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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
and Rev. Michelle LaGrave
January 14, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Sometimes love feels easy, like when we think about our love for a beloved pet or family member. Other times, love feels hard, like when we encounter someone who feels difficult to love or when we are loving someone through a hard place. What happens when we lay sentimentality to the side and think about Love theologically or as a spiritual value?
Chalice Lighting
by Amy Carol Webb
We light this flame
For the art of sacred unknowing.
Humbled by all that we cannot fathom in this time,
We come into the presence of what we do know,
Perhaps the only thing we can ever know:
That Love is now and forever
The only answer to everything
And everyone
In every moment.
Call to Worship
YOU ARE BELOVED, AND YOU ARE WELCOME HERE
by Joan Javier-Duval
Whether tears have fallen from your eyes this past week or gleeful laughter has spilled out of your smiling mouth
You are beloved, and you are welcome here
Whether you are feeling brave or broken-hearted, defiant or defeated, fearsome or fearful
You are beloved, and you are welcome here
Whether you have untold stories buried deep inside or stories that have been forced beyond the edges of comfort
You are beloved, and you are welcome here
Whether you have made promises, broken promises, or are renewing your promises,
You are beloved, and you are welcome here
Whatever is on your heart, however it is with your soul in this moment
You are beloved, and you are welcome here
In this space of welcome and acceptance, commitment and re-commitment, of covenant & connection,
Let us worship together.
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Reading
GOD GAVE ME A WORD
by the Rev. Amy Petrie Shaw
I was talking with God the other day, ’cause we’re cool like that.
And God said “Hey, I want you to tell people something.”
And I was kinda busy, so I pretended like I didn’t hear.
And God poked me and said, “I’m not kidding. Pay attention,”
(’cause while we’re cool, we aren’t that cool
And I know when I have pushed it way too far.)
So I put down my coffee cup and I turned around.
And God said, “Let me hang a Word around your neck, so that Everyone can see it. And you better speak it when you’re out, ’cause I’ll know if you don’t.
And it will be heavy,
So heavy,
On your soul.”
And a Word was hung around my neck to take out to the people standing in the streets.
A Word was preached into my ear and laid into my mouth and burned into my Heart until all I could see was the shape of the Word and the Word was all.
And the Word was Love.
And God said “Now get out because
You don’t have all day, and that Word is gonna get heavier.
And you got some work yet to do.
So I’m taking my Word out into the world.
Love came down on this green earth.
Love came down and turned over the tables and set the world on its end
Love made it clear that it was the Word for the poor and the broken hearted. For the queer boi and the angry girl.
Love was the Word for late night hookers and the long haul truckers,
for the heroin junkie and the runaway cutters.
Love was the Word for all of the screwed up and pushed over and too tired and I can’t take no more.
Love was the Word for the HIV patient and the man with no papers.
Love was the Word for me and for you,
for the saints and the sinners and the scramblers in between.
Love came down and made a way
for there to be a way
and then
Love said “We are never going back.”
(he who has ears let him hear)
Love said we are all a part of something bigger and if you cannot rise with us, if you cannot Love with us
then you should get the Hell out of the way because
We aren’t going anywhere and you
are in the path.
(he who has ears let him hear)
Love came down for the World to know and
I’m holding out this Word so
even when you and God are just like that you can’t pretend you didn’t know.
I cannot put it down.
Not for a politician spewing hatred.
Not for a minister vomiting out bile in the costume of a saint.
Not for money or for country or for kin.
I’m holding my Word in my mouth
‘Cause the next time I see God I wanna be able to say “You gave me a
Word and I carried it just the way you asked.”
You gave it to me and I took it.
I showed it to everyone I met.
You gave it to me and I showed it to her and gher and ze and him.
I showed it to them and they and those over there.
I never put it down.
(I can never put it down).
I was talking with God the other day, ’cause we’re cool like that.
And God said “Hey, I want you to tell people something.”
And I was still kinda busy, so I pretended like I didn’t hear.
And God said, “I’m not kidding. Pay attention,”
(’cause while we’re cool, we aren’t that cool
And I know when I have pushed it way too far.)
So I put down my coffee cup and I turned around.
And then God gave me a Word.
And now I’ve given it to you.
Start moving.
Sermon
Rev. Michelle LaGrave’s Homily
Every so often, I offer a Question Box sermon. I did one with Rev. Chris shortly after I arrived here this past summer. That’s when instead of an already prepared sermon, the congregation is invited to ask questions of the minister. The scope of questions is pretty open, within appropriate bounds. They might cover anything from UU thea/ology to UU history to world religions to congregational life to personal getting-to-know you kinds of questions. As you might imagine, it can be a lot of fun. It can also be … well, risky, because you never know what someone might ask.
