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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
October 5, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
One of the religious values our church community vows to uphold is compassion, which we define as “to treat ourselves and others with love.” How does treating ourselves with love open us to acting with compassion toward others?
Chalice Lighting
This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.
Call to Worship
Our Call to Worship this morning is based upon First UU Church of Austin’s religious values.
NOW LET US WORSHIP TOGETHER.
Now let us celebrate our highest values.TRANSCENDENCE
To connect with wonder and awe of the unity of lifeCOMMUNITY
To connect with joy, sorrow, and service with those whose lives we touchCOMPASSION
To treat ourselves and others with loveCOURAGE
To live lives of honesty, vulnerability, and beautyTRANSFORMATION
To pursue the growth that changes our lives and heals our worldNOW WE RAISE UP THAT WHICH WE HOLD AS ULTIMATE AND LARGER THAN OURSELVES.
Now, we worship together.
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Reading
There is no greater remedy for helplessness than helping someone else, no greater salve for sorrow than according gladness to another. What makes life livable despite the cruelties of chance – the accident, the wildfire, the random intracellular mutation – are these little acts of mercy, of tenderness, the small clear voice rising over the cacophony of the quarrelsome, over the complaint choir of the cynics, to insist again and again that the world is beautiful and full of kindness.
– Maria Popova
Sermon
During what turned out to be the last time my late spouse Wayne was in the hospital, I left work at the church here one day and went up to visit with him in his room.
I got there only to encounter him chastising a nurse over the fact that he was in one of those hospital beds with the rails, and an alarm that would go off rather loudly if he tried to get out of the bed by himself to go to the bathroom or something like that.
He was feeling terrible so understandably was not exactly being being very nice, expressing himself in no uncertain terms, some of which I cannot use here in the sacred space of our sanctuary.
His nurse kept a little smile on her face, listening to him until he seemed to have finished, then said, “I understand. I’ve been in one of those beds myself, and I still can’t let you get up on your own because you’re at a high risk for falling, and I would be at high risk for losing my license.”
So then, Wayne tried pulling rank, informing her that he was a doctor, and that he would be speaking with his hospital physicians and telling them that he didn’t think that bed alarm was really necessary.
Still smiling slightly, she informed him that he could go right ahead, that in her experience she knew more about bedside care then the doctors did, and that she was pretty sure they wouldn’t remove the order unless she thought it was OK. She didn’t because she didn’t want him to hurt himself and make himself feel even worse.
So then he said he was going to demand a different nurse, to which she said that he could go right ahead, that all of the nurses would tell him the same thing and that by the way she supervised the other nurses.
Finally, he threatened to intentionally set the bed alarm off all day and all night until it drove them crazy and they let him get up on his own. She again replied, “Go right ahead. There are more of us, and we will outlast you, and if we have to, we’ll get out the bed restraints.”
Wayne couldn’t help himself; he giggled a little at the fact that she wasn’t backing down and that she knew it was never going to get to that point.
She saw that, giggled too, and said, “so don’t make me spank you.”
Well, the next time I was there when that same nurse was on duty, they had become the biggest of buddies.
On the day that he was released from the hospital so I could take him home, she insisted on being the one to take him down to our car. They hugged and wished each other well as she helped him out of a wheelchair and into the car.
The spiritual theme were exploring this month in our religious education, classes and small group ministries is “cultivating compassion”. We’re putting a link in each Friday newsletter to a terrific packet of information on our monthly theme, in case you would like to delve into it even further.
As you may have noted in our call to worship we read together earlier, Compassion is one of our church’s religious values.
We describe compassion as “to treat ourselves and others with love”
I love that, because it turns our value of compassion into an action – something we must do.
Compassion then is really about living love — that sounds familiar – the agape love, the fierce love, the divine love for humanity and all that is we have been talking about so much here at the church.
Now, today, I’ll concentrate mostly on that part about self compassion – treating ourselves with love.
I focus on self compassion not because our compassion for others in our world is not vital – indeed it is needed now more than ever – I focus on it because until we learn to love ourselves fully, we cannot love our world fully.
Self compassion is how we sustain our passion for social justice.
We have to put on our own oxygen mask first.
Acting with compassion toward ourselves is spiritual practice for offering compassion to others, even those whom we find difficult or with whom we disagree.
I began with that story about Wayne’s nurse, because she so beautifully demonstrated an essential way we practice self compassion – treat ourselves with love.
She set a clear boundary.
She said “no” to him getting out of that bed on his own. She said “yes” to to protecting her own license and “yes” to providing the best care to him that she possibly could with some limits around approaching things with a sense of equality, equanimity, and even humor between them.
Having such a clear boundary, let her empathize with how having been sick for so long he couldn’t be at his best or sweetest and to understand how he might feeling angry over such a loss of personal agency.
By setting a boundary that was compassionate for herself, it allowed her to treat him with love rather than resentment over his words.
And in doing so, she opened up this sense of spaciousness within which a beautiful new relationship between them could emerge.
Researcher and author Dr. Brene Bown says, “Compassionate people ask for what they need. They say no when they need to, and when they say yes, they mean it. They’re compassionate because their boundaries keep them out of resentment.”
