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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 1, 2020
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Another in our sermon series on the elements of baking. We look at bread and yeast. Rabbi Jesus told a parable about how the kingdom of heaven, or the Beloved Community is like yeast. What could that mean for us?

Chalice Lighting

At this hour, in small towns and big cities, in single rooms and ornate sanctuaries, many of our sibling Unitarian Universalist congregations are also lighting a flaming chalice. As we light our chalice today; let us remember that we are part of a great community of faith. May this dancing flame inspire us to fill our lives with the Unitarian Universalist ideals of love, justice, and truth.

Call to Worship

From THE HOUSE OF BELONGING
by David White

“This is not the age of information, forget the news and the radio and the blurred screen. This is the time of loaves and fishes: the people are hungry. We say one good word, and it can become bread for a thousand.”

Affirming Our Mission

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

Moment for Beloved Community

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

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

Meditation Reading

“[Jesus] said, ‘With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it? It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when sown on the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth, yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants and puts out large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.’ “

Again he asked, “What shall I compare the Kingdom of God to? It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough.”

Sermon

In the Jewish faith story, the Hebrew people, descendants of Abraham and Sarah, had been enslaved in Egypt for 400 years. Moses, their liberator, said to the Pharaoh, “Let my people go.” The Pharaoh was reluctant, since he’d needed the labor of the people to build his economy. Then came the plagues. The water turned to blood, and no one could drink it. Frogs infested the land, then flies. Then all the cattle got sick, then the people got boils. Hail came, then locusts. Then the skies turned dark so you couldn’t even see your hand in front of your face. The last plague was that the first born children of all the Egyptians died overnight. After that final plague the Pharaoh said he would let Moses’ people go. The Hebrew people were told to make unlevened bread, which we now know as Matzoh bread, a bread with no yeast, made only of flour, olive oil, water and salt. This was fast and simple bread to make, and a person could live on it for a short time.

You can mix grain and water together and live on the paste for a little while, but you will soon die. If, however, you give the flour and water time, if you mix it together and set it on a counter in your kitchen, after a few days it will start to bubble. I don’t know which prehistoric person saw the grain and water porridge bubbling in a bowl in the corner and thought “I’m going to bake that in the fire,” but they are the first baker of bread. Anthropologists are divided about whether the first person to see the bubbling said “I’m going to bake that,” or whether they said “I’m going to drink that.” You have the “bread before beer” scientists, and you have the “beer before bread” scientists.

If you let that flour and water paste we started with take its time, that is, if you don’t have to run away from the pursuing armies of Egypt, then you can have levened bread, and leavened, or yeasted bread can sustain your life indefinitely. Where does the yeast come from? It’s wild, it’s in the air. Yeast is a fungus that floats in the biosphere. If you give it time, it will find your flour and water and start to break down the starches in the mixture, forming sugar. This is fermentation. When the yeast breaks down the cell walls of the starch, it gives off carbon dioxide, which makes the bubbles and creates the holes you see when you tear open a loaf of yeasted bread.

Bill read a pair of parables for our meditation reading, parables attributed by the author to Rabbi Jesus. He was describing the Kingdom of Heaven, which we could translate as “the Beloved Community.”

The Beloved community is like a mustard seed, which a gardener planted. It grew and became a tree, and the birds perched in its branches. It’s like yeast that a baker took and mixed into about sicty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough.

Something that starts small can have a large effect. Helping build the Beloved Community doesn’t have to be enormous sweeping actions, but small ones, persistent, breaking down the walls of apathy and ignorance in order to create something that will nourish souls and transform lives.

In the series Cooked, on Netflix, botanist Michael Pollan talks about bread. How it was one of humanity’s first foods, how bread (or beer) was the reason humans changed from being nomadic hunters to being farmers of wheat and other grains. To plant and have a harvest, people have to stay in one place for a period of time. Staying in one place means you will probably build dwellings that can last for at least a year. It may mean that you will have to defend your harvest from those who didn’t plant it, but who may want it for themselves. Staying in one place means that when your people die, you will probably make one place where you bury their bodies, and you may develop some rituals, ceremonies to render those burials sacred.

When you have beer and bread, thanks to the wild yeast in the air of your place, you have conviviality, feasting, you survive, and you have nourishment and intoxication. Bread is the staff of life, a metaphor for a thing you need every day. In the Cooked series, you see a boy, maybe 10 years old, in Morocco, picking up the tray on which are the loaves his mother has kneaded and shaped that morning. He takes them to the neighborhood baker, whose is the only house with an over. He bakes all day, loaves the neighborhood families bring to him. The flour comes from all over the world: Ukraine, Germany, France, because Morocco can’t grow enough grain to make the bread eaten by all of its people. Bread is the spoon that they scoop up the dinner. Bread is the plate.

My mother, who was raised in what is now Pakistan, would wash dishes muttering grumpily about the wastefulness of having to buy, store and wash plates, when in India, she’d say, the plate is the bread, and when you are finished with the meal, the plate is gone. In some cultures it is an offence to take a knife to bread. It wants to be handled, torn, to have the shape of a human action instead of a metal tool.

When you have kneaded bread, and it has become smooth and stretchy, and then it rises, it has much the same feel to your hand as a human body, as if this were a baby smooth under your hands. It feels as if it could be part of you, or you part of it.

Here is what I want you to remember. The Beloved Community is like yeast. You don’t have to change everything all at once. This is true within us and in our communities. I told you two weeks ago that when I was in seminary, the women started calling God “she.” It was like a tiny seed that grew and changed everything, giving the birds of our lived experience a place to rest. The idea was like yeast, that started bubbling and soon we were all rising. Have you ever heard or seen something that seemed small at first, but changed the way you saw things? Another thing that changed me was when I followed a suggestion that, watching TV or movies, I switched the genders of the people involved. Another seed is reversing the ethnicity of people you see. On Face Book there was a meme with a row of Asian women laughing, on their phones, having pedicures done by white women.

Tiny things can start big things in the culture. Greta Thunberg began her climate change activism sitting in front of the Swedish parliament building in August of 2018. How far have things come from there? Young climate change activists have been the yeast that levens an enormous amount of flour. And we are all rising. People, ideas, songs can be yeast, a small beginning that changes everything. When 10 percent of a group begin to talk about something, people shrug them off as fringe folks. When 20 percent talk about something, people begin to notice, and it feels like everyone is talking about it. When 30 percent of people are on the bus, talking about that idea, it feels like a movement. When you have 40 percent, you can win over the rest of the people easily. You can see that in this 2 minute video from Derek Sivers.

VIDEO

The poet said “This is not the age of information… the people are hungry. We help one another rise. We say one good word, and it can become bread for a thousand.”

Most sermons during the past 20 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 16, 2020
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

So many beings seek sweetness. Fruits invite the bees with it, It can make a meal delightful. What happens, though, when civilizations go after sugar production without thought for ethics or balance?

