still in bud.
Some of us grow low to the ground,
And some of us stretch toward the sun.
Some of us feel like weeds, sometimes.
Some of us carry seeds, sometimes.
Some of us are prickly, sometimes.
Some of us smell.
And all of us are beautiful.
What a bouquet of people we are!

Reading:

Today we listened to the story of “Ferdinand, the Bull”, about a bull who loved flowers. It was written by Munro Leaf. Here’s some interesting history about the book. According to wikipedia, “The book was released nine months before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and was seen by many supporters of Francisco Franco as a pacifist book. It was banned in many countries, including in Spain. In Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler ordered the book burned, while Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union, granted it privileged status as the only non-communist children’s book allowed in Poland. India’s leader Mahatma Gandhi called it his favorite book.”

It’s only fitting that this book is being read today, the day before Memorial Day, when we remember, honor, and mourn all those members of our human family that war has taken from us. We know that the best way to honor the fallen soldier is to help heal the spiritually and bodily wounded and to work for a peace. This is our 6th Principle and our duty as fellow humans whose hearts still beat. So, today, hug a veteran. But instead of saying the all-too-common, “Thank you for your service,” let’s try something different. Let’s say, “I won’t forget you or your friends. I’ll do everything I can to bring peace to our world,” and, “Here’s a flower for you.”

Introduction to Flower Communion

The Unitarian Universalist Flower Communion service which we are about to celebrate was originated in 1923 by Rev. Dr. Norbert Capek founder of the modern Unitarian movement in Czechoslovakia. On the last Sunday before the summer recess of the Unitarian church in Prague, all the children and adults participated in this colorful ritual, which gives concrete expression to the humanity-affirming principles of our liberal faith. When the Nazis took control of Prague in 1940, they found Capek’s gospel of the inherent worth and beauty of every human person to be -as Nazi court records show — “… too dangerous to the Reich (for him) to be allowed to live.” Capek was sent to Dachau, where he was killed the next year by Nazis. This gentle man suffered a cruel death, but his message of human hope and decency lives on through his Flower Communion, which is widely celebrated today. It is a noble and meaning-filled ritual we are about to recreate. This service includes the original prayers of Capek to help us remember the principles and dreams for which he died.

Consecration of Flowers
by Norbert Capek

Infinite Spirit of Life, we ask thy blessing on these, thy messengers of fellowship and love. May they remind us, amid diversities of knowledge and of gifts, to be one in desire and affection, and devotion to thy holy will. May they also remind us of the value of comradeship, of doing and sharing alike. May we cherish friendship as one of thy most precious gifts. May we not let awareness of another’s talents discourage us, or sully our relationship, but may we realize that, whatever we can do, great or small, the efforts of all of us are needed to do thy work in this world.

Flower Communion

Flowers were a very important part of the story of Ferdinand. Flowers, in the story were a symbol of love and peace. Unitarian Universalist also use flowers as a symbol of love and peace in this special ceremony called Flower Communion.

It is time now for us to share in the Flower Communion. I ask that as you each in turn approach the communion vase you do so quietly –reverently — with a sense of how important it is for each of us to address our world and one another with gentleness, justice, and love. I ask that you select a flower different from the one you brought that particularly appeals to you. As you take your chosen flower noting its particular shape and beauty please remember to handle it carefully. It is a gift that someone else has brought to you. It represents that person’s unique humanity, and therefore deserves your kindest touch. Let us share quietly in this Unitarian Universalist ritual of oneness and love.

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 16 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.

 

What’s the difference: Venting vs Lamentation

by Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
May 22, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

“What’s the Difference?” This week we’ll look at the difference between venting vs. lamenting.

Today is the last of our “What’s the Difference?” sermons for this church year. We’re talking about the difference between lamentation and venting. In the Hebrew Scriptures, there is a book of Lamentations. The book consists of five separate poems. In the first (chapter 1), the city sits as a desolate weeping widow overcome with miseries. In Chapter 2 wonders whether the destruction of the city by the Babylonians is because of the sins of the nation. Chapter 3 has in it hope that the chastisement will be for the good of the people. The next chapters go back to wondering about the sins of the people, being sad and distressed that God seemed to have deserted them, questioning whether the punishment was too great for the sin, and hope for the recovery of the people. This exile of the people happened in 586 BCE. Many Jews stayed in Babylon, but others longed for Jerusalem. “By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept for thee, Zion. We remember thee, Zion.”

Each chapter is a poem, the first four are acrostics. They have groups of 22 lines, each starting with the next letter of the alphabet.