Practicing self-compassion begins with setting firm, clear boundaries: knowing what is important to us and what really is not; claiming our own needs and desires while knowing the difference between them and releasing all else; being aware of that to which we must say, “no”, and, just as importantly, that to which we can joyfully say “yes”. Once our boundaries are clear, it leaves open a remaining spaciousness within which our compassion for others can be boundless.
Now, in addition to setting boundaries, here are a few other self compassion practices.
The first of them is to speak to ourselves as we would to a close friend. Most of us would not say to a friend or loved one who was experiencing a challenging life situation, “Well that’s because you’re a screw up and it’s all your fault. You should be ashamed.”
Why do we so often say something much like this to ourselves! Can we instead offer ourselves the comfort and support we would to a good friend?
Next – embrace and offer compassion to our whole selves, including the parts of ourselves that we may not be so proud of or like so much, even if that’s a past self. After all we are each an ever evolving process, so we never really leave behind who we used to be entirely.
Here’s an example of how I had to do this during my formation as a Unitarian Universalist minister.
I was raised in a fundamentalist southern Baptist Church as a young child. Later, I rejected that religious belief system into which I’d even been baptized!
I rejected it because it’s tenants seemed, well, untenable to me.
The problem was, for many years I also rejected all spirituality along with it because I had felt hurt by that religion.
So, for hot minute after I became a Unitarian Universalist, when someone would ask me about my faith, it would go something like this.
“So, Unitarian Universalist. Never heard of that. Is that a real religion?”
To which I would reply something like, “Well, yes. But we’re based heavily in reason and science and don’t believe in a lot of hocus-pocus, supernatural stuff. Hell, we don’t even believe in hell.”
And then they would usually say, “Really? Then how do you get people to give money?”
Our religious self can’t be only about what we’re not anymore.
To fully become a UU minister, I had to forgive and direct compassion toward that little boy who had gotten baptized in the Baptist Church because he wanted to belong so much and who then had to process having felt hurt by religion, once he finally found one where he did belong.
I had to reclaim that little guy and his baptism within holiness for myself.
Next – the science shows that engaging in spiritual practices such as prayer or meditation, especially the Metta meditation we did together earlier, grounds us in the present moment and gives us a sense of our vast interconnectedness with one another and all that is, which is so necessary for compassion and forgiveness toward both ourselves and others.
Buddhist activist, scholar and author, JoAnna Macy says, “You need that wisdom, that insight into the mutual belonging of everything that is interwoven as it is in the web of life.
And when you have that, you see, you know that this is not a war between the good guys and the bad guys, but that the line between good and evil runs through the landscape of every human heart.
And we are so interwoven in the web of life that even the smallest act with clear intention has repercussions through that web that we can barely see.”
Finally, maintaining an awareness that there is this really cool synergy between self compassion and practicing compassion more generally can help keep us focused.
Self-compassion generates compassion for others, as we’ve been discussing.
Acting compassionately toward others benefits us in multiple ways and nourishes our own love of self.
As our reading earlier said, “There is no greater remedy for helplessness than helping someone else, no greater salve for sorrow than according gladness to another.”
Research indicates that the benefits of practicing compassion include:
Psychological and Relational benefits such as reduced stressed and anxiety, emotional resilience, increased life satisfaction, greater feelings of self- worth, less depression, deeper and more authentic relationships.
Physical benefits have also been found like lower blood pressure, reductions in chronic disease, improved immune function, quicker recovery from illness, AND increased longevity”
In the realm of psychological benefits, a recent New York Times article detailed how setting a self-compassionate boundary around our busyness, which we can so easily think is a sign of our worth, saying no to some of the demands on our time, can allow for the rest, relaxation, and contemplation that can free up space for vastly increased creativity and innovation.
We’re taught to feel selfish and guilty about saying “no”, and yet, sometimes, we do more creative good through saying “no.”
Other research has found that this one self-compassionate boundary, setting limits on our own time, has myriad mental and physical health benefits AND it opens up this spaciousness within us in which we are far more able to notice the needs and suffering of others and ourselves and are thus far more likely to act with compassion.
In that same vein, there is even research that says that when we act on compassion often enough, it actually rewires our brains, creates this neuroplasticity through which we become more empathetic and even more prone to being compassionate.
Since I am reclaiming with self-compassion that little religious guy who got baptized all those years ago, I’m going to think of that as a “God-given compassion feedback loop.”
- Setting boundaries.
- Speaking to ourselves as we would a close friend.
- Embracing our whole selves with love.
- Engaging in spiritual practices
- Remaining mindful of the interdependent nature of self compassion and compassion for all.
My Beloveds, if you hear nothing else today, hear this:
Self-compassion is a sacred act. We cannot truly treat others with love until we treat ourselves with love.
When we treat ourselves with love, we find we must treat others with love. If God is an ocean of fierce love that flows through our universe, then this sacred act is how we manifest God within us, among us, and beyond us.
Hallelujah.
Extinguishing the Chalice
We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we hold in our hearts until we are together again.
Benediction
For our benediction today, I invite you to find a comfortable position, take a deep breath, and then repeat after me:
May I be well; may all be well.
May I experience loving kindness
May all experience loving kindness.
May I dwell in peace and beauty.
May all dwell in peace and beauty.
Amen. Go in peace.
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