Chalice Lighting

At this hour, in small towns and big cities, in single rooms and ornate sanctuaries, many of our sibling Unitarian Universalist congregations are also lighting a flaming chalice. As we light our chalice today; let us remember that we are part of a great community of faith. May this dancing flame inspire us to fill our lives with the Unitarian Universalist ideals of love, justice, and truth.

Call to Worship

The words of Hans Christian Andersen, a white Danish author best known for his fairy tales.

Just living isn’t enough,” said the butterfly, “one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.”

Affirming Our Mission

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

Moment for Beloved Community

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

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

Meditation Reading

From the words of Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, a white Marine Corps officer who fought in both the Mexican Revolution and World War I. Butler was, at the time of his death the most decorated Marine in U.S. history.

I spent 33 years and 4 months in active military service … And during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

Thus, I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in ….

I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.

Our boys were sent off to die with beautiful ideals painted in front of them. No one told them that dollars and cents were the real reason they were marching off to kill and die.

Sermon

My mama was a health food nut. When I was little she used to celebrate our good things with celery. She’d say “So good! Let’s have some CELERY!!” When I was four someone gave me sugar. I felt betrayed. I remember the first time I gave my two year old his first tiny bite of a chocolate kiss. He stopped. He transformed with rapture. I had a herd of boys in and out of the yard. Occasionally they would come in to the house and I introduced them to Earl Grey Tea. Not too much tea. Lots of milk. And sugar. They loved it. I felt a little guilty about the sugar. I knew it was a drug.

We’re going along in a series about some of the elements of baking. Today we’re talking about sugar. This’ll be fun, I thought. This’ll be sweet.

Sugarcane grows in Southeast Asia, and it’s been used for its sweetness since 4,000 BCE. From about 2,000 years ago in India, they were crystalizing the juice into granules. The cultivation and manufacture of cane sugar spread through the Islamic world, and there continued to be improvements in production methods. It was used as medicine in the Greek and Roman cultures.

Then I came to the headline Sugar cultivation in the New World, See also slavery in the British and French Caribbean.

UH OH

I learned about the slavery triangle. Portuguese traders took seeds and planted them on the islands of the Caribbean, and they grew well. The New World was going to be a cash machine of sugar. It was back breaking work, and the Europeans were dying from heat and malaria. Traders began buying people from the coast of Africa to come work in the cane fields, making the very expensive spice called sugar. The sugar was shipped to England. The goods from England were sold on the way to Africa to buy more people. I say “people” because when you say “buy more slaves” it sounds like these folks were born slaves, or like they are some other species, but it’s buying enslaved people is what they were doing. And shipping them, stuffed in like merchandise, to the New World. Over 11 million people were sold into the cane plantations, mostly in Brazil. Between 1502 and 1866, of the 11.2 million Africans, only 388,000 arrived in North America, while the rest arrived in Latin America and the Caribbean. These enslaved people were brought as early as the 16th and 17th centuries. The work, the heat and the malaria was killing people, so more people had to be bought and brought to the sugar companies.

The colonizing countries were making so much money on their occupied colonies where sugar was growing, that their economies depended heavily on sugar. The enslaved workers throughout the Great Britain colonies outnumbered the White plantation owners and they were always worried about uprisings. They demanded troops from the Crown to protect themselves. If the Crown hadn’t been spending so much money and so many troops protecting their sugar interests around the world that they couldn’t spend what they needed to in order to win against the American Revolutionary armies. So we may have won that war because sugar in their other colonies was distracting the Brits.

Now the work is still back breaking and we have better machinery, so sugar is inexpensive and doesn’t require slave labor any more. It’s not fun work, but people get paid some.

So with sugar’s bloody history, should we allow ourselves to enjoy it? Sugar is naturally attractive to bees, to animals and humans too. Apples, as we know, increase their sugar content to increase their appeal….then farmers helped that process keep going. But when we humans like something we try to get more and more of it, concentrate it more and more. We go after the things that make us happy : pleasure, accomplishment, friendship, love relationships, money, drugs, alcohol…. And it seems to me that we have a tendency to want to process whatever it is until it reaches its full concentration. I wonder what is enough? Sugar is one of those things that can trigger a switch (alcohol is just liquid sugar) in your mind and nothing is enough. Money does that to some people. Nothing is enough. 10 million sounds good, but once you have that, 100 million sounds better.

What we want, we want. We don’t ask ourselves often what is enough. We have the money, most among us, to have most of what we want. As long as it doesn’t cause people to be enslaved. This is where I have to tell you about how much child labor and yes, even child slavery is still involved in the chocolate trade.

The US State Department estimated that 20 years ago there were 15,000 child slaves working in the cocoa, cotton and coffee farms in the Cote D’Ivoire. Hershey, Mars and Nestle promised they would no longer use chocolate that involved child labor. But they have broken that promise. Newman’s Own chocolate keeps its promise not to use child labor, and other companies do too, but their chocolate is harder to get.

There is nothing wrong with chocolate. It’s the people who run the farms, and the people who run those people. And underneath it all, the love of money, the never-enoughness of the people at the top and their money, and the system that says you have to squeeze as much money out of your company as you possible can, and you’ll go as far as you need to go to do that.

This world is so hard on children, so hard on the powerless. We can’t possibly live in complete purity, but we can try to do what we can. Let’s keep making the world better, one step at a time. When you get weary, let someone else “hold the note” for you for a while. Do not despair, but let’s use all our privileges of health, wealth, skin color, sexuality, citizenship and education to partner with the powerless to stand by them and listen to their pain and do what can be done. That will be really sweet.

Most sermons during the past 20 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 9, 2020
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Sometimes it’s when we fail or when we are limited that our creativity is brought to the fore. Agitation can bring transformation.

Chalice Lighting

At this hour, in small towns and big cities, in single rooms and ornate sanctuaries, many of our sibling Unitarian Universalist congregations are also lighting a flaming chalice. As we light our chalice today; let us remember that we are part of a great community of faith. May this dancing flame inspire us to fill our lives with the Unitarian Universalist ideals of love, justice, and truth.

Call to Worship

WHY I WAKE EARLY
Mary Oliver

Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who made the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and the crotchety –
best preacher that ever was

dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the uniiverse
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light –
good morning, good morning, good morning.
Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Meditation Reading

by Frederick Douglass

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation,
are people who want crops without ploughing the ground;
they want rain without thunder and lightning;
they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters.

The struggle may be a moral one,
or it may be a physical one,
or it may be both.
But it must be a struggle.

Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never did and it never will.

Sermon

Today we are talking about butter, and about creativity within constraints. When you use butter you have in your hands a substance with at least a 3,000 year history. According to The Butter Journal, a hunter could have made the first batch by accident. He may have tied a sheepskin bag of milk to his horse and, after a day of jostling, discovered the transformation: Churned milk fat solidifies into butter. Farmers in Syria still take a goat skin bag, fill it with milk and start shaking.