Lamentations are a form of prayer used in many ancient cultures. They are a crying out on behalf of a community, a cry from the heart and the spirit. There is anguish, self-examination, questioning of the way things work. “Did I cause this? What is my responsibility? Did I do something wrong? Am I supposed to learn a lesson here? What might the lesson be? How did this happen? What are the causes? What could we have done differently?”

Lamentation is rooted theologically: in your relationship to the Universe, to Wisdom, to God. Venting is just letting off steam, right?

Most of us have been taught that Venting is a good way to let off steam, to lance the blister of your anger. If you don’t express it, it turns inward. I was taught that as I was learning to be a therapist. Back in the 80’s, 30 years ago. Turns out, it’s not so true. Venting, with words or with physical punching, can make some people more angry, more aggressive. College students at Ohio State University, in a study directed by Dr. Brad Bushman were asked to write an essay, which they were told would be graded by another student. After they turned in the essay, they waited for it to be graded. It was returned to them with a big red F, and the comment “This is the worst essay I’ve ever read.” They were mad. One group of students was told to vent their anger by punching a big pillow. The other group just sat for a time. Then the researchers came in with cups and hot sauce. They told the angry students they could put any amount of hot sauce in the cup and their grader would have to drink it. The students who had just sat quietly with their thoughts poured a small amount into the cup. Those who had punched the pillows poured much more hot sauce, some filling the cups! That you need to vent your anger is being shown to be one of those “sticky” stories, to use a word from Malcom Gladwell. All evidence to the contrary, the story still persists.

Complaining is actually bad for you. Neuroscience (and if you are interested in this part, there is a class in the science of religion offered by two scientists in the congregation – look in the announcements in your oos) “synapses that fire together wire together.” Once you have a particular thought, it becomes easier and easier to have that thought again. You can complain, but if you become repetitive with it, it can cause a trend toward that kind of thought, and pretty soon you’re that whiny person who is hard to hang out with. Venting releases stress chemicals into your body, which is bad for BP, weight and blood sugar.

What can you do instead, that is different?

The ancient practice of lamentation differs from venting. It’s more often about a situation the community is in. It’s rooted in your theological view of the world. What is the world supposed to be like? Who is taking care of things? What is our part in what is happening? You are calling out in lamentation. To God, or to the Spirit of Life. Your heart is in a lament in the way that it’s not in a vent. Your attention is turned to your responsibility in the mess as well as wrongs done by another.

The first word of the book is “how,” which is central to the dynamic of lamentation. How did this terrible situation come about? What did I do? What was supposed to happen? What did I think would happen?

I wrote a lamentation in Biblical style, starting one line with each letter of the alphabet:

All the people on both sides seem to have lost their civility
Both Democrats are saying things which seem to me to be unwise
Civil discourse seems to be becoming a lost skill
Donald Trump
Education is so important to democracy.
Frustration and anger make better news than civil discourse.
Great? I think he means “Make America White Again.”
History is a great teacher.
I must admit I used to be riveted by the horrible things said and done.
Jefferson and Adams had a campaign nastier than this one.
Knowledge of the past gives us perspective
Laughing at it is not working for me any longer
My heart is seized with sorrow for my country
Nausea grips me as I watch the news
Oh, how did we get into this fix?
Please tell me everything is going to be all right
Quivering with dread, we listen for the next awful thing he’ll say
Remind me that nothing too terrible has happened yet
Sweet dreams of a just society fuel our actions.
Teaching civics in the school would help people understand how things work
Understanding others is what we should work on before trying to be understood by others
Variations in views are a quality of every free society
We’re all in this together
Xenophobia is a human failing we must always work against.
Yelling is a sign that no communication is happening.
Zero is the number of ideas on how to fix it.

Maybe next time you want to vent, hold it, deepen it, and write a lament in Biblical style. You might learn something, and rather than just going round and round in welle worn circles, you might. grant your pain some forward motion.

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 16 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.

 

Finding the divinity in the Mundane

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons, Video available

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The Youth of First UU Church of Austin
May 15, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

“Youth Sunday: Finding the Divinity in the Mundane” with the Senior High Youth Group. Our annual youth-led Sunday service. The wisdom of adolescence will share their particular insight into the topic of discovering the divine within the routine of our daily lives.

Call to Worship: “Finding the Divine in the Mundane” by Rae Milstead

Reading: “What is there beyond knowing” by Mary Oliver
read by Bridget Lewis

Homily: Kira Azulay

Homily: Alica Stadler

Homily: Alex Runnels

Homily: Theo Moers

Benediction: Abby Poirier

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.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 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.