I offered one of these question box sermons several years ago at the church I was serving in Omaha. And, as you might guess, someone came up with a doozy of a question. Are you ready for it? “Why is life so darn hard?”
“Why is life so darn hard?” Well, I didn’t know then and I still don’t know. It just is. It just is.
What I can tell you is this. As Unitarian Universalists, we build our thea/ology from our life experiences, whatever they may be, including, especially including, the hard things. That’s what makes us different from so many faith traditions. Instead of receiving an inherited body of theology, or creed, or doctrine, or dogma, we build our own thea/ology. And the material we use in doing so is our life experiences.
So we go through life, experiencing all of the hard things for ourselves or witnessing our friends and families and neighbors and each other experiencing their hard things, living in and through those hard places. Illness, job loss, people who are mean or unfair or unkind, addiction, and recovery, divorce, loss of abilities, coming out, not making the team, mental health struggles, unwanted moves from one place or home to another, homelessness. There are so many, many hard things, hard places, and hard, or hardened, people.
What are we to do about all of this hardness? About life being so darn hard?
As Universalists, one answer is … Love! We love each other while we are in and as we go through the hard places. We listen to and witness each other’s stories, the ways in which we each live out our lives and then weave them into a whole cloth of meaning.
Our Universalist ancestors tell us that Love is God and God is Love. This has been my experience as well. I remember one night, when I was a child, and I was in a hard place, tearfully lying in bed when all of a sudden I felt like I was being enveloped by a large, warm, hug. I was completely wrapped up in this powerful feeling of being Loved. Completely, thoroughly, peacefully, and warmly Loved. It was an almost indescribable feeling, one I attributed to G-d.
As an adult, my understanding of this spiritual experience has expanded to thinking of this as some kind of collective unconsciousness, or quantum entanglement, or the universe. But in the end, whatever the exact cause or nature of this experience of being loved, thea/ologically speaking, calling it G-d, in the end, still works for me.
Now while none of us can, individually, match this all-encompassing feeling of being loved for someone else, we can aspire to live out our lives in Love – love for each other and love for the people who are easier to ignore than to love, especially when they are a stranger to us. Our tradition of humanism teaches us this.
Here’s a story, shared on social media by a chaplain named J.S. Park:
A patient was yelling at someone, then at me. I had a few options.
1) Call security.
2) Keep walking.
3) Go confront him.
4) Go find his nurse. (The RNs love this. But really. They don’t.)
5) Ask him what he needed.
You might have guessed I picked 5. Here’s what happened:
I got up as close to this patient as possible – now my patient an arm’s length. Just out of striking distance. I asked, “What do you need right now?” No kidding, his mouth hung open. He stared at my hair. Back to me.
“Hungry,” he said. “I’m hungry. But I mean, I need real food.”
“Okay,” I said. “.. do you have any dietary restrictions?”
“No sir, I don’t,” he said. “I am the opposite of dietary restrictions. I am dietarily open-minded.”
“How about a hamburger and fries?”
“For real? You for real? Can I get two of each?”
He told me his story. He went to the ED which he thought would be a quick trip, but it turned into a week. He said the hospital food reminded him of prison food. He didn’t mind the hospital. But he didn’t like it reminded him of prison. He had cried himself to sleep every night.
Normally I don’t buy food for patients. But hearing his story – what else could I do? I checked with the nurse.
“Got enough burgers for the floor?” she asked, only half joking.
I went to grab his food. He almost lunged at the bag. Finished a burger right in front of me.
And he told me between bites: “Chaplain, believe it or not, but I’ve stayed at the Ritz. And this right here is the best burger I’ve ever had in my life.”
“I believe you,” I told him.
“Thanks, chap. That’s all I wanted.”
This patient was in a hard place and his behavior was probably making it difficult for anyone to feel compassion for him. And yet, the solution to helping him out was easy. The chaplain listened. The chaplain heard him. The chaplain fed him. This is Love. This is Loving someone through a hard place.
Have you ever loved someone through a hard place? Has someone ever loved you through a hard place?
Rev. Chris Jimmerson’s Homily
My uncle Bobbie was so very lovable. And, my uncle Bobbie could be extremely hard to love sometimes. That’s not as much of a paradox as it might seem.
Bobbie was brilliant and funny and caring and was the first in my family to recognize and accept that I was gay.