In ancient Rome, butter was medicinal – swallowed for coughs or rubbed into aching joints. In India, Hindus have been offering Lord Krishna tins full of ghee – clarified butter – for at least 3,000 years. And in the Bible, butter is a food for celebration, first mentioned when Abraham and Sarah offer three visiting angels a feast of meat, milk and butter.

A couple of weeks ago we talked about how salt enabled humans to travel, as they could take with them salt-preserved food that didn’t spoil on the journey. Milk spoiled quickly in transport, and travelers could take butter with them more easily and get to where they were going with those concentrated calories still appetizing and available to them.

Butter is made by agitating milk. You put the milk in a container and then shake it up for a time until you get butter. So I’ve been thinking about being shaken up. Our culture doesn’t change without agitation. As you heard Fredrick Douglass say, power never yields without a demand.

We may be the same. We’ve all been faced with challenges. Thrown off our horse by a bad diagnosis, the loss of a job, the death of someone we love, some of our normal comforts removed. Or we are sent on a journey, a quest. Sometimes we know we need this, and take off traveling to new places. We have felt ourselves getting too comfortable, getting sleepy, so we do something to wake ourselves up. More often, agitation happens on its own.

One of the things that agitated my life was reading feminist theology. I was raised in a pretty traditional protestant home, where God was the daddy. When you start thinking of God as the mother, things can change. My whole theology fell apart, because I knew no mother in the world would torture and kill her son because of some construction of sin and forgiveness she herself had set up. Then as I delved into neo-pagan theology, where Gaia, the living Earth, was seen as the divinity, I read things about how you can see god in nature, dolphins, sunsets, mountains….

I knew, as someone who had been camping, that there was more to nature than that. There were the endless forests of the Appalachians, where it got cold, and when the wind whistled through your tent and the bears ate the food you had put in the tree, you could die there and the forest wouldn’t really seem to care. Or else the woods and the moon had a completely different understanding of death than I did and saw it as much less of a big deal. Mother Nature was completely comfortable with death, indifferent, you could say. Praying to her for your child’s illness to be healed felt different from praying to a loving father god. But I had done both, when my mother was dying of cancer, and they had worked similarly badly.

Now I have a theology that feels creamy and nourishing. God is Love, and there is a river of love running through the universe. Every act of love by human or other adds to this river. The river has no hands, though, so the hands of love are ours. We are the ones who make love into action, and the river strengthens us. We can bathe in this river when we need forgiveness or grace, when we feel off track or dried up. The river of love is there for us. The God of my childhood makes no sense to me. Mother nature is too indifferent, but I seek the river of love, and that makes sense to me. Finally, a sweet buttery thealogy that makes sense to me after all that agitation.

The things that shake us can change us. You all have known people who haven’t had any trouble in their lives. They have never had someone they loved die, never been grievously sick or injured, never been completely without resources, never been at the mercy of merciless people. Sometimes it is glorious experiences that shake us, but most often it is the difficult ones. That’s life. It shakes the raw milk of our characters and we become more solid, sweeter, longer lasting, more nourishing to others.

Shaking makes butter, shaking within an enclosed space.

There is a good bit of research on how creativity thrives best when given constraints. Business journals talk about it. How it can be good to be limited in some ways, geographically, in your budget, in your human resources, in time constraints. The limitations agitate, and creativity is born in the situation. Maybe a football team like Green Bay is owned by the town it’s in, not by a rich person, and they have to make do with who they have, and they do well and inspire plenty of passionate loyalty as a side effect.

Some creatives give themselves limitations to spur creativity.

Tell a story in six words. I saw one in the want ads one day “Wedding dress for sale. Never worn.” Another way to impose constraints is to set a timer, try to do a job in 30 minutes. At least get part of it done and then rest.

Most of you know that I write books, stories about my life. Those of you who have tried to write know that facing a blank page, paper or on your computer screen, can be intimidating. If you sit down with the idea that you could write about anything, just anything in the world, it’s a lot harder than if someone gives you some constraints. Writers use prompts. They might be character prompts, like you spin a wheel and get “wears his father’s fedora” and an additional one “blinks rapidly.” Then you put those together and write about that character. The guardrails give you a place to go.

There are lots of examples, and you will now begin to see them everywhere, of how constraints enhance creativity. Lots of us are now watching a show called “Next in Fashion,” where 18 designers compete to win 250,000 dollars. They aren’t just told “make something.” They must make a military inspired look, or a sportswear look, or make something completely out of denim. One of them realizes he doesn’t have enough of the material to make the pants he had in mind because he started with the top and used too much there. What’s he going to do? Make shorts? Use another kind of material? He has to make it work, and you can see his creativity sparking as he looks around in desperation.

Almost all of us have constraints. Children need constraints in order to grow up well. There used to be a stock market commercial that showed a bull out in a field by himself and the song said “To know no boundaries…” It sounded kind of awful. A bull with no boundaries is a dangerous animal. The psychologists say that to leave a child with no boundaries is the same as abandonment. We need boundaries in order to be kind, in order to be patient and generous. We need to know that we won’t be intruded upon, have our agency taken away, or have someone lean on us far more than we are able to bear. We have limitations thrust upon us, but we get to set limitations on friends and family as well. The relationships may flourish, or they may disappear as we say “You can’t talk to me like that.” Or “I’m happy for you to be in my home unless you’re drunk.” Or whatever is important to you.

Most of us don’t need artificial shake-ups. Just know that when the agitation comes, when you experience constraints, know that they may come bearing gifts. When they happen, you may just say to yourself “Making the butter, we’re just making the butter.”

Most sermons during the past 20 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Text of this sermon is not available. Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 2, 2020
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

All Ages Service with our Annual Blessing of the Pets. There are several theories about how best to train horses and dogs. Might these theories work concerning humans as well?

Chalice Lighting

We light the fire of Truth and ask to be clear, wise, and humble enough to admit when we don’t know. We kindle the warmth of community and ask for open heartedness and patience. We are grateful to the Spirit of Life and ask to learn the secret to loving and being loved.

Call to Worship

A LITTLE PRINCESS
Frances Hodgson Burnett

How it is that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words, and everything in the world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything, and it can always speak, without even making a sound, to another soul.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Meditation Reading

THE POWER OF NOW: A GUIDE TO SPIRITUAL ENLIGHTENMENT
Eckhart Tolle

Watch any plant or animal and let it teach you acceptance of what is, surrender to the Now.

Let it teach you Being.

Let it teach you integrity – which means to be one, to be yourself, to be real.

Let it teach you how to live and how to die, and how not to make living and dying into a problem.

Most sermons during the past 20 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
Jamuary 26, 2020
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

The second in the sermon series inspired by the elements of baking, we will talk about everything from the history of salt in the shaping of civilization to the Christian scriptures’ admonition to be the salt of the earth.

Chalice Lighting

We light the fire of Truth and ask to be clear, wise, and humble enough to admit when we don’t know. We kindle the warmth of community and ask for open heartedness and patience. We are grateful to the Spirit of Life and ask to learn the secret to loving and being loved.