I will always remember the practical jokes he played on more than one of us. I can still picture him standing in a comer at the edge of family gatherings, quietly throwing in hysterical commentary at the goings on. His jokes and comments though were affectionate – most often pointing out something he loved about us in a humorous way.
I grew up with uncle Bobbie as one of my parental figures. He was my mom’s brother, and they had always been close, so our family and his would get together often.
My brother and sister and I grew up almost as as siblings with our cousins, Bobbie’s three daughters. They lived just outside of New Orleans, so visiting them was always an adventure compared to the much more staid little Southeast Texas town where we lived.
Bobbie was also manic depressive, which got much worse as he aged. When he was at the depths of the worst of his depressive states, what had been humor could turn biting and hurtful.
At the height of his manic states, he could become delusional, like the time he attached a giant television antenna to the top of his van and wired it into the dashboard radio so he could pick up what God was sayIng.
He got to the point in his 40s and 50s that he could no longer work, and my grandparents had to take care of him. At times, when the psychological illness had him in its grasp though, he could be very ugly to them, even physically threatening sometimes.
Eventually though, with the right medications, he was able to stabilize enough that he could live on his own again, but with their continued support.
But, when he was only 55 years old, Bobbie and a woman he begun seeing drove to Louisiana for a night out together. On their way back, they were in a terrible car wreck, and both were killed.
I will always believe though that Bobbie made it as long as he did because of the love and care of my grandparents, my mom, and his daughters, and that with that care he might have made it even much longer were it not for that tragic accident.
We had loved him through some very hard places.
On the night after Bobbie’s funeral, his youngest daughter, my cousin, Jeannie, her husband, Steve and I spent the night at my mom’s house.
As I said, Jeannie and I grew up together. She is several years younger than me though, and because of that age difference, we had always been that sort of “family close” – you know, where you have great familiarity and affection for each other because of spending so much family time together, but you don’t actually know one another all that well?
That evening, we talked until late. We told stories of Bobbie. We laughed and cried and were vulnerable with each other and got to know each other much more deeply.
After that, Wayne and I began to visit Jeannie and Steve in New Orleans when we could, and they would visit with us where we lived in the Heights area of Houston.
So, when Steve took a job in the Houston area, they moved to the Heights too, just a few blocks away from our house.
I was there when their first child, Robbie, was born, and Wayne and I used to help take care of Robbie when he was an infant, babysitting him from time to time so they could get a night out together.
Out of that terribly difficult tragedy of love lost, a new, much deeper relationship also came into being because we had loved each other through the loss.
Well, Wayne and I ended up moving to Austin, and Jeannie and Steve moved back to New Orleans, and life and then the pandemic happened, so we haven’t been able to stay in touch in the way that we used too.
And yet, Jeannie and I talked recently to catch up and make promises to each other to do better about staying in touch, and the most amazing thing happened. As we spoke on the phone, it was as if we picked things up right where we had left off.
The laughter and love and vulnerability with each other was right there, just like it had been when we could be together often. Love crosses the hard places and the hard times and the long distances of time and space, if we just give it the opportunity.
I’m betting many of you have had similar experiences.
You’re probably familiar with Brene Brown, a research professor and the Huffington Foundation Endowed Chair at the University of Houston School of Graduate Social work.
In her best-selling books, as well as her peer reviewed academic publishing, she often demonstrates that one of the ways that we become whole is through being vulnerable enough to express love even when it’s hard, to love even when we are finding others difficult to love sometimes.
She quotes Social psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm, who said, “Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.”
Tomorrow is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. King once said, “Love is the greatest force in the universe. It is the heartbeat of the moral cosmos. One who loves is a participant in the being of God.”
For me, theologically, we might express these ideas like this. There is a river of love that flows through the universe. This divine river, this eternally flowing process, pulls us toward more life-giving, loving, creative ways of being.
Sometimes we drift smoothly and easily in its currents. Sometimes, it feels as if raging rapids might pull us under. And yet always, we are also its tributaries.
We choose whether to add more love, strengthening its flow. We choose whether to create rapids that, rather than sweeping any of us under, instead carry us all toward a future of Beloved Community.
Even when it seems difficult, maybe especially when it is difficult, may we immerse ourselves into that river so that love may flow ever more powerfully.
Benediction
As the Rev. Dr. Rebecca Ann Parker says, there is an all-encompassing Love which has never broken faith with us and never will.
Through all of your days and all of your nights, may you feel held in the arms of an all-encompassing, all-embracing, and everlasting Love.
And in all of your comings and all of your goings, may you tap into this Love and use it to bless all others as you yourselves are now blessed.
Amen and Blessed Be
SERMON INDEX
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