Call to Worship

Israelmore Ayivor

Don’t be a pepper on the eyes of people; Rather be the salt on their tongue and make a difference that influences their sense of belonging to the earth.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Meditation Reading

THE SWEETNESS OF SALT
Cecilia Galante

She reached for a tiny white dish on top of the stove. “Oops, and salt. I almost forgot salt.”

“Salt?” I wrinkled my nose, and then widened my eyes. “Is that your secret ingredient?”

Sophie laughed. “Salt isn’t a secret ingredient, doofus. Besides, you just add a pinch. Salt brings out all the flavors.” She paused. “It’s weird, isn’t it? How something so opposite of sweet can make things taste even better?” “How does it do that?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Sophie answered. “It just kind of brings everything together in its own strange little way.

Sermon

A few years ago I read a book called “Glass Paper Beans.” The writer, Leah Hager Cohen, was sitting in a coffee shop drinking a glass of coffee, reading the newspaper. She found herself wondering where the coffee beans came from, and what the process was by which they came to this place. The glass, too. How is that made? And the paper…. It’s made from wood pulp, we all know, but how is the wood harvested? How is it made into paper? The book was interesting. Here, years later, I was baking baguettes, whose only ingredients are water, flour and salt, and I thought I didn’t know much about any of the elements of baking. Heat and Transformation was the first one, two weeks ago, and this past week I’ve been researching salt.

Since I was raised in the Christian church, one of the things that came to mind was Rabbi Jesus saying “you are the salt of the earth, but if the salt has lost its flavor, it is good for nothing but to be cast out and trampled underfoot.” This saying has never made sense to me because there is salt in the earth, but where there is salt in the soil nothing will grow there. Enemies used to salt the fields of the people they conquered to ruin their ability to live in that place any more. Salt of the earth doesn’t sound like a good thing. Also, salt doesn’t lose its saltiness. It’s salt. So it tastes salty. So I started reading about salt.

Where does it come from? Dry lake beds, salt flats, the ocean, and mines. In some mines, people go underground to chop it out of the eart, and in others, a well is dug, fresh water is forced down into a salt deposit, and when it comes back up it’s salty. Then they evaporate the water. Most kosher salt is sea salt. Much of our table salt comes from the wells that force water into the ancient oceans’ salt deposits.

In ancient China, the history of salt can be traced back over 6,000 years. Salt was such a valuable commodity that many battles were fought for control of the area and access to the dry lakes’ salt flats.

The first known Chinese treatise on pharmacology, the Peng-Tzao-Kan-Mu, written more than 4,700 years ago, lists over 40 different types of salt and their properties. It also describes methods of extracting it and preparing it for human consumption.

It was widely traded in pottery jars which, according to ‘The Archaeology of China’, served as a form of currency and ‘standard units of measure in the trade and distribution of salt’.

Maybe you have a pink salt lamp, or pink salt for cooking. Himalayan rock salt was first laid down more than 500 million years ago, the history of Himalayan rock salt starts with Alexander the Great in 326 BC. Alexander was recorded resting his army in the Khewra region of what is now northern Pakistan. His soldiers noticed their horses started to lick the salty rocks in the area, a small surface part of what is now known to be one of the world’s most extensive underground rock salt deposits.

Today, the Khewra salt mine in Pakistan is the second largest in the world and famous for producing culinary pink rock salt and Himalayan salt lamps. The Egyptian salt trade, especially with the Phoenicians and early Greek Empire, contributed significantly to the wealth and power of the Old and Middle kingdoms of ancient Egypt. Furthermore, the Egyptians were also one of the first cultures known to preserve their food with salt. Both meat, and particularly fish, were preserved by salting.

Salzburg, a city in Austria, translates to ‘salt city.’ It was also an important center of salt trade in ancient Europe. Today, the Hallstatt salt mine near Salzburg is still open and considered the world’s oldest operational salt mine.

In the Iron Age, the British evaporated salt by boiling seawater in small clay pots over open fires. Roman salt-making entailed boiling the seawater in large lead-lined pans. Salt was used as currency in ancient Rome, and the roots of the words “soldier” and “salary” can be traced to Latin words related to giving or receiving salt. During the Middle Ages, salt was transported along roads built especially for that purpose. One of the most famous of these roads is the Old Salt Route in Northern Germany, which ran from the salt mines to shipping ports.

Salt taxes and monopolies have led to wars and protests everywhere from China to parts of Africa. Anger over the salt tax was one of the causes of the French Revolution. In colonial India, only the British government could produce and profit from the salt production conducted by Indians living on the coast. Gandhi chose to protest this monopoly in March 1930 and marched for 23 days with his followers. When he arrived on the coast, Gandhi violated the law by boiling a chunk of salty mud. This march became known as the Salt March to Dandi, or the Salt Satyagraha. People across India began making their own salt in protest, and the march became an important milestone in the struggle for Indian independence.

Salt production also played a significant role in early America. The Massachusetts Bay Colony held the first patent to produce salt in the colonies and continued to produce it for the next 200 years. The Erie Canal was opened primarily to make salt transportation easier, Salt continues to be important to the economies of many states, including Ohio, Louisiana and Texas. Grand Saline is the saltiest town in Texas, and it has the Salt Palace to prove it. Calling the visitors’ center a palace may be stretching it, but the Northeast Texas town is literally sitting on a mountain of salt, 20,000 feet deep, left there when Texas was a sea bed. Apparently you can’t lick the court house, but you can lick city hall.

OK, so what does being the salt of the earth mean? Since one of salt’s earliest uses was to preserve food, which enabled people to travel, not as they had traveled before, to find more food, but for other reasons, to go somewhere, to visit someone, to go on a sales trip to sell the salted food, or pottery or jewelry or grain or animals or people to sell. Salt enabled travel and trade.

Old time preachers seized on this and said what Jesus meant was that people who followed him were supposed to be a force to prevent moral decay and moral corruption.

I would love for us to be a force to prevent moral decay and corruption. I don’t think I share their views of what moral decay looks like. I think it looks like people in cages, treated cruelly, for-profit prisons, pay-for-play politics, super-rich people facing a completely different justice system than the poor. That’s what looks like moral decay to me. And corruption? Most of the governments of the world run on it. So maybe that’s one meaning. The old rabbis said that every passage in the Jewish Scripture has at least 300,000 meanings, and I think the same is true of the Christian Scriptures.

I think about salt, and I think we come from the sea, there is salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. If your body salt gets out of balance, you’re in trouble. In the hospital, you get a saline solution to restore your balance. Medicines are suspended in saline. You can help your cedar fever by squirting saline solution into your nostrils.

Another thing salt does is magnify the flavors of food. Your tongue has salt receptors along its sides, near your salivary glands, and close to the bitterness receptors. Sometimes you can put salt on something bitter, like coffee or grapefruit, and it occupies those taste buds so that it cuts the bitterness. A pinch of salt in cookies makes the sweetness deeper and more layered. You have to get just the right amount, though. They say, cooking pasta, that the water should be salted enough so that it tastes like the ocean. If you eat something that is less salted than you like it, it tastes bland and flat. If something is over-salted, it can be ruined. So, if you’re the salt of the earth, you have to spread that saltiness out. Too much salt of the earth on salt of the earth, it burns you. Tastes awful. How might salt “lose its savor?” By trying to stick to its own kind. Salt can’t salt salt.

Salt is essential for baking, for industry, for manufacturing, for preserving and cleansing and health. I still don’t really know what Rabbi Jesus meant, but here’s what I think today:

If we are salt of the earth we apparently need to spread out, to be about other people. If I’m sitting with you, and I’m in a good spiritual place, I’m going to be thinking “How can I enhance your flavors? How can I help you be a delight to this conversation, to yourself, to this group, to the planet?

Most sermons during the past 20 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

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Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
January 12, 2020
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

The first in a sermon series inspired by the elements of baking. Sometimes transformation takes heat, it takes trouble, agitation or discomfort. We will have just finished two days of talking about our religious education program with an interim facilitator. Telling stories from the past can turn up the heat, but as in baking, the results can be something nourishing.

Chalice Lighting

We light the fire of Truth and ask to be clear, wise, and humble enough to admit when we don’t know. We kindle the warmth of community and ask for open heartedness and patience. We are grateful to the Spirit of Life and ask to learn the secret to loving and being loved.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Meditation Reading

Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the parts of the world that is within our reach… One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, sends up flares, builds signal fires,…

Sermon

HEAT AND TRANSFORMATION

One of my spiritual practices is baking bread on Fridays or Saturdays. I love the smell of the yeast starting to come alive, the feel of the dough as I knead it and braid it, and the way it makes the house smell when it is baking. Yeast and bread are an upcoming sermon. Today it’s heat. And transformation. We all “feel the heat” sometimes, and it can change us, and we’ve all seen that transformation can be for the better, for the worse, or it’s hard to tell.

In cooking and baking, you are conjuring transformation. A set of ingredients comes together and then, with the application of heat, they become something completely different. The ancient Celts talked about the cauldron of the goddess Ceridwen. When you were in trouble, when you were sick, when you died, you were in Ceridwen’s cauldron, being boiled up into something else. A lot of the time things are going well. You have your job. You have some money. Your body’s working pretty well. Then life throws in some heat. You’re in the cauldron. You’re in the heat, in the stove. How do you hold up?

When you read about stress, the consensus seems to be that people need some stress, we need to rise to a challenge. We sign ourselves up for marathons, or 5k runs. We take classes, we set ourselves songwriting challenges or start new businesses. We take on a big project like dating someone with the goal of changing them. We know that it’s going to be stressful, but we enjoy the challenge.

My dad used to teach at the Institute for the Achievement of Human Potential, casually known as the Better Baby Institute. He learned that making the surfaces babies crawled on too soft didn’t lead to as much development as letting them get scuffed up a little by crawling on burlap. Even babies need challenges. My mother wouldn’t let us have Lysol in the house, because she said that killing germs led to the deterioration of building immunities, and she thought our immune systems needed challenging. She taught second grade, and was not a scientist with any credential whatsoever, and she was not in love with house cleaning. She’d grown up in India playing with dried cow patties in the village, and thought American obsessions with cleanliness were misguided. That was possibly a self-justifying theory!

In England and Europe the new thought is that playgrounds should be slightly dangerous, that children need to learn to navigate risk and danger. If children never have to navigate risk, learn how far it is from the monkey bars to the ground, if we always run up to catch them, they won’t learn some crucial things. Intermittent challenges are called good stress. You rise to it, or you learn something, or you fail. And learn something. Failure throws you into the cauldron, with a chance for transformation.

Sometimes the challenge goes on and on. You are living with someone whose way of doing things is a continuing misery for you, and they can’t or won’t change. You are working for a boss whose way of doing and being makes your life a misery, and they can’t or won’t change. This leads to what they call chronic stress, which transforms people like being left in the oven at 350 for ten hours would affect your dinner. In chronic stress, we get left in the oven too long. Or we leave ourselves in the oven too long. We even say “I’m burned out.” “I’m crispy.”

When the pressure is on, our centeredness becomes crucial. When someone is throwing clay on a potter’s wheel, they try to slap that mound of clay right in the center of the wheel. It takes practice and skill. If the clay isn’t centered, when you put the pressure on, when the spinning starts and you press your hands into the clay and start trying to shape it into a pot, it begins to wobble wildly. You have to scrape it off the wheel and start over. Our spiritual practices, our learning from our experience, our support system are what can center us.

We’ve been talking about spiritual practices. Kelly has articles about them on the Religious Education table. Chris and Lee talked about their personal practices at the end of December. Then we all did the practice of burning the old year in the burning bowl last Sunday. It can be our spiritual practices that help us, when the heat is turned up, to be transformed in a good way rather than transformed in a destructive way.

What makes heat for transformation? Anger is heat, indicating that your boundaries have been violated. How do you work with that heat to transform your situation? Desire is heat, when you want something very much and point yourself in that direction. The need to live authentically can make enough heat to lead people to come out as gay, even though that adds to trouble in their lives, or leads people to transition in their understanding of or presentation of their gender, inviting lots of concern from people around them. The desire to live authentically can lead people out of one career into another, or from one relationship to another.

When we feel the heat, we are in the cauldron. The chance of transformation is here. What do you do? You first say to yourself: I’m feeling the heat. This is a hot situation. What next?

The best thing to do, if you can, is to take yourself away and out of the stress from time to time. That is the way to keep it from being chronic. Learn to relax. As my counseling mentor used to say, “Don’t just do something, stand there!”

Celebrate your victories. Have a birthday party even if the eviction notice is on the door.

Take things day by day. Be grateful for what’s good. Change what you can. Ask for help, not to fix everything, but for someone to sit with you in the heat, the way the wise person does with those in their sweat lodge.

I would want a smooth life for you, with no trouble and no pain. That wouldn’t be the best for you, though. May we find a way to be in the heat and come out on the other side transformed with more compassion, more heart, and more understanding.

Most sermons during the past 20 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above. Text of this sermon is not available.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
January 5, 2020
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Is it possible to let go of grudges? Is it a good idea? We take things that we want to let go of from 2019 and we give them to the Burning Bowl. Then, from a second bowl, we will draw a word which can inform our intentions for the new year.

Chalice Lighting

We light the fire of Truth and ask to be clear, wise, and humble enough to admit when we don’t know. We kindle the warmth of community and ask for open heartedness and patience. We are grateful to the Spirit of Life and ask to learn the secret to loving and being loved.

Call to Worship

By Maya Angelou

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive, and to do so with some passion, compassion, some humor, and some style.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Meditation Reading

BURNING THE OLD YEAR
Naomi Shihab Nye

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.

Sermon Reading

By Ralph Waldo Emerson

Write it on your heart
that every day is the best day in the year.

He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day
who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.
Finish every day and be done with it.
You have done what you could.

Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in.
Forget them as soon as you can: tomorrow is a new day;
begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit
to be cumbered with your old nonsense.

This new day is too dear,
with its hopes and invitations,
to waste a moment on the yesterdays.

Most sermons during the past 20 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
December 24, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Come join our annual Christmas Eve worship service of Lessons and Carols. We will read, from the Christian texts, the story of Rabbi Jesus’ heralded birth as well as sing Christmas carols and hymns for the holiday.

WINTER TREES
by William Carlos Williams

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the dis-attiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold

Chalice Lighting

On this night of anticipation, we raise our voices in story and song to greet Christmas. May the lessons of compassion, trust, and generosity alight within us and lead us into the new day, renewed.

Opening Words

The Persian poet Rumi wrote,

God’s joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box
From cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flowerbed.
As roses, up from ground.
Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish,
Now a cliff covered with vines,
Now a horse being saddled.
[God’s joy] hides within these,
Till one day it cracks them open.

Reading

“COME INTO CHRISTMAS”
by Ellen Fay

It is the winter season of the year
Dark and chilly
Perhaps it is a winter season in your life.
Dark and chilly there, too
Come in to Christmas here,
Let the light and warmth of Christmas brighten our
lives and the world.
Let us find in the dark corners of our souls the
light of hope,
A vision of the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Let us find rest in the quiet of a holy moment to
find promise and renewal.
Let us find the child in each of us, the new hope,
the new light, born in us.
Then will Christmas come
Then will magic return to the world.

Reading

“THE SHORTEST DAY”
by Susan Cooper

So the shortest day came, and the year died,
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive,
And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us-Listen!!
All the long echoes sing the same delight,
This shortest day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, fest, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!

Reading

“ON ANGELS”
by Czeslaw Milosz

All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe you,
messengers.
There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seams.
Short is your stay here:
now and then at a morning hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.
They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for the humans invented themselves as well.
The voice – no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?),
girdled with the lightning.
I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:
day draws near
another one
do what you can.

Reading

Luke 2: 1-7

1. And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.
2. (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.)
3. And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.
4. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:)
5. To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.
6. And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.
7. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.

Reading

A GENTLE KIND OF MADNESS by Anthony F. Perrino

A gentle kind of madness
Comes with the end of December
A winter solstice spell, perhaps,
When people forget to remember –

The drab realities of fact,
The cherished hurt of ancient wrongs,
The lonely comfort of being deaf
To human sighs and angels’ songs.

Suddenly, they lose their minds
To hearts’ demands and beauty’s grace;
And deeds extravagant with love
Give glory to the commonplace.
Armies halt their marching,
Hatreds pause in strange regard
For the sweet and gentle madness born
when a wintry sky was starred.

Reading

“EACH NIGHT A CHILD IS BORN”
by Sophia Lyon Fahs

For so the children come
and so they have been coming.
Always in the same way they came-
Born of the seed of man and woman.

No angels herald their beginnings.
No prophets predict their future courses.
no wise man see a star to show where to find
The babe that will save humankind.
Yet each night a child is born is a holy night.
Fathers and mothers
Sitting beside their children’s cribs-
Feel glory in the sight of a new beginning.
They ask “Where and how will this new life end?
Or will it ever end?”

Each night a child is born is a holy night
A time for singing-
A time for wondering
A time for worshipping.

Reading

Luke 2: 8-14

8. And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.
9. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.
10. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
11. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.
12. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.
13. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,
14. Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

Reading

“IN THIS NIGHT”
by Dorothee Solle

In this night the stars left their habitual places
And kindled wildfire tidings
that spread faster than sound.
In this night the shepherds left their posts
To shout the new slogans
into each other’s clogged ears.
In this night the foxes left their warm burrows
and the lion spoke with deliberation,
“This is the end revolution”
In this night roses fooled the earth
And began to bloom in snow.

Reading

Luke 2:15-20

15. And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.
16. And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger.
17. And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child.
18. And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds.
19. But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.
20. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.

Reading

“THE CAMELS SPEAK”
by Lynn Ungar

Of course they never consulted us.
They were wise men, kings, star-readers,
and we merely transportation.
They simply loaded us with gifts
and turned us toward the star.
I ask you, what would a king know
of choosing presents for a child?
Had they ever even seen a baby
born to such simple folks,
so naked of pretension,
so open to the wind?
What would such a child care
for perfumes and gold? Far better
to have asked one born in the desert,
tested by wind and sand. We saw
what he would need: the gift
of perseverance, of continuing on the hard way,
making do with what there is,
living on what you have inside.
The gift of holding up under a burden,
of lifting another with grace, of kneeling
To accept the weight of what you must bear.
Our footsteps could have rocked him
with the rhythm of the road,
shown him comfort in a harsh land,
the dignity of continually moving forward.
But the wise men were not
wise enough to ask. They simply
left their trinkets and admired
the rustic view. Before you knew it
we were turned again toward home,
carrying men only half-willing
to be amazed. But never mind.
We saw the baby, felt him reach
for the bright tassels of our gear.
We desert amblers have our ways
of seeing what you chatterers must miss.
That child at heart knows something
about following a star. Our gifts are given.
Have no doubt. His life will bear
the print of who we are.

Reading

A RITUAL OF THE WINTER SOLSTICE FIRE”
Rev. Meg Barnhouse

Let us take into our hands a Christmas candle, a Solstice candle
this is a night of ancient joy and ancient fear
those who have gone before us were fearful of what lurked
outside the ring of fire, of light and warmth.
As we light this fire we ask that the fullness of its flame
protect each of us from what we fear most
and guide us towards our perfect light and joy.

May we each be encircled by the fire and warmth of love
and by the flame of our friendship with one another.
On this night, it was the ancient custom to exchange gifts
of light, symbolic of the new light of the sun.

Therefore make ready for the light!
Light of star, light of candle,
Firelight, lamplight, love light

Let us share the gift of light.

Reading

“THE WORK OF CHRISTMAS”
by Howard Thurman

When the song of angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are
home,
When shepherds are back with
their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
to find the lost,
to heal the broken,
to feed the hungry,
to release the prisoner,
to rebuild the nations,
to bring peace among the brothers,
to make music in the heart.

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.

Closing Words

“KNEELING IN BETHLEHEM”
by Ann Weems

It is not over, this birthing.
There are always newer skies
into which God can throw stars.
When we begin to think
that we can predict the Advent of God,
that we can box the Christ in a stable in Bethlehem,
that’s just the time that God will be born
in a place we can’t imagine and won’t believe.
Those who wait for God
watch with their hearts and not their eyes,
listening, always listening for angel words.

Most sermons during the past 19 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
December 22, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Our Annual Christmas Pageant with costumes provided for Angels, shepherds, and more as we hear and perform the famous story and sing beautiful carols.

Chalice Lighting

Through the longest night we waited for the sun to rise once more. This first morning we kindle the flame of Courage, the fourth of the five values of our congregation. May the light of Courage strengthen us as we tend to our roots in the winter darkness.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Christmas Pagent

The season of the winter solstice has been celebrated in one form or another for thousands of years. A hundred different cultures have told stories about how the birth of their gods took place at this time of year. In the Northern Hemisphere, we tell of how light, hope and life are returning to the world and to our lives. Darkness is good for rest and for root growth, but it’s harder to see where you are going and what is coming when you’re in the dark, so humans like to celebrate light. Today we will present the Christian faith story, as Christianity is one of the sources of our UU faith. It is the story of a special baby, a child of God as all babies are, a child called Jesus.

THE CHRISTMAS STORY

Here is the Christmas story. It happened a very long time ago in a land faraway. A man and a woman named Joseph and Mary had to make a journey to the city of Bethlehem, because there was a new law that said everyone had to return to the city where they were born to pay their taxes. Joseph was worried about Mary taking this trip as she was going to have a baby very soon, but Mary wanted to be with her husband for the birth of their first child. It was a long trip to Bethlehem, three full days of walking. Mary was glad when they saw the rooftops of Bethlehem in the distance. “Joseph,” she said, “let’s stay at the first inn we come to. I think our baby is almost ready to be born.” But when they got to Bethlehem, they found the little town crowded with people. They stopped at the first inn they came to and knocked on the door. But the innkeeper told them, “I’m sorry, there is no more room here.” At the next inn the innkeeper said, “We’re full. Try the place three streets over. It’s bigger.” Joseph tried another place and another place, but everywhere it was the same story: “Sorry, no room for you here.”

Finally, when it was almost night time, they saw a house at the edge of town with a light in the window. Joseph knocked at the door, and told the innkeeper, “Please help us. We need a place for the night. My wife is going to have a baby soon and I don’t think she can travel any farther.” And the innkeeper said, “There’s no room in the inn, but don’t worry, we’ll find someplace for you.” The innkeeper showed Mary and Joseph to a quiet little barn where the animals were. It was clean and warm and smelled like sweet hay.

And on that very night in that barn in Bethlehem, their little baby was born. It was a boy and they named him Jesus. Mary and Joseph wrapped him in the soft swaddling cloth and made a little bed for him in the hay.

That night, like every night, there were shepherds in the fields outside Bethlehem, watching the flocks of sheep. The shepherds were surprised and amazed by a very bright light in the sky and a strange song coming from nowhere and everywhere, all at once. It was angels and they were glorious! After sharing the joyous news, the angels went to see the baby born in a stable in the city of Bethlehem to tell him hello. What a beautiful baby!

After the angels had gone away, the shepherds remembered what they had said, that a wonderful baby had been born and that they could find him by following the brightest star in the sky. So the shepherds all said to each other, “Let’s go look for that baby.” They had no trouble finding the stable, because of the bright star, and sure enough, there inside were Mary and Joseph, watching over their little baby, Jesus. And the shepherds saw that Jesus was just stunning. “Oh! What a beautiful child!” Then the shepherds went away and told everyone what they had seen.

On this same night, three wise ones saw the bright star and said to each other, “Look at the amazing star! It must be shining for something very special!” The wise ones loaded up their camels with treasures and traveling supplies and followed the star all the way to Bethlehem. Jesus was only a few days old when the wise ones found him, but they knew he was special. “What a wonderful child. This child will be our teacher.” And they gave the baby gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

Mary and Joseph wondered for a long time about all of these things that happened when their child was born. “It’s astonishing that all these people would come to see our baby and give us presents for him. They don’t even know him.” When Jesus grew up, he was a courageous teacher, just like the wise ones said. And one of the most important things he tried to teach people was to love each other and to treat all people, even strangers, with kindness and care. And people who have tried to follow his best teachings have become better people, and have spread light through their world, which is what we are here to do.

Tonight we shared the Christmas Story about one special baby. But this baby isn’t the only special one. Every child is a treasure, is a wonder and a miracle. And as they grow up, they are always and forever a treasure, a wonder and a miracle.

Excerpted from “Each Night a Child is Born is a Holy Night”
by Sophia Lyon Fahs

For so the children come and so they have been coming.
Always in the same way they come
Born of the seed of man and woman
Each night a child is born is a holy night.
Fathers and mothers sitting beside their children’s cribs
feel the glory in the sight of a new life beginning …
Each night a child is born is a holy night, a time for singing, a time for
wondering, a time for worshipping.

Sermon

There is no Batman at the manger,” one person said later. “Probably not,” I answered, “but there is a lot we don’t know about what actually happened. Historically, we barely know Jesus lived, much less whether he was born in Bethlehem, or whether he was married to Mary Magdalene, or whether he went to India to study in the ‘lost years’ between being a twelve-year-old talking with the teachers in the temple and beginning his ministry as an adult.” I saw her eyes glaze over with this much information, and circled back to the point. “Right. Odds are against there having been a Batman.”

The baby in the manger is a soul story, if not an historical story. Soul stories are as likely to be true as stories from history, but they are perhaps a different sort of true, and you approach them differently. Before and after doing historical research, biblical study, and the kinds of work on context and language one does when looking at a story from scripture, my inclination is to interact with the story as I would with a dream.

Holding the image of the Divine as a baby in mind and heart, I invite myself to let go of my hold on the Abrahamic God, the ideas about the Divine I can live with or not, the elements of the concept of a God I believe in and those I don’t believe in. A soul story is a dream from the depths of a culture, not an individual. This is bigger than my squeamishness or my history.

When God is a baby, no one has to be afraid of God. No one has to tremble before God’s wrath. No one has to wonder what they have done wrong, how they have disappointed God. A baby God isn’t mad at you — in fact, he needs you to coo over him, hold him close, smell her head, curl her tiny fingers around your pinkie, protect him, and visit her with presents. No wonder Christmas is a well-loved holiday: We get to coo over the baby God, and feel the aching openness of a heart at its very beginning.

Among the ways to understand the Divine is as the spirit of love, the spirit of light, the spirit of life. A baby love, a baby light, a baby life would carry within itself all that it will become, like an oak within the acorn, like a mighty river that starts as a spring seeping out of the earth in a high and quiet place. The light starts as a tiny spark. A new baby love has all the possibilities in the world; it carries all the hopes and dreams. Later on, as it grows and matures, it becomes more real, and if you are skilled and lucky, it grows richer and deeper. As life starts you care for it and nurture it. You are careful with it. You delight in it. A baby is full of possibility.

What if this is a story about the soul entering the world of the body? The light of spirit and wisdom, the Divine seed planted in a human being? Some of the founders of our free religion believed that the seed of God, a tiny sliver of the light, was in each of us.

I think about the Divine seed, the wise baby, within me, containing the whole of divinity in itself, yet needing to grow. Antoine de Saint-Exupery writes in Flight to Arras: “The seed haunted by the sun never fails to find its way between the stones in the ground.” Is my soul the seed, or is it the light? I say it is both. Do we long for the Divine, or are we divine ourselves? Both. Do we search for God or is God within us? Both.

In times of confusion and doubt, I see myself able to visit my soul like the magi, the wise magicians, and kneel before it with gifts of quiet, respect, and love. I can nurture the light, the seed of God within me. I can protect it from the forces of power over, which show up next in the faith story-the forces of fear and control, the Herod power, the light-killing, love-killing power of the outer world and of my inner world as well.

I wish for each of you at this time of the rebirth of the light that the light be reborn in you, that love be cradled in your heart, that you be a seed haunted by the sun, finding your way from the nurturing darkness, past all obstacles, stubbornly and rapturously breaking through to live in the light.

Most sermons during the past 19 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
December 15, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

What can we say about miracles? Are they supernatural interferences with the laws of nature? Are they proofs of divine power? Are they everyday beauties and interactions we can see if we have an eye for miracles?

Chalice Lighting

As we await the return of the light, we kindle the flame of Compassion, the third of the five values of our congregation. May the light of Compassion brighten our own spark of the divine, guiding us to treat ourselves and others with deep love.

Call to Worship

Albert Einstein (attributed)

There are only two ways to live your life. One is a though nothing is a miracle, the other is a though everything is a miracle.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Meditation Reading

MIRACLES
Walt Whitman

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with anyone I love,
Or sleep in the bed at night with anyone I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown,
Or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.

Sermon

PERFECT MIRACLES

The choir this morning is singing about the conversation Mary had with the angel, when he brought her God’s message that she was to be the mother of the divine baby. In the faith story, this is a miracle. In my mind the bigger amazement is that in that time when women were seen almost as property, the angel, and God, waited for her to say yes. The church, as it evolved, made the miracle of Jesus’ birth a centerpiece of the faith. In most religions of that time, a miraculous birth was part of the story of their prophet, or their divinity. The Roman Christian church didn’t cement it in time, though, because the gospel of Matthew begins with the list of the ancestors of Jesus, and the lineage goes back through his father Joseph. You may not want to point this out to Uncle Hollister at Christmas unless you want to start a fight.

The Transcendentalists, our Unitarian forbears in the 19th century, were scornful of the thought that the Divine would have to show their power by miracles. Most people think of miracles as events where God disrupts the laws of nature for the purpose of helping, healing, or showing power. Ralph Waldo Emerson saw it as almost insulting of God, that the creator of this wondrous world with all of its laws and patterns, with falling rain and crashing waves, with buds that bloom and then make seeds, with the Fibonacci series, with our bodies, and most of all our minds, would have to interrupt those laws in order to show the people, whom they created, their power.

If we don’t retain our sense of wonder and awe at all of these things around us, we could get into an overly dry and linear place where we say “there is no such thing as a miracle. Everything is chemistry and physics and everything is understandable.” Or we might stubbornly hold on to a desire to live in a world where monks can levitate and make themselves warm sitting in the snow on the mountain. People flock to evangelical and Pentecostal churches where the Spirit is called down for healing and guidance. The miracles advertised by these churches are like the ones in all religions, faith stories, up to and including people being raised from the dead. My suspicion is that most of that is fake, or it’s the placebo effect (which I take to mean “great! You are healed for some reason we don,t understand. That’s wonderful. Your mind/spirit/body did that.”) Any scientist, any person working in medicine, will tell you there are factors in healing and sickness that can surprise and astonish everyone involved. There are mysteries. Most of us, if you get us in a talkative and trusting mood, will talk about something inexplicable in our lives that could be considered magic, or a miracle. The poets, the mystics of all religions remind us that there are things beyond our ken. Almost any traveler will tell you how their minds were opened, broadened.

I live in the tension between what I can believe and what I experience. I don’t believe in Reiki, but I have experienced it and it has been helpful, and when I do it for others they sometimes find it helpful. When I say I don’t believe in something what I mean is I can’t find a rational scientific way to understand it, and that it works sometimes and not other times. I don’t believe that there are Saints who can help us find things, but, as I confessed to you a couple of years ago, I sometimes pray to St. Anthony to help me find something I’ve lost. I was not raised with saints, but when he seems to agree to work with a UU, who am I to argue?

I saw a medicine man from Surinam offer to show a group of us how he could walk in fire. “Oh yeah, I thought. He’ll be like those folks who walk fast across coals, and the distribution of their weight and the speed at which they move keeps their skin from burning.” He left to meditate for fifteen minutes. Walking back to us, he said “There are many of you, so I will choose a burning log and hold it to my foot as I move around the circle.” I was disappointed, as I pictured him holding it to his foot for a second, then moving on. Then I watched him go choose a log. By which I mean he walked into the fire and stood there as he picked up first one log then another to find just the right one.

I saw a man who teaches mentalism at the New School in NYC bend keys at my father’s wedding reception. He didn’t touch the spoons himself, he asked us all to hold one of our own keys in our hand. Then we were to concentrate on them and try to make them bend with our minds. I wanted mine to bend, but it didn’t. When he asked the assembled crowd to open our hands, my Uncle Rob, a conservative Episcopalian Pathologist from Squirrel Hill and his daughter who was teaching English in China gasped in a chorus of two. Their keys, as they held them up, were nearly bent in half. We were astonished, even as Gabe the mentalist said “Please let me remind you that this is an illusion.”

I also saw a fortune teller in India run up to a friend of mine on the street, and say “your mother’s name was Ruth and your father’s name is Greg. Your mother died when you were 38. If you want to know more, come into my shop for a reading.” My friend, a Franciscan friar in his brown robe with its white cord, lost all the color in his face. “That was right! How did he know!” We were both – what’s a word – nonplussed.

My Aunt Ruth, who was with us on that trip, a medical doctor as well as a doctor of divinity, said “Of course. He was reading the Akashic record in your aura.”

What I think as a neo-Transcendentalist is that just because there is no current scientific understanding of all of those mysteries doesn’t mean they are supernatural. What a bunch of arrogance, to draw the trajectory of human scientific understanding as if we were at the pinnacle. If anyone were to give it more than a moment’s thought, they would know that we are somewhere on the trajectory, but nowhere near its peak. Here is what I think. Surprising things happen. The rules of nature as we currently understand them may be disrupted, and that just means there are things in nature we don’t yet understand.

And speaking of miracles Mary’ s Magnificat says

The Magnificat
My soul magnifies the Lord…
He hath showed might with His arm: He hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the lowly.
He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away.

May this world she dreamt of come to pass. May the heavy-footed be thrown down, their scepters broken, their hearts healed. May the proud, conceited and heavy-footed within each of us also be scattered and our hearts healed. This would be a miracle indeed.

Most sermons during the past 19 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS