Loving, Laughing, Living

August 19, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
August 19, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

For many of us, the stories and images we have been witnessing in our news and social media have felt like trauma. In fact, some notable authors have suggested that Americans have begun to show the signs of trauma as a people. We will explore some of the ways to lower our trauma responses and foster resilience, love, and joy.

Reading

After the Blinding Rains
Chris Jimmerson

After the blinding rains came and washed away the foundations;

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

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

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

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

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

And together, we built new structures of meaning.

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

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

Sermon

In 1972, in the mountain town of Buffalo Creek West Virginia, a rudimentary damn that had been holding back waste water and sludge deposited behind it by a coal mining company collapsed during a rainstorm. A huge wall of thick black waste flooded town after town below, destroying homes, churches, roads, businesses.

One hundred twenty five people died.

The waste avalanche wiped out the entire infrastructure supporting community after community.

Sociologists visiting the area a year later discovered not only individual trauma, but also collective trauma.

Entire communities experiencing collective disorientation and disconnection, shock.

Entire communities struggling to find meaning and purpose because the structures and institutions, relationships and routines that had defined their daily lives for generations had been swept away.

Collective trauma is when the familiar ideas, expectations, norms and values of an entire community or society are damaged, plunging them into a state of extreme uncertainty and confusion.

Studies have found that collective trauma can be trans generational, passed on to the children of communities that have experienced trauma. One study evert found that holocaust survivors had passed a genetic tendency toward stress hormones associated with trauma to their children, though others have questioned this study.

Individually and collectively, trauma is the result of experiences that pose an existential threat to our well being or even our very existence.

We can also experience secondary trauma when we witness such experiences happen to other people.

I’m going to go through a list of some of the signs and symptoms that can indicate trauma in a society and/or in individuals. As I do so, I’d like to invite you to reflect on what we are witnessing in our u.s. society these days, as well as what you mayor may not have felt or experienced.

Anxiety, fear, tension, inability to relax, trouble sleeping.
Increased rates of substance abuse and other addictions.
Impunity, social injustice, inequality, discrimination.
Feelings of helplessness and hopelessness.
Rumors, disinformation, tendency toward conspiracy theories.
A sense that one can never do enough.
Hyper vigilance, chronic exhaustion, paranoia, a sense of persecution.
Loss of communality, polarization, tearing of the social fabric.
Depression, despair, increased physical ailments, shortened life expectancy.

Any of that ring a bell? And the list could go on.

A growing number of sociologists and others are suggesting that u.s. society is exhibiting signs of collective trauma.

And would that really be so surprising? Let’s review again some of what we have been experiencing and witnessing.

Rapidly growing wealth and income inequality that has resulted in greater and greater numbers of American households living in poverty or only one lost paycheck, one unexpected major expense away from it. People having to crowd fund insulin and other basic healthcare necessities. This is an existential threat, folks.
News reports full of violence, terrorism threats, renewed fears of nuclear warfare, mass shootings. School children having to participate in active shooter drills where they hide under their desk while uniformed men with guns burst into their school room. How can we think they wouldn’t be traumatized?
Climate change that is driving a new age of species extinctions and making whole geographic areas of our world uninhabitable.
The Me Too movement revealing harassment and abuse women continue to endure in this country.
Polarizing and sometimes violent political rhetoric and attacks upon the very institutions of our representative democracy.
Those of us who are LGBTQI and our allies witnessing our hard fought rights protections being reversed and moves to make discrimination against us legal.
The continued brutality against and killing of African Americans by police who are rarely held accountable for it. Clueless white people calling the police on African Americans for the crimes of having a barbecue while black, napping in their own dorm lobby, a black child selling lemonade in front of her house.

I find it horrifying to read these stories and view these images and videos. I can only imagine how traumatizing it must be for African Americans and other people of color.

Our government ripping small children apart from their asylum seeking parents, some who may never be reunited. Our gross mistreatment and human rights violations of immigrants more broadly.

Again, I experienced what I can only honestly call secondary trauma over these stories and images. The trauma experienced by these children and their parents must be devastating, as well as that experienced by their collective communities.

These are just some of the societal issues we are experiencing that could very well be leading to collective trauma.

Now, I have to talk about our 45th President here for a moment. Every time I do, I hear back from someone who thinks we should not talk about politics from the pulpit (or our senior minister Meg gets an upset email about it).

The thing is, that set of religious principles that we read together earlier – as Unitarian Universalists we make a covenant (a sacred promise with ourself and with one another) to affirm and promote them.

And we cannot be true to that covenant, that sacred promise, if we remain silent while those religious principles are trampled upon and violated in the political policy sphere.

So, when the Obama administration was holding small children in prison like facilities, I spoke out against that too.

And I do not think we can begin to address the societal ills I just described if we do not acknowledge that the policies and rhetoric of 45 and his administration are creating some of them and making others of them much worse than they had been.

And while I am getting myself in trouble, there is one more potential source of collective trauma that some social observers have proposed we may be experiencing.

I want to read a definition for you.

“Gas lighting is a form of psychological manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or in members of a targeted group, making them question their own memory, perception, and sanity. Using persistent denial, misdirection, contradiction, and lying, it attempts to destabilize the victim and delegitimize the victim’s belief.”

Collective trauma is when the familiar ideas, expectations, norms and values of an entire community or society are damaged, plunging them into a state of extreme uncertainty and confusion.

The Washington Post Fact checker found that as of August 1 of this year, our 45th President had made 4,229 false or misleading claims in 558 days.

That’s an average of almost 8 falsehoods per day, and they found his rate of daily denials, misdirections, contradictions, and lies has been increasing.

If you watch his rallies, I think he is even traumatizing his own supporters in this way

OK, enough about that. Since I am on my iPad, I’m just sending Meg a text warning her not to check her email until she gets back from vacation and study leave.

So, if we accept that we may be experiencing collective trauma, how do we heal? How do we reduce our trauma responses and foster resilience?

Well, the first step may be recognizing the trauma. I think sometimes because what we are experiencing may be at a lower level than people who have experienced the horrors of genocide or individual abuse, we discount our own feeling and experiences.

To become whole again though, requires that we share our feelings collectively, share our stories with each other, and that can feel very vulnerable. It is a paradox of trauma that it understandably causes us to want to put up an emotional shield because our vulnerability has been abused, and yet expressing our emotions can be one way through it.

We can work to change the conditions that are leading to trauma in the first place. We can join with groups that are pressuring our current governmental officials to institute policies that alleviate these social conditions and create a more equitable economic system.

We can work to elect officials more committed to social justice and economic fairness. We can encourage and help others to vote. And my friends, there is an election coming up – so vote!

And my beloveds, I called this sermon, “Loving, Laughing, Living” because one of the things trauma causes us to do is to withdraw from the very things that bring us joy in life – that are what our lives are all about.

During times such as this, connection and belonging with our loved ones, and expressing that love with them becomes even more important. Finding larger communities of compassion and support, such as we have with this congregation can be vital.

Taking care of ourselves, eating well, exercising, getting plenty of rest will help.

Here’s some advice that really helped me – only access news and social media once or twice each day and set time limits on how long.

Tending to our spirits, engaging in practices which ground and calm us, whether that is attending worship, meditation, yoga, hikes in nature, taking time to list all that for which we are grateful, whatever the practice might be, tending our spirits can also help shield us from collective trauma.

And it is OK to take a break from life’s struggles – immerse ourselves in beauty and the things that bring us joy. In fact, it is not only OK, it is necessary to our wellbeing. It is one of the strongest ways we resist collective trauma.

Playfulness and fun. Humor. The arts. Music. Goofing with our pets. Exhilarating in natural beauty.

Collective trauma (and progressive guilt) can cause us to rob of us these experiences of beauty and joy. We can feel that we do not deserve them because, after all we have it better than many other folks do.

The truth is we need them to sustain our spirits and give us resilience in our struggles to create a better world wherein we no longer experience human caused collective trauma.

Allow yourself the joy, my beloveds. I’ve come to think of joy as divine love finding expression in our lives.

I’ll close with the words of the poet Jack Gilbert:

“If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, we lessen the importance of their deprivation.

We must risk delight… We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil. If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down, we should give thanks that the end had magnitude. We must admit there will be music despite everything”.

Amen.

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

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

Truth Telling

August 12, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Kye Flannery
August 12, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

So many people in so many ways have said “the truth shall set you free.” What are the truths that set us free? What sounds like truth but doesn’t liberate us at all? Together we’ll be exploring our experience, how we know ourselves, and how we speak from our deep truth to create better relationships and a better world.

sermon

I must say it’s easy to deliver one’s truth by sermon — pull your argument together, write it out — read it — I get to take 15-20 minutes of your time, uninterrupted — most of the time — 😉 Much harder in real life.

When you don’t think someone will care
When there’s no one to help
When we don’t want to risk a relationship
When you’re low on the totem pole…

as Ashley Judd, one of the actresses who came forward to help start the #metoo movement — in speaking out about harassment she’d faced from Harvey Weinstein, she pointed to this truth: ‘Were we supposed to call some fantasy attorney general of moviedom?’

No. No such person. It can be hard to tell the truth. It can put us in a place that feels dangerous, or is dangerous. But let’s face it. Our Universalism infuses how we view our own lives and the lives of others. We don’t believe that anybody’s condemned, and we believe that everybody and everything is interconnected. The time is ripe for us to get talking, and sharing our truths — with neighbors and law-makers, family members, oil companies and educators.

And I’ll just say there are a lot of grey heads out there that I bet have been telling difficult truths since I was in diapers. So, I’m sharing my truth today, and I look forward to hearing yours. Let’s start by bringing the spirits of other great truth-tellers into the room… who are they, in your life? Who lifts you up with the way they speak truth?

We’ve gathered those brave spirits into the space, a host of angels around us, supporting and inspiring.

One of the strongest voices of truth I know is a woman who spoke it with such courage, and it was so integral to her character, that she gave herself the name Truth — Sojourner Truth.

When I stop to think about that auditorium in Akron, Ohio — the Women’s Convention – May 1851 five male pastors had spoken — one, a universalist — and all had given theological reasons that it was inappropriate for women to have the vote or speak in public to advocate for themselves.

Nobody asked Sojourner to speak — she just stood up and walked to the podium. Organizer Frances Gage ALLOWED her speak, but all around there were rumbles from white women about a black woman speaking at the assembly. 1

If you were striving for respectability, it was considered unseemly for a woman to speak in assemblies or churches… 2 Olympia Brown wasn’t ordained by the universalists until 1863. But Sojourner stands, and she speaks:

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne five children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?”

Just grok for a moment the courage it took to say that to a room full of white folks, confronting us with our stereotypes about strength, and womanhood, and blackness, all at once —

Book Crucial Conversations – I recommend it – I have been enjoying it and have incorporated some of its wisdom into what I bring you this morning. Here’s how I see the process of truth-telling:

We must first know our truths.
Then we must share our truth while staying in connection.
Then, we must find the path forward.
Courage – Listening – Translation – Creation

We must first know our truths.
Sometimes threats to our health, financial stability, physical safety, immigration status mean it isn’t safe to tell a truth that needs to be told. The first rule of caring for each other is believing that we each know what is safest for us, and to honor that.
But within the bounds of safety…

Is there something you really need to tell the truth about…? It’s possible to shy away from truth, even inside our own hearts, because it’s messy, because we suspect people don’t want to hear it, because we’re ashamed of it, because it’s ugly or painful.

And it takes time to transform the things that might be holding us back.
Truth-telling takes connection. Do we really want connection?
Truth-telling takes fairness. Are we willing to be fair?
Truth-telling means working through our fear. Are we afraid?

Buddhist teacher and climate activist Joanna Macy writes about fear of climate disaster, what we’re doing to the planet keeps us from even looking at it. 3 Fear keeps us ignorant of our own motivations and feelings, not to mention the feelings and motivations of others. So, this path to knowing our own truth involves facing fear, being with fear. After all, we can’t ask others to be brave and lay something on the line unless we set the example.

I know I get this *ding* when things fall into place — when I’m seeing from a big enough perspective that both the other person’s truth and my truth can fit there together, when I believe I can see a person’s goodness and good intent while also knowing I have a piece of the truth that they need. 4 And it is my job to walk with them to this truth… starting with what we both want, and showing how I believe we can get there.

I want to share words from a woman who is masterful at this.

Rigoberta Menchu — 1992 Nobel acceptance Speech… “Peace cannot exist without justice, justice cannot exist without fairness, fairness cannot exist without development, development cannot exist without democracy, democracy cannot exist without respect for the identity and worth of cultures and peoples… We are not myths of the past, ruins in the jungle, or zoos. We are people and we want to be respected, not to be victims of intolerance and racism… It is said that our indigenous ancestors, Mayas and Aztecs, made human sacrifices to their gods. It occurs to me to ask: How many humans have been sacrificed to the gods of Capital in the last five hundred years?”

It’s clear she’s done some very hard work – figuring out what’s in her heart, and also how it doesn’t fit what the dominant narrative said about her people. 5

I hear her facing fear — here’s what they say about us — they say we’re animals, savages — and I don’t accept it.

I hear her walking people along the path, from the end goal – peace – back to its roots — respect for the cultures and identities of all peoples…

There’s something so strong and undeniable in our words when we face our fear.

I really believe that we can’t connect with others on the issue racism unless we’ve connected to our own racism… I want to tell you a story about that.

There was a man I met at a church where I worked in Boston. He did cleaning in the office. We became friendly over time and I learned that his family was from the Dominican Republic. He’d had some brushes with the law, but was now doing better. He had a lovely little boy who I met once or twice. I was just getting to know him. I liked him, he was soft-spoken — eager to learn new things — One morning he came into the office late and he… I couldn’t figure out what was going on with him. I asked him the regular questions, how are you, how was your weekend, how’s your son — but he didn’t seem to comprehend my questions, he was barely able to answer them. I let him be and went about my day. I started to wonder in that moment if … maybe he wasn’t very smart. Did he not understand my questions?

There was a listening circle that happened later that month, talking and listening facilitated circles on the topic of race. I learned what happened that morning. That morning he had been driving a green car, and there had been a call about a crime, they were looking for “a black man in a green car.” He’d been stopped by the police in his car, put face-down on the pavement in the rain in front of his 1.5-year-old son, who was in the back seat of the car.

Suddenly I felt that grief and horror WITH HIM — anger — such a sense of loss — what would it have been like if I had been a trusted person for him to talk to —

Him telling his truth was me Claiming sorrow that had been mine all along, I just didn’t know it — Cultural grief. And we need to be able to both share this and hear this from our people.

Francis Weller, therapist, grief counselor in California 6

He writes about grief and conducts grief rituals, encouraging us to get in touch with the grief we are all carrying. He writes: “We send into the shadow the parts of ourselves that we deem unacceptable to ourselves or to others, hoping to disown them… The lack of courtesy and compassion surrounding grief is astonishing, reflecting an underlying fear and mistrust of this basic human experience… We must find the courage, once again, to walk the wild edge of grief.”

If we don’t even know how to feel one another’s pain when they’ve had a death in the family, how can we grapple as a culture with the effects of slavery, of failing refugees and asylum seekers, how can we willingly get into the imaginary space of truly GETTING what we’re doing to the planet, minute by minute? There’s that courage again —

We shape our lives to get away from discomfort! But as Pema Chodron puts it: “That’s the definition of Ego, just trying to get away from our experience, which never adds up to inner strength…it just makes us more scared and more uptight. And saddest of all, it isolates us and cuts us off from each other…” 7

We actually move away from each other because we’re afraid we can’t handle the things others bring up in us.

BOTTOM LINE:
When pursuing truth, we must do those things which cultivate our courage.

What gives you courage?

Jumping in the springs gives me courage. Everytime, I dread it, and everytime I do it, I’m glad I did.

This leads us into sharing our truth, while staying in connection.

(Translation)
WHEN I TELL THE STORY I just shared with you — about my friend who was harassed by the police because he was a man of color driving a green car– it becomes easier for people who haven’t understood how racism functions in our society to understand how deep it runs — how much it hurts — both of us — him, and me — and how UNTIL I KNEW ABOUT IT, he was carrying all the grief and heaviness of that experience. He was the only one who knew. One of us was living in a police state, the other wasn’t.

So I’m not often going to tell someone the “truth” about their own racism. But I will tell them the truth of my racism, and that’s opened up more than one conversation. Because that is MY story, my vulnerability, my shame and grief.

Jungian psychologist James Hillman 8 — INDIVIDUATION — “Transparent Person, who is seen and seen through, foolish, who has nothing left to hide, who has become transparent through self-acceptance; her soul is loved, revealed… she is just what she is, freed from paranoid concealment… her transparency serves as a prism for the world….”

I like this idea. When we have courage to be seen and seen through, we become prisms. You know how being around a truthful person is like being around a clear light, when they use their power for good and not evil? I think that’s what he means. Sometimes, a truth is simple — that doesn’t mean it’s easy to say.

“I don’t like the way this conversation is going”
“I’m sorry, I don’t think it’s at all fair to say that Muslim people are dangerous, I don’t see evidence that this is the case.”
“If you want to talk seriously, we need to talk in terms that are serious and respectful.”
“I see the changes happening in our environment and I’m afraid for us… I see our planet and our species in danger.”
“I don’t feel that you’re doing your share of the work, and I’m tired of picking up the slack.”
“I know you’re a spiritual person, and I expect more compassion from you.”

For me, this is the hardest part — engaging with another person’s truth without resorting to SILENCE or VIOLENCE.

Silence
Purposely withholding information from the dialogue, to avoid creating a problem.

Masking – understating or selectively showing what you actually think
Avoiding – not addressing the real issues, shifting the focus to others
WIthdrawing or even exiting

Violence
Convincing, controlling or compelling others to our view

Controlling: Cutting others off, overstating facts, speaking in absolutes, dominating the conversation
Labelling – stereotyping, name-calling
Attacking – belittling or threatening the other person

As truth-finders, we run into our own discomfort, As truth-tellers, we are likely to run into our own AND OTHER PEOPLE’S cognitive dissonance – ” The discomfort experienced when we simultaneously hold two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values.”

For instance,

How could we be walking through everyday life like things are normal if our planet is in crisis?
How could a man I’ve been friendly with cross the line into assault or harassment? How could it be that I have been a predator for 40 years?
I always thought other people were racist. What if I am too!?

AT THAT POINT our work is three-fold: not to get hooked on our own emotion, not to get hooked on other people’s, and to help them try to disentangle if they’re stuck.

Creating safe space
Those who are terrible at it: Ignore the need for safety, express without regard for how it will be received
Those who are good at it: May sense that safety is at risk, but do the wrong thing — water down content, which avoids the real problem
Those who are best at it: Step out of the content of the conversation, make it safe, then re-enter
Stepping out of content and then moving back into the content of the conversation.
When someone (including ourselves) begins to move into silence or violence, we recognize it.
Say, hey, what’s happening for you right now? Address the kind and generous soul in front of you who’s not feeling safe. How can you help to reduce this, without stepping away from truth? 9

I’ve done this with my mom — Ha, this was a pretty funny conversation, if you have a daughter or a mom you can probably hear how this went in your head 😉
Mom, can we talk about what this is bringing up for you?
“Don’t you chaplain me!!”

I didn’t stop chaplaining though. In a really defensive place, a person is wanting to be able to relax and trust, but can’t. We have to establish — sometimes over time — that our approach is loving and dependable — Marge Piercy: “fight persistently like the vine which brings down the tree”

Being aware of the other person’s emotions and our own emotions!! Being able to hold both of those at once! 10 Tonglen Practice. This is breathing in what’s difficult, and breathing out something lighter. Breathing in what’s difficult, breathing out something lighter. Breathing in what’s difficult, allowing it to open our hearts and wash over us and the situation, lightness and peace.

In that spirit, we find the path forward.
The examples of this peaceful courage are in this congregation and all around us

Isabel Pascual is a 42-year-old strawberry picker, She was interviewed in Time Magazine , when Time named the #metoo ladies their Person of the Year. Isabel is not her real name. Isabel was harassed in the workplace by a man who threatened to harm her and her children. “That’s why I kept quiet,” Isabel said. “I felt desperate. I cried and cried. But, thank God, my friends in the fields supported me. So I said, ‘Enough.’ I lost the fear. It doesn’t matter if they criticize me. I can support other people who are going through the same thing.”

Isabel spoke out about sexual harassment while working without documents. Her courage gives me chills.

Part of the creativity of finding the path forward is going where we don’t normally go, where others reside, (#metoo is a movement of both movie stars and migrant workers) — people continuing to put themselves on the line for others — courage and creativity go hand-in-hand.

When finding our path through truth together, we pratice courage — listening — translation — creativity — and, I believe, we must cultivate cheerfulness —

In Shambhala Buddhism there are several sources of energy and power for the self — different sources of life force. The one they call Windhorse: “gallantry, cheerfulness, upliftedness, gentleness” (Thea!) “Primordial confidence” — Let’s just breathe with our windhorse right now — deep breaths, bringing up that primordial confidence, gallantry, cheerfulness — 11

Taking up the path of truth doesn’t mean we are perfect In fact, if we are perfect, we probably aren’t practicing very much. 12

Another favorite mystic: Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul “The soul becomes greater and deeper through the living out of the messes and the gaps — this is the negative way of the mystics”

COURAGE – Listening – Translation – Creation

What’s the worst that could happen? What do the voices tell you? That we won’t be liked or respected? That we’ll lose our words? And there is a voice inside me that says if I speak out I’ll die — for some people that may be true.

But for me, in most situations, it isn’t. So if that voice speaks to you, too, I leave you with some words from sister Sojourner: “I’m not going to die, I’m going home like a shooting star! ”

Benediction

(are you holding a truth that needs to be told that will bring healing?)

In the tradition of UU ordination, we lay hands on ministers to offer them strength,e energy, courage. I say, let us join our hands right now and bless one another as we move forward into the world as ministers:

We bless each other as seekers of truth. We start with the courage to listen. In the words of John O’Donohue:

To all that is chaotic in you, let there come silence…
Let there be an opening into the quiet that lies beneath the chaos,
Where you find the peace you did not think possible,
And see what shimmers in the storm.

We bless each other as sharers of our truth — It is in us to offer safety for ourselves and others in our words. In the words of Audre Lorde:

…when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid

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

Let us bless each other as finders of the path forward — in the words of Rumi

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.

May it be so, Amen.

1 There are only a few accounts of this speech, version I’m going with was shared by Ms. Gage, 12 years later, in her autobiography. So take it with a grain of salt.

2 Though there are some itinerant women preachers from this time who were supported by specific communities… three of them left behind autobiographies… Sisters of the Spirit, Indiana Univ Press

3 She created an activist community to check out online: “The Work that Reconnects”

4 “Every time God’s children have thrown away fear in the pursuit of honesty, trying to communicate, understood or not – miracles have happened.” – Duke Ellington

5 International Indigenous People’s Day was this week — August 9 — gratitude for Rigoberta, the water protectors still doing the work of protecting the earth and our water supply here in the U.S.

6 Francis Weller “The Wild Edge of Sorrow”

7 Staying with Discomfort From Fear to Fearlessness

8 “Myth of Analysis”

9 It’s totally possible to do this badly! I remember speaking directly to a man who shouted at me and cut me off once in a board meeting — pulling him aside when we took our break and asking him what was going on, and saying that I didn’t feel that was appropriate, asking if we needed to talk about what feelings I was bringing up for him. Unfortunately, this set him off again — my tone, rather than helping him to feel safe, threatened his sense of calm and safety, which he was keeping by dominating the conversation. I think this made him feel shame and anger to boot.

10 When deepening engagement, we must cultivate Tolerance/Patience/Khsanti – Tonglen practice

11 Windhorse energy “Warrior’s gentleness: this is elegance, not arrogance. This is fearlessness, not heavy-handedness. Genuineness is not trying to convince ourselves something is there when it doesn’t exist. Gentleness is not being polite… Windhorse could be described as a bank of energy, which is the product of genuineness…” –Chogyam Trungpa

12 Joanna Macy’s 5 vows of a leader in the climate movement. Mix of our own growth and courage and engagement:

Committing to the healing of the world and the welfare of all beings. To live in Earth more lightly and less violently
Drawing strength and guidance from the living Earth, from our brothers and sisters of all species.
To help others in their work and to ask for help
To pursue a daily spiritual practice that clarifies my mind, strengthens my heart

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

Making Our Alphabet Soup

August 5, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Guest Speakers, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
Guest Speakers: Michael Thurman, Becca Brennan-Luna, and Tomas Medina
August 5, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

With the LGBTQ Pride Festival and Parade coming soon, members of our “Alphabet Soup” group will share their stories of finding a spiritual home at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin.

Call to Worship

We Answer the Call of Love
Responsive Reading By Julia Corbett-Hemeyer

In the face of hate,
We answer the call of love.
In the face of exclusion,
We answer the call of inclusion.
In the face of homophobia,
We answer the call of LGBTQ rights.
In the face of racism,
We answer of justice for all races.
In the face of xenophobia,
We answer the call of pluralism.
In the face of misogyny,
We answer the call of women’s rights.
In the face of demagoguery,
We answer the call of reason.
In the face of religious intolerance,
We answer the call of diversity.
In the face of narrow nationalism,
We answer the call of global community.
In the face of bigotry,
We answer the call of open-mindedness.
In the face of despair,
We answer the call of hope.

As Unitarian Universalists, we answer the call of love —
now more than ever.

Reading

Let Us Make this Earth a Heaven
By Tess Baumberger

Let us make this earth a heaven, right here, right now.
Who knows what existences death will bring?
Let us create a heaven here on earth
where love and truth and justice reign.

Let us welcome all at our Pearly Gates, our Freedom Table,
amid singing and great rejoicing,
black, white, yellow, red, and all our lovely colors,
straight, gay, transgendered, bisexual, and all the ways
of loving each other’s bodies.
Blind, deaf, mute, healthy, sick, variously-abled,
Young, old, fat, thin, gentle, cranky, joyous, sorrowing.

Let no one feel excluded, let no one feel alone.
May the rich let loose their wealth to rain upon the poor.
May the poor share their riches with those too used to money.
May we come to venerate the Earth, our mother,
and tend her with wisdom and compassion.
May we make our earth an Eden, a paradise.
May no one wish to leave her.

May hate and warfare cease to clash in causes
too old and tired to name; religion, nationalism,
the false false god of gold, deep-rooted ethnic hatreds.
May these all disperse and wane, may we see each others’ true selves.
May we all dwell together in peace and joy and understanding.
Let us make a heaven here on earth, before it is too late.
Let us make this earth a heaven, for each others’ sake.

Homilies

Michael Thurman

How I found this church. It was the 90s, Every week there was another funeral another friend diagnosed with AIDS. My LGBTQ family were being villafied around the globe. we were feeling scared, guilty and helpless. We were living in full crisis mode. Feeling alone and shunned by family, friends and the whole community at times.

We leaned on each other and time was spent on vigils, helping our dying friends as much as we could. Cooking for them, some of us opened our homes so during the day no one had to be left alone, while their partners worked. Our social lives had changed from bars and dinner parties to hospital visits, Benefits and collecting donations. We got the notice for a 24 hour benefit called The mostly music marathon. It was being held in a church?

Now I was raised in a Southern Baptist Church. (Its where I learned the word HYPOCRISY) I grew up hearing the hate spewed out in my church against homosexuality. I was lucky though, coming out was no problem for me. I came out after high school graduation in 1979 and my mother always had my back. She would get upset while we were out together and ask “Why do you have to let everyone know your gay?” Because they need to know gay people exist! My mom and step dad even left the family church after a sermon (as they described) as a ignorant unkind attack on their son.

So the day of the mostly music marathon I got prepared, picked out my clothes made sure my belt matched my shoes and then started to prepare for entering a church again.

Practiced my smile and nod I would muster up when I heard “Love the sinner Hate the sin” “accept Jesus Christ as your savior and denounce your homosexuality before you die and you might make it to heaven” and hoped I did not get whiplash when smacked upside my head with the bible. My montra was brain first mouth second.

We pulled up in front of the church, walked to the front double doors and the first thing we see is a sign that stated “This church has a open door policy and accepts all that step through its doors” WOW! That still makes my hair stand up on end (and with all this hair that is saying something) As we walked in we were welcomed by several church members and smiled at, a little small talk, no entrapment so far! Then we hit the sanctuary and found a place to set. As I sat there a kind of peace fell over me. Here in this church there was every kind of person, all colors, ages, sexuality and families with children, not afraid to be around us gays. During intermission in the fellowship hall got to meet and talk to members of the church, gay and straight all welcoming and thanking us for being there. Heard of the gay mens group that met once a month. Even heard a rumor the new pastor was going to be a gay man.

The next sunday got up and went to our first Unitarian service. After a few more services my partner and I became members. Worked on committees gathered things for the annual fundraiser auctions. Being gay here was just a normal thing. I had found my place of peace. Now as all things do, things change, a breakup, a move out of town, several health challenges and church fell to the side. Then on my birthday a couple of years ago a small gift from a fellow Unitarian. My First Unitarian Universilist name tag. I found my place of peace again back in this church!

It was a little confusing that first Sunday back, All those Rainbow stickers on a lot of name tags had me confused. I thought “this church has become overrun with the gays” Then realizing allies wore them too, my heart felt so supported. Thanks allies for all the love and support. You are definitly part of my peace here. THANK YOU.

Becca Brennan-Luna

Hi, my name is Becca Brennan-Luna. I have been a member of First UU since last September, so almost a year. My wife Amy and I have been married for over two years and together for over 6 years. We had a few setbacks, and some discrimination at first, but we just recently found out that we have become licensed foster parents!

I was raised Mexi-Catholic in El Paso, TX. My family went to church every Sunday. We celebrated Christmas and Easter and gave up something for the 40 days of Lent. We were REALLY super Catholic! It was a big part of my life for a long time. I was baptized, had my First Holy Communion, and my Confirmation in the Catholic Church. I grew up believing that if we prayed and sacrificed and confessed our sins, that we would go to Heaven. I believed that God created us in His image and that He loves us, but that He would punish us if we sinned.

I’m sure we all have an idea about what the Catholic Church thinks about homosexuality, right? Well, Pope Francis is a good guy, but it was different when I was growing up. I heard a lot of anti-gay sentiment and hate and judgement based on fear. Despite this I did believe that God would be there for us when we needed Him. I still believe that, and I still pray. Okay, maybe my image of God is different now. He is a She, for one.

My family was very close and very loving. But we definitely had a certain way of doing things, and a way things were supposed to be. Homosexuality is not something my family talked about all that much. My mom had one gay friend who lived in California and a distant gay cousin who lived in Mexico. We saw the friend sometimes, and my family was pleasant with him, but there was always an air of mystery about the men and their “lifestyle.” It certainly wasn’t something that would be acceptable for me in my family’s eyes.

I guess growing up I had crushes on boys. Yes, I swooned after the New Kids on the Block. But maybe that’s because that’s what all the other girls did. Maybe that’s just what I was “supposed” to do I honestly didn’t know crushing on girls was an option. I remember feeling very ashamed and confused for a long time.

I attended an all-girls private Catholic high school, with nuns and everything! If the mean girls didn’t like you, they would spread a rumor that you were a (whisper) leeeesbian! Oh, the horror if that rumor got spread around about you! Everyone would avoid you like the plauge and make ugly faces at you for being SUCH an abomination. Needless to say, finally coming to terms with my sexual orientation was a lengthy and difficult process. College was great for me because I moved away from home, met like-minded people, and felt accepted for who I was. I understood who Becca really was for the first time . So, I shared a bit of my coming-out story and we’re supposed to be talking about our experience at First Unitarian Universalist. I’ll get to that.

Even though I felt a little betrayed by the Catholic Church, I still continued to go for a while. I longed for that spiritual connection with a community. I loved the music, the singing, the prayers and “Peace be With You.” At first it was kind of ok to be there. Even though I personally was never turned away, it got harder to ignore the fact that I was not welcome.

I heard about First Unitarian Universalist from a few different people, so my wife and I decided to try it out. I LOVED it! People were so welcoming! It seemed like everyone was friendly with one another. The music was so lively and uplifting. I love hearing Reverend Chris and Reverend Meg’s messages acceptance, inclusion and love. I enjoyed the services very much.

What means so much to me was that I ALWAYS feel like I belong here. I joined the People of Color group, Alphabet Soup, and I got involved with Service Saturdays, Sack-Lunch making and Religious Education. Im just so thrilled to be a part of such a wonderful community. I have everything I used to love about my old church, minus all the judgement. I feel like I am welcome and accepted. I feel like I am home.

Tomas Medina

When I was growing up, my father used to tell me, “Gay people should be lined up and shot.” When I was growing up, the worst thing you could be called in school was faggot. In junior high and high school, I was called faggot, a lot. In fact, I had such a miserable time in high school, that I skipped my senior year altogether, opting to test out and start college at age 17.

The church I was brought up in was also not a place of refuge for me. I was taught that I should love the homosexual sinner, but that a homosexual act was a mortal sin, which not only prevented me from taking communion but would also condemn me to hell, if I was unlucky enough to die before having the chance to confess my sin.

As you might imagine, as a young man wondering about my own sexual orientation, I never felt particularly safe at home, or at school or at church. When I came out at 17 to my parents, I was seriously worried that they would react negatively and throw me out. They didn’t throw me out, but they did send me to a psychologist whose advice to me was to not look at the men on my college campus who were wearing shorts. Fortunately, at my college, I was part of support group for LGBTQIA students, and I quickly decided that I didn’t need to see a psychologist to help me get over my gay feelings. What I decided instead was that it was my parents who needed help to get over their homophobia.

Coming out to my parents was not the only time I felt like coming out might be risky. As a gay man, deciding whether to come out is something that I have to weigh on an almost daily basis. With every new situation and every new person that I encounter, I do a quick calculus as to whether it is safe for me to be explicit about being gay. And I don’t think I’m being paranoid about this calculus. Even in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood, a very gay neighborhood, I’ve recently been called faggot by men who I not only had no romantic interest in but was downright frightened of. And I remember that when I was being interviewed for a job by a judge in a NYC court, he asked me how I could live in downtown NY where there were so many homosexuals and wasn’t I afraid that I’d get AIDS. There are only two places, where I don’t feel the need to do the mental calculus as to whether to come out. One is when I’m somewhere that is predominantly gay and caters to the gay community, like a gay club, gym, or beach. The other exception is here at First UU Austin. I think it’s remarkable that there is a community that is majority non LGBTQIA where I don’t have to wonder what the consequence will be if explicitly acknowledge my gay identity.

Here at First UU being lesbian gay bisexual transgendered, intersexual, questioning, asexual or straight is not something that is used to define us. But, at the same time, our struggles with the world outside of this First UU community are acknowledged, and our triumphs are celebrated.

Being part of a community that is majority non LGBTQIA , in which I feel both safe and acknowledged, has had transformative benefits for me. For one thing, it has allowed me to find a spiritual home. I couldn’t explore my spirituality anywhere where being gay somehow made me lesser than anyone else.

Something else I appreciate about First UU is that it supports our Alphabet Soup group. A group exclusively for those who identify as part of both the LGBTQIA and UU community. It’s a wonderful treat to be able to meet with other First UU’s who share similar experiences and to be able to relate to each other without the need to explain ourselves. And, not all members of the LGBTQIA community at large are interested in exploring spirituality, so it’s great t be able to form relationships with other member of this community who share similar spiritual yearnings.

I also love that at First UU I have formed relationships and friendships with many people outside of the LGBTQIA community. Being supported and loved by so many people in this congregation, has given me the confidence to be more myself in the outside world. As I find myself taking leadership positions in the church, I also find myself less willing to keep my opinions and beliefs to myself in my relationships outside of the church, whether I’m with family, friends, or at work.

Perhaps the most transformative aspect of being part of the First UU community is the optimism it has given me. I am confident that if we can build a loving and supportive community in here, it can happen in the outside world too. Being part of this community has given me more confidence to take the risk when I do the calculus as to whether to come out, yet again. And I know that every time I and others in the LGBTQIA community comes out, yet again, the world takes a small step towards becoming the world we know it can be.

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

You are magic

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

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
July 29, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

The service is created in collaboration with the Camp UU Hogwarts. Celebrate the magic we make here at First UU and the magic you make in your world!

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

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

Let’s talk about depression

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

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
July 22, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

So many people suffer from blue days, sad weeks, or stormy months. How do you know if what you have is depression? Is it related to events, or is it hereditary? Does it come to you out of nowhere? Let’s talk about what we know.

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

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 15 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Our UU Heritage; Our Larger Faith

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

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
July 15, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Our new mission statement says that we “build the Beloved Community”. As Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. defined it, that’s a huge dream though. We do not do it alone. We do so as part of a rich Unitarian Universalist heritage and our larger UU movement, as well as in partnership with many other faiths and groups. We’ll examine our mission in relationship to these larger efforts.

Call to Worship
Susan Frederick-Gray

We love to celebrate when we were on the right side of history–when we let our faith and commitment to human dignity and commitment to universalism lead us into the practice of justice. But that is not the whole story, and it is important to be honest about our complicated history, not to bring shame or guilt, but to bring understanding that can inform our faith today.

We are in a time of deep challenge and opportunity in our faith. The reality for many is dire, and increasing threats are real. Policies of the state seek to silence, imprison, deport, and even murder people. Our congregations are faced with important questions of how we answer to empire as well as how to wrestle with how close we have come to beloved community–or how far we still have to go. It is important that we not let the opportunity or the urgency of this moment slip away. Like the theme of this year’s GA says, “All are called” to this work, and I believe we have been readying for it.

My hope is that this GA may be one more collective pace forward to “becoming the religious people we want to be,” the religious people we are called to be.

Mission

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

Reading
– Reverend Shirley Strong

“Beloved Community is an inclusive, interdependent space based on love, justice, compassion, responsibility, shared power and a deep and abiding respect for all people, places and things that radically transforms individuals and restructures institutions.”

About 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 decencv 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 confict-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

Sermon

As I listened to you all read that description of the Beloved Community with David earlier, I thought, wow, that is a lot, isn’t it? It is a huge undertaking.

And if you look at the definition of the Beloved Community by the King Center printed on the back of your order of service, it says that building the Beloved Community, means we have to eliminate “poverty, hunger and homelessness”, eradicate “racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry and prejudice” and abolish “war and military conflict”.

No problem! And if we are going to get all that finished by tomorrow, I am going to have to go ahead and wrap this up early so you all can go get to it.

It is a lot. Dr. King’s vision of the Beloved Community is a big, bold dream, an ultimate outcome that we strive to create.

And, if you’ll notice, we have made it the ultimate outcome toward which we strive here at the church we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice TO build the Beloved Community.

I don’t know about you all, but with the events we see in our news every day, for me that dream can sometimes seem awfully far away. The vision of Beloved Community for which we yearn can seem pretty big and overwhelming.

So, I think it is important that we remember that we do not build the Beloved Community alone. We build the beloved community as a part of something much, much larger than ourselves.

Here in this congregation, we say that we strive to build it together.

And we build it alongside our other local Unitarian Universalist churches, along with a host of local interfaith and secular partners and coalitions.

We build the Beloved Community as part of our larger Unitarian Universalist or UU faith. And our larger UU Faith also has interfaith and secular partners at the regional, national and international levels.

We also build upon the foundation of a rich faith heritage, which has not been perfect at times, and yet was among the first to call for abolition, ordain women and then ordain LGBTQ persons into our ministry, as examples of those foundations upon which we build.

So, please allow me a few moments of indulging my inner polity geek by reviewing with you a little about how our larger Unitarian Universalist Faith is organized.

We are a member congregation of the Unitarian Universalist Association or UUA. The UUA is composed of, largely funded through and broadly governed by our UU congregations, fellowships and other organizations.

We elect the UUA board, and we also elect the UUA President, who oversees operations and other UUA staff. The UUA provides a number of programs that support us, represents us regionally and nationally and helps organize our efforts to build the Beloved Community at the national level.

We also have a number of UU organizations with which we partner that are working for justice in specific ways. I’ll mention just a few:

Did you know we have a Unitarian Universalist United Nations Office that has been and continuous to be a highly effective advocate for human rights worldwide?

Likewise, our Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, or UUSC, challenges injustice and advances human rights both at home in the U.S. and abroad.

We have a Women’s’ Federation, the Side with Love campaign; two UU specific seminaries, UURise for immigration sanctuary and human rights; our disability rights group EqUUal Access, the UU College of Social Justice (or UUCSJ); Diverse Revolutionary UU Multicultural Ministries or DRUUM; Black Lives ofUU or BLUU; Allies for Racial Equity or ARE; and our professional associations for ministers (the UUMA), religious educators (LREDA) and musicians (the UUMN).

We love ourselves some acronyms, don’t we?

All of these and others are working in their own arenas to build beloved community. And all of these and more are our partners and help make up something much, much larger, of which we are a part.

Whether all of this is already familiar to you or you are hearing about some of it for the first time, I think it is good to remind ourselves that we are not alone in our struggle to build the world about which we dream.

As you heard about earlier, one of the ways we connect with our larger UU movement, is that each year, folks from our church attend the annual UUA General Assembly (or GA for short), where UUs from around the country and even the world gather to worship together each day, conduct UU A business and learn from each other.

The video that was showing as you came in may have given you at least a little sense of the connection to UUism and our traditions that attending GA can create.

I would like to share with you just a few things we did at GA related to building the Beloved Community.

First, we made some internal changes.

Based upon their membership size, churches are allowed to appoint a certain number of their members attending GA as delegates. Delegates are allowed to vote on issues taken up during the assembly.

Ministers have been automatically given delegate status; however, Directors of Religious had not been. Because most churches do not allow staff to also be members, this was effectively keeping our religious educators from having a full voice in their own faith association. I am thrilled to report that we voted to change the UUA bylaws so that active directors of religious education are granted delegate status and allowed that full voice.

Similarly, we have had two, non-voting youth observers to the UUA Board of Trustees. We changed the bylaws to make these full, voting trustee positions to give our youth a greater voice.

More externally focused, We also had a lively discussion about choosing a new congregational study action issue, or CSAI because we need yet another acronym. CSAls are issues that our congregations will then jointly study and engage in social action around.

One of two proposed CSAls was more explicitly focused around undoing white supremacy. It was important to many of our people of color that this more explicit CSAI be the one adopted. They asked Allies for Racial Equity to speak on behalf of it, and I ended up being the ARE representative to do so. Through the magic of people with cell phone cameras, there is video stitched together of it.

VIDEO

Occasionally, I have an opinion or two about something.

After continued good discussion, delegates voted overwhelmingly to select the undoing white supremacy CSAI.

One of our church members, Rob Hirchfeld, recorded a great reflection on how participating in such discussions at GA can challenge and deepen ones own faith.

VIDEO

The delegates also voted to take on a number of urgent social justice issues that you can find out about by searching for “actions of immediate witness” on UUA.org.

Finally, there were real efforts to feature the voices of people of color and other marginalized groups at GA, and, to stress the theme of this years G.A., “All are Called” – we are all in this together, which means we are both not alone in our struggles to build the Beloved Community, and we are each accountable to one another and our faith as we do so. Here are just a few of our UUA President, Susan Frederick-Gray’s powerful words on this:

VIDEO

No time for a casual faith. No time to go it alone.

So far, I have talked about how we build the Beloved Community as part of something larger than ourselves in ways that are very tangible – as part of the UUA, in cooperation with other faiths and groups.

I’d like to close by sharing with you an experience that I think demonstrates my belief that we also do this work as a part of something more intangible, spiritual and even larger.

A few of you may have heard me tell this story from many years ago now. I was still in seminary and serving as a chaplain intern at the old Brakenridge hospital. I’ve changed a few inconsequential details to protect the identity of the other people involved.

One Sunday, I was asked to bring a young woman back to the Intensive Care Unit to see her younger brother. He had just died as the result of an accident at his summer job earlier that same day. She had fought with him before he left for work that morning and needed to say her goodbyes and seek forgiveness before the rest of the family would get there.

As we stood by his bed and she spoke the words she needed to say to him, she suddenly turned and placed her head on my shoulder, cupped a hand over each of my shoulders and collapsed her entire weight onto me.

I hadn’t expected this, and it was as if her body had suddenly become a stone weight and her overwhelming grief was pouring into me though the tears she was crying on my shoulder.

In that moment, I thought I might collapse too.

That I didn’t have the strength, and that we were both going to fall down onto the cold tile floor beneath us.

But we didn’t, and somehow, the experience was as if something was holding me up, so I could keep holding her up.

Rebecca Ann Parker, one of our UU theologians, calls this an “upholding and sheltering presence” that is “alive and afoot in the universe”. Others might simply call this God. Still others might say that it’s some sort of a bio-psychological reserve built deeply into our genes that helps us help others survive so that our species can go on.

I think maybe it was that on a level that is much deeper than words, I sensed that I was a part of and being upheld by my much larger faith tradition and movement that in turn is a part of something even greater.

I was being held up by all the love I have felt and been given and by an even greater love that emanates when we as human beings are at our very best when we glimpse that we are interconnected with each other and the web of all existence in ways that are far more complex than our day to day comprehension can fully grasp.

And that greater love sustains us and gives us strength and moves us toward building the Beloved Community.

It is a love of such power that it makes me believe that peaceful revolution is possible – that someday we really just might eliminate poverty, hunger and homelessness, abolish military conflict and eradicate racism and all forms of oppression.

My beloveds, we are not alone. You are not alone.

We are a part of something almost incomprehensibly larger than ourselves that is calling us all toward divine possibilities we have yet to even fully imagine.

Amen.

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

Genderbread Person

July 9, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
July 8, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Unitarian Universalist Children and Youth learn about gender identity, sexual preference, gender presentation, and all the other terms in the multicolored universe in our curriculum called Our Whole Lives. There is an adult version, too. Here are some bits of information that might be new to you!

Call to Worship
from James Howe, Totally Joe (The Misfits, #2)

I hated that the soldier doll had my name. I mean, please. I didn’t play with him much. He was another Christmas present from my clueless grandparents. One time when they were visiting, my grandpa asked me if G.I. Joe had been in any wars lately. I said, “No, but he and Ken got married last week.” Every Christmas since then, my grandparents have sent me a check.

Meditation Reading
Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society

A man once asked me… how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five. “Well,” said the man, “I shouldn’t have expected a woman (meaning me) to have been able to make it so convincing.” I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also.

Genderbread Person

Sermon

When I had my first child I was determined that all the gender expectations were not going to have any effect on us. I dressed him in yellow. I did not refuse to tell people his gender, but I tried to raise them as free from those structures as I could. I did not let him have a gun as a toy. I don’t think he even knew what one was. We watched videos. I was a kind of crunchy granola mom. When he was about two we went on a playdate to a friend’s house. He was looking at the kids toy chest. I just saw his bottom as he dove into the toy chest, flinging toys over his shoulder to get to the one he wanted. It was a silver six shooter. He raised it above his head, his eyes following the gun as if it were the Lost Chalice of Jerusalem. As if it glowed with power. He played with it the whole time we were there, and as we were leaving I had to pry it from his fingers. After that he made guns out of bread, out of cheese, out of sticks. I finally gave up.

I didn’t bother as much with his brother, since his brother wanted to do everything that first born son did. I did not have any girl children for contrast, but I saw my friends grow children. Some of them were rowdy and rough and some liked pink and were not interested in chasing trains through the town or stopping for hours by construction sites to watch the big machines. There was a moment one August before first grade when my first born wanted a Barbie lunch box. I thought okay, here it is, this is my test. I try to act nonchalant and told him he could pick whichever one he wanted. He ended up with GI Joe on his lunch box and he got the doll as well. Action figure, sorry. When it’s a boy toy we don’t call it a doll we call it an action figure. I get it. One time I asked the man at the paint store what the recipe for this paint was. Formula, he said, with a stern look.

When you ask yourself what are masculine quality is in what are feminine qualities, how do you try to answer? We all know the rules, and the rules do change. Women can wear pants now without any approbation unless they are Pentecostals.

First you’ve got gender. If you oversimplify you say that nature is binary you’re either male or female. Nature, in fact, doesn’t see it that way. There are males and females and then there are those whose gender is somewhat indeterminant. The doctors and the parents have always chosen at Birth which gender to fix the child to conform to. What if we left that alone and let people be inter-sex? Some cultures have a place for people who are both and neither. They are sometimes seen as holy people, touched by the Gods.

So Nature has more than two genders even though most people are born into one or the other. Now, what about your brain? What gender do you feel you are? If either?

I remember being at General Assembly one year and listening to Dan Savage, sex columnist from San Francisco, say there are two genders, pick one. He got a lot of push back from the entire universe lists, who wanted to make room for there being a continuum of gender. Maybe you can identify as a little bit masculine-of-center or a little bit feminine-of-center or all the way to one side or the other. Why not? In fact, that seems to be the reality. And what does feminine-of-center mean anyway? We are humans with our human expressions. When I was a little girl I wanted two six-guns. Because I was masculine? I wouldn’t let my mother put me in pants; I had to wear skirts all the time. Because I was feminine? Why do we even have to put those characterizations on our self-expression? Was I expressing my gender with my frilly skirts and my six-guns or was I expressing my spirit?

So there’s what you feel like in your brain, whether you are male or female or something in between. Some people want to answer the question and some people don’t feel they can adequately answer the question in the words that are culture gives us with which to answer. What you feel like in your brain is a gender identity. How you express it is your gender expression or just your expression? Some women like to dress from the men’s department because that kind of clothing expresses what they would like to communicate about themselves. They feel most comfortable dressing from the men’s department. For others it’s because men’s clothing fits them better, lasts longer, is cheaper, and has pockets.

In our culture, because men are more highly valued than women, it is much easier for a woman to dress like a man than it is for a man to dress like a woman. If a girl is like a boy, she’s affectionately known as a tomboy. If a boy dresses like a girl, he has more problems. Needs parental support. There are men who are straight in their sexuality who like to dress as women. Being straight in their sexuality is another way of saying there sexual preference is for women. But they like to express themselves as a woman too. Does that make them a straight-male-gay-woman? See how ridiculous that is? There are men who like to dress as women in there daily lives, and men who dress as women in order to perform drag. Does this mean they wish they were women? Not usually. This a lot to get our heads around? Most definitely.

In most youth groups these days it is part of check-in to introduce yourself and let the others know which pronouns you prefer. Many people prefer the pronouns they-them-theirs, so that they can be free of the his or hers pronouns. Other people are comfortable with him-his-hers-her and sometimes pronouns change. Sometimes teen-age years are a time to try on different identities, and sometimes kids know from the time they are three or four what gender they prefer to be and how they want to express. You can call it gender-nonconforming, or genderqueer. Queer is a word that is no longer seen as pejorative, but kind of jaunty and descriptive. It is even used by academics as in queering history, queering The Sciences etc. There was a wonderful talk given at General Assembly many years ago called queering religious education. I hope you get to see it sometime.

Let’s talk about sexual attraction. Some people are attracted to one gender their whole lives and other times people shift. Some people can be attracted just to the smell of a person or the side of their hands and it doesn’t matter what their gender is. Some people stay non-binary in their gender and some people are attracted to all kinds of folks and some are not attracted to anybody.

I think the upshot of all of this is that maleness and femaleness we used to think we would know it if we saw it, but it’s such a social construct even though it is for Reaching Across the planet, maybe people can slide on the continuum, maybe people can stake out their place and stay there, maybe it doesn’t matter.

Why do we need to know what gender a baby is. Why do we need to know whether to say, “Oh what a handsome baby” or “what a beautiful baby” or say to the girls “I love your little shoes” or say to the boys “those shoes make you look like you could run fast”! It’s such a deeply embedded part of our culture and many people are just born knowing they don’t like trucks cuz they’re a girl and they don’t like paint cuz they’re a boy. Can our hearts be big enough for all of us. Because we need all of us. And we need to be able to focus on what matters. Truth. Compassion. Community. Love.

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

A feeling for the holy

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

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
July 1, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Throughout human history there have been moments, places, and events which have seemed holy. What does that mean? How do we mark those times and places in our own lives?

Call to Worship
Rumi

I looked in temples, churches, and mosques but I found the devine within my heart.

Reading
Walt Whitman

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.

To me the sea is a continual miracle.
The fishes that swim–the rocks–the motion of the waves–the ships with men in them.
What stranger miracles are there?

Sermon

When I was fifteen I used to go to the Philadelphia Art Museum. Walking through an enormous room that contained the ancient pillars of a Hindu temple, I heard, not with my ears, but with some other sense, a low vibrating note that stopped me in my tracks. It went through me. The next room was a Zen tea garden. I fell in love that day with the simplicity, the colors, the paper walls, the bamboo and falling water, the single teapot on a low table. As soon as I got home I cleared all the tchotchkes, and made a minimalist space in which my spirit felt right. I’d walked through those rooms before, but that was the day they came to me as holy places. Was the holy spark in them or in me? Does it matter? Later it was a spring down in the woods beside the Presbyterian church my then-husband served. I would slip away, down the hill past the fellowship building into the woods, and at the bottom of the hall was the spring. It felt holy to me, water just bubbling up out of the ground, and it felt like truth and refreshment to my spirit. When things speak to us and help us on our way, those are holy moments.

I lived in Jerusalem for half a year, and the city is home to holy sites for three of the world’s religions: Islam, Judaism and Christianity. In Bethlehem you’ll see the cave where the baby Jesus was born. In Jerusalem you can visit the site of the last supper, the crucifixion, walk the Via Dolorosa. It’s not that people just remembered for three hundred years and passed down the knowledge, it’s that the Emperor Constantine’s mother walked around the city and had feelings about where things happened. She discovered the hidden fragments of three crosses, the two on which two thieves were executed and the one on which Jesus died. She wasn’t sure which was the true cross until a miracle revealed the truth to her. Now, you can tell by this story that I am dubious about all of this.

I think an individual can feel a spring, a tree, a view, a canyon, river or lake is sacred to them, and I think a people can feel as a people that a place is sacred to their people. I don’t know how that happens, because I don’t belong to a people that is an entity like that. One well meaning lady deciding for an entire religion where the holiness is? No.

Carl Jung borrowed the Polynesian word “mana” to talk about the great impersonal power that imbues certain objects, images or archetypes with the ability to connect people with the holy, either outside them or within them …. Power, effectiveness, prestige, understood to be supernatural. It came to the psychological world by way of anthropologists reporting from Pacific Islander cultures.

In the Jewish scriptures, people would stack stones to mark a place. Lots of peoples do that. A pile of stones marks a place to remember. Some people get a tattoo to mark a time that feels set apart, blessed, full of power. The birth of a child, the memory of a dream, a realization or a vow.

We can mark the every day sacred moments in our families by lighting a family chalice before meals, or at the end of the day as we tell each other what we’re grateful for and what we wish we’d done better. We mark the growth of children on the doorposts, we plant a tree for a birth or a death, we give a gift when we visit a friend, we send money when we are grateful or when we are determined to make a difference. All of these are ways to mark holy moments.

Is everything holy, as Peter Mayer’s song says? I love that idea, but I can’t be a dolphins and sunsets spiritual person. If nature is holy, then there are mosquitos, roaches, cancer, preons, and flesh-eating bacteria. Are those things holy? Is the divine in those things? Hinduism says god is the creator and destroyer. Are some things evil? This is an interesting question, but I don’t have the patience to spend any time on it. We are in times that try our souls. Many among us are grieving, upset, horrified at the separation of children from parents who have either done nothing illegal in asking for asylum, or who have committed a misdemeanor by crossing the border not at an entry point. We have been made to look at the behavior of people in our country going back to the beginning, slaughtering Native men, women and children, selling children away from their parents who were enslaved, forcing Native kids away from their families into schools where they were not allowed to speak their language, be with their parents or learn their culture.

We want to say “this is not us, ” but it has been. Those of you who are sorrowing, your sorrow is holy. The Divine is moving in it. You who are outraged, your rage is holy. The Divine is moving in it. Your brokenness is holy. Those of you who say “Don’t mourn, organize,” your determination is holy. The Divine is moving in it.

How do we learn to see the sacredness of our tears, our shouts, our planning and coordinating? Something becomes holy by the investment of heart and treasure, memory and experience. When we bring our hearts to a spring, to a hiking path, a rock, a view, a river, a church, we are recognizing the power in that place that comes from the love of people for that place, the openness of their hearts as they being them there. We can make our dinner table sacred by lighting our family chalice and taking a moment to be grateful to the earth, the farmworkers, the truckers and grocers whose job it is to bring us this experience of eating together. We could make our homes holy by keeping a bowl of water by the front door so we can dip our fingers into it in gratitude as we come in, or we can light a candle as we close our eyes for a moment in gratitude. I would love for you to tell me about what you do in your family to mark the moments where Divine wind blows through, where connection takes place, where relationships are strengthened, where grace is given. You are surrounded by miracles, as Whitman says, surrounded by as many holy things as you can see the holy in.

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

Everyday Ministry and Finding Your Signature Move

July 1, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons

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Rev. Erin Walter
June 24, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

How do we nourish ourselves, as caregivers, activists, workers, or simply human beings living in troubled times? How can we put our spiritual values to deep use in our daily lives? Rev. Erin Walter will share lessons from her new ministry with the YMCA and reflect on what we can learn from unconventionally sacred spaces.

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

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

Unitarians and Abolition

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

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 17, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Unitarians and Abolition. Some were heroes, others not very heroic at all. It seems that we have always been, and still are, a mixture of passion and fear, militant and hesitant, part of the solution and part of the problem.

Call to Worship
from Jody Picoult’s novel “Vanishing Acts”

I suddenly remember being very little and embraced by my father. I’d try to put my arms around my father’s waist and hug him back. I could never reach around the equator of his body; he was that much larger than life. Then, one day I could do it. I held him instead of him holding me and all I wanted at that moment was to have it back the other way.

Reading
from Johnathan Foers novel “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”

Darling,

You asked me to write you a letter. I do not know why I am writing you this letter or what this letter is supposed to be about. But I am writing it none-the-less because I love you very much and trust you have some good purpose for it. I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.

Your Father

Sermon

I came in to Unitarian Universalism as many of us did, from other denominations and I was thrilled with the stands on justice that this denomination was taking. As I got to know us better, I heard the history of the church I served in the south. They’re doing a bit been the big split during the Civil Rights Movement. No one was against working for civil rights, but some people felt it should happen more gradually. Everyone wanted the YMCA in the town to be integrated but some people wanted to work with the politicians and the leadership of the Y to make it happen and others wanted to take a more militant stand, a more disruptive stand. Those who wanted to be disruptive ended up getting frustrated leaving the church. Unitarians have been like this since our beginning. When I say like this I mean carrying espousing a variety of different perspectives different stances on social issues and on how to bring about Justice. No one is against Justice, well maybe John C Calhoun. Did you know he was a Unitarian?

John Caldwell Calhoun (March 18, 1782-March 31,1850) was a United States representative, senator, secretary of war, secretary of state, and vice president. A political sparring partner to John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, and Henry Clay, Calhoun is best remembered for the rallying cries of “states’ rights” and “nullification,” both of which he invoked to support his steadfast opposition to tariffs on manufactures and his defense of slavery.

He was a son of South Carolina, educated at Yale, where he was exposed to Unitarian ideas and espoused them. He remained calvinist in his dour personality and in his opposition to Pleasures such as dancing. After graduation he briefly study law in Charleston South Carolina before going back up north to the Litchfield law school, and Connecticut. Litchfield was a hotbed of anti-federalists and secessionist politics. Are you surprised that there was this kind of group in Connecticut? Don’t be. It’s everywhere.

He moved back to South Carolina as a gentleman farmer, which means that enslaved men and women did the farm work and the housework.

John Quincy Adams was his nemesis and his partner in building All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington DC, where they both worshipped. Calhoun remained a staunch defender of the enslavement of men and women from Africa until his death in 1850. His rallying cry was states rights and nullification by which he meant that a stage should have the right not to enforce a federal law if they didn’t agree with it. Many southern states have made attempts to behave as if this is true up until today.

Many of the Southern unitarians were against enslavement, but they did not want the country to break apart, so they were working to vote for compromise. Some of them did not want to compromise. The American Unitarian Association in Boston sent a minister down to the church and Savannah to talk to them about abolition, they did not let him into their pulpit and they told the AUA not to send anybody else like that down there, they were fine thank you very much, and they did not want to sully the purity of religion by engaging in politics from the pulpit.

One of The unitarians who wanted to keep the union together and so compromised more than he should have was Millard Fillmore. President Fillmore succeeded to the presidency after the death of Zachary Taylor. He did not want to identify with either the anti-slavery Whigs or the pro-slavery Southern Democrats, and he vowed that he wanted “to look upon this whole country, from the farthest coast of Maine to the utmost limit of Texas, as but one country”

Fillmore delayed signing the Fugitive Slave Act for three days, until September 18, 1850, while he pondered its implications. He knew it would be greeted with protest by abolitionists and other northerners who resented being made the South’s slave catchers. Further, he expected that the new law would destroy his political career. He had sworn an oath, however, to defend and preserve the Union. Accordingly he signed it. Charles Sumner, who would soon campaign for the repeal of the Act in the Senate, said, “Better for [Fillmore] had he never been born; better for his memory and the good name of his children, had he never been President.” Some in the South were also dissatisfied with the combined effects of the acts. The governor of South Carolina made public threats of secession. Fillmore immediately gave the United States Army orders to reinforce Federal positions in South Carolina and other southern states. This prompt action stopped any talk of secession.

Fillmore never doubted he had taken the right action. His definitive statement on the subject was: “God knows that I detest slavery, but it is an existing evil, for which we are not responsible, and we must endure it, and give it such protection as is guaranteed by the Constitution, till we can get rid of it without destroying the last hope of free government in the world.”

During his presidency and afterwards Fillmore was befriended by Dorothea Dix, the crusader for better treatment of the mentally ill. He promoted her social legislation and she supported him in his presidency, his political career, and in his bereavements.

Fillmore’s association with First Unitarian Church of Buffalo lasted for 35 years. He took John Quincy Adams to church with him there in 1843 and President-elect Abraham Lincoln in 1861. A letter written in 1849, turning down an invitation to speak at a Unitarian meeting in Boston, saying, “I sympathize with those who inhance liberal Christianity. But yet I am not a member of the Unitarian church,” remains puzzling. He had contributed much money to the Unitarian church, including a registered payment in 1848.

Numerous abolitionists in the congregation greatly disagreed with Fillmore’s acts as President. He understood this and did not complain. Although George W. Hosmer, minister of the church, 1836-67, disagreed publicly with Fillmore’s positions, particularly on the Fugitive Slave Law, the two men enjoyed a close relationship. Upon Fillmore’s death, Hosmer said, “He dreaded war; by any and every means he would save his country from such calamity as war would bring. When Congress by a large majority passed the Fugitive Slave Bill, then for the sake of peace he thought it best to sign it.”

Now all can see, and some saw it then, it was only postponing the horror But I know Mr. Fillmore was honest, unspotted by corruption, and never thought of the nation’s capitol as a place to make money or satisfy selfish ambition. No goods of the nation clung to him; his hands were clean. Integrity and economy kept him safe. A letter he wrote to me, when he suddenly found himself at the head of the Government, reveals the strong earnestness with which he took up his great duty. In serious words he said how deep he felt his dependence on God, and with all his heart sought his guidance.

Conrad Wright has suggested that most Unitarians fell into one of three groups: those influenced by the prominent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who acted for the immediate cessation of slavery; those who sought a gradual end to the institution of slavery, so as to minimize disruption of the social, economic, and political order; and those who opposed slavery on moral grounds, but resisted making a political commitment to end it. An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, written by Unitarian Lydia Maria Child, firmly established the “Garrison” perspective within Unitarianism. Her work also greatly influenced William Ellery Channing.

Some of those who were long-time abolitionists felt that it was going to take more than legislation and debate to end slavery. A group formed called The Secret six. Two of them were wealthy men, and the other four were men of influence. Two of the not wealthy men were Unitarian ministers, Thomas Higginson and Theodore Parker. They met with a fiery abolitionist named John Brown and funded his raid on Harpers Ferry. He wanted to steal weapons in order to arm enslaved men to make a rebellion. John Brown felt that violence was demanded if slavery were to end. He and his men had killed some pro-slavery householders in Kansas, and the secret six felt that perhaps with this desperate, passionate, murderous person could end the horror.

After Brown was caught, one of the men had himself committed to an insane asylum, insisting that he had not helped Brown. three of the men went to Canada, one stayed in the U.S. and plotted to break John Brown out of prison. Theodore Parker was in Italy with Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning trying to recover from his tuberculosis. He stayed there until he died.

Sources: John McCauley Unitarianism in the Antebellum South, Wikipedia

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

Question Box Sermon

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

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 10, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

People in the congregation write their questions down and Meg will read the questions and answer as many of them as she can.

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

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

Does it hurt to bloom?

June 3, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 3, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

In this intergenerational service we celebrate the traditional Unitarian ceremony of flower communion. We remember its origins as a vivid resistance to Nazi oppression.

Call to Worship
“Blessing the Bread”
by Lynn Ungar

What a gathering-the purple
tongues of iris licking out
at spikes of lupine, the orange
crepe skirts of poppies, lifting
over buttercup and daisy.

Who can be grim
in the face of such abundance?
There is nothing to compare,
no need for beauty to compete.

The voluptuous rhododendron
and the plain grass
are equally filled with themselves,
equally declare the miracles
of color and form.

This is what community looks like–
this vibrant jostle, stem by stem
declaring the marvelous joining.

This is the face of communion,
the incarnation, once more
gracefully resurrected from winter.

Hold these things together
in your sight–purple, crimson,
magenta, blue. You will
be feasting on this long after
the flowers are gone.

Flower Communion

As we begin our Flower Communion I ask that as you each approach the communion vases, do so quietly — reverently — with a sense of how important it is for each of us to address our world and one another with gentleness, justice, and love.

As you bring your flower up, take a few moments to admire all the different flowers. Notice their particular shapes. Their colors. Their beauty. Are there any that particularly speak to you? As you take a moment to look at the flowers, remember that these flowers are gifts that someone else has brought to to this church community today. It represents that person’s unique humanity. If you did not bring a flower this morning, that is alright. Please still come forward and take a moment to admire all the flowers.

Please leave the flowers in the vases for the time being. Everyone will get a different flower than the one they brought to church at the end of service.

Norbert Capek started this ritual to celebrate the beauty of our faith and the people in it. Remembering that the sounds of children are a part of the quiet, let us now share quietly in this Unitarian Universalist ritual of oneness, community, and love.

Please move toward the center aisle and get in line to come to the flower altar in front of the pulpit.

Blessing

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

Sermon

Flower communion is being celebrated in almost every one of the thousand UU churches in our country. It is a ceremony which was made up in a war-torn country where really bad things were going on because the country’s leaders thought that some people were good and other people were troublemakers, dirty, lazy and wrong. A Unitarian minister named Norbert Capek said “Look at the flowers. All of them are beautiful, and they are so different from one another. No one looks at a daisy and says “Why are you not a rose? If you tried harder you could be a rose.” No one looks at a lily and scolds it for not being a poppy. Flowers are beautiful, each in their own way, like we are. Whenever human beings get together, we are like a big bouquet of flowers.

Flowers have to be so brave. Their seeds fall into the ground and are buried by leaves, wind and rain. They stay there in the darkness, which is where they need to be for this first part. Then they split open, and a little shoot comes out. The shoot makes its way toward the sun. Where is the sun, it asks itself, and goes past any obstacle in order to find the light. That is a good picture of our hearts. We love the light of truth, the light of connection with each other. The light of love and purpose. Finally the shoot breaks through the ground, and it sends its stem up with two leaves. Those leaves eat air and sun and rain and they make more leaves and more, and then sometimes there is a bud. The bud is tiny and perfect. I think it might like being a bud.

But then one day its petals start to loosen. OH NO!!! What’s happening? I used to be so neat and compact, and now I’m opening up, ew, spreading out! Nooooooooo! Then — wait a minute, I’m beautiful! This is great!

Then, just when you’re enjoying your beautiful openness, when you are a blossom, and the bees are coming to visit you and you’re all warm in the sun… then your petals open even more and start falling off! OH NO!! But now you are at a great point… you are using your green energy to make seeds, and you’re ready to let them fall into the earth. Bye, little seeds, Blessings on you! See you when you sprout.

This church is in a period where part of it is blooming. I have to tell you that last Wednesday I was grumpy. TOO MUCH CHANGE. I don’t like it. It’s hard having the bathrooms under construction. It’s hard wondering if our concrete will pass the stress test. It’s hard knowing you are struggling to get here, to find parking. I want things to be easy. GRUMPY. It hurts to bloom. Yes it does.

In the words of the poet Dylan Thomas “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green age;”

We feel the force. It is the life force, that makes us grow and change. Let us welcome it, with all its surprises and alarms. Let us have faith in it, that if we welcome it and line ourselves up with it, it will take us to the place we need to be.

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

Bravely ourselves

May 27, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
May 27, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

In her newest book, Brene Brown examines the supposed duality between becoming fully ourselves as individuals and finding true belonging and community. She finds it to be a false duality. She raises the question of how we find sacredness both in being a part of something and in standing alone when necessary.

Call to Worship

Exerpt from Dr Brene Brown’s book, “Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone”.

True belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world and find sacredness in both being a part of something and standing alone in the wilderness.

True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are. It requires you to be who you are.

Reading

Exerpt from Dr Brene Brown’s book, “Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone”.

Theologians, writers, poets, and musicians have always used the wilderness as a metaphor, to represent everything from a vast and dangerous environment where we are forced to difficult trials to a refuge of nature and beauty where we seek space for contemplation. What all wilderness have in common are the notions of solitude, vulnerability, and emotional, spiritual, or physical quest.

Belonging fully to that you’re willing to stand alone is a wilderness — an untamed, unpredictable place of solitude and It is a place as dangerous as it is breathtaking, as sought after as it is feared. The wilderness can often feel unholy because we can’t control it, or what people think about our choice of whether to venture into that vastness or not. But turns our to be the place of true belonging, and it’s the bravest and most sacred place you will ever stand.

The special courage it takes to experience true belonging is not about braving the wilderness, it’s about becoming the wilderness. It’s about breaking down the walls, abandoning our ideological bunkers, and living our wild heart rather than our weary hurt.

Sermon

I’d like to begin today with a confession.

I am still struggling myself with what I am going to talk with you about today. I still mess up. I still get angry or hurt and make mistakes.

The last time I preached, I talked about human rights activist, Valarie Kour, and how she says that to build the Beloved Community, we must practice revolutionary love – love that is an intentional act both brutally difficult at times and ultimately beautiful and life-giving.

She says that are three aspects of revolutionary love. We must love ourselves; we must love others who do not look like us; and we must love our opponents, even those who would harm us.

It’s that last one I am struggling with this morning.

Anyone else struggle with that one? Valarie Kour confesses that she struggles with it too.

She tells the story of the first person killed in a hate crime in response to the attacks of 911, a close family friend named Balbir Singh Sohdi who like her, was a Sikh. Frank Roak, the killer, mistook him for a Muslim, because of Balbir’s turban and beard.

Roak had bragged, “I am going to go out and shoot some towel heads. We should kill their children too.”

Flash forward 15 years, she returned to site of the shooting and was joined by Balbir’s brother, Ranna. They lit a candle, mourning how little had changed.”

Kour asked, “Who have we not tried to love yet?”

And so, 15 years later, they called Frank Roak, who was still in prison.

They asked him why he agreed to take their call.

Roak replied, “I am sorry for what I did to your brother, but I am also sorry for all the people killed on 911”.

Ranna somehow found the compassion to not react to the second part of that and say, “That is the first time I have heard you say that you feel sorry.”

Roak answered, “Yes, I am sorry for what I did to your brother. One day, when I go to be judged by God, I will ask to see your brother, and I will hug him, and I will ask him for forgiveness.”

Ranna replied, “We already forgave you”.

Here is how Kour explains what she learned from that story.

VIDEO

So forgiveness, finding a way to be in conversation even with our opponents, is not releasing them from accountability. It is not giving up on struggling, fighting, resisting, rebelling against an ideology we oppose.

It is living our own values to their fullest.

It is, as Kour puts it, tending the wounds, both theirs and ours – the wounds that are so greatly and dangerously dividing us.

Dr Brene Brown, social worker, researcher, author and our second Ted Talk divinity for this morning, approaches much this same challenge in her book, “Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone”.

I can only scratch the surface of this book full of great information this morning, so I’ll start by simply highly recommending it to you.

Part of what she reveals though is how we as a society have been moving more and more into silos.

We are segregating ourselves not just by race and ethnicity anymore, but also by societal and political ideology.

We move geographically to live around people whose ideology largely matches our own.

We interact on the web and social media with people of like mind.

We attend churches or other communal institutions with folks who think and believe much like us.

Conservatives watch the “Fox Propaganda Network” and progressives watch the Rachel Maddow Ultimate Truth and Journalistic Integrity Hour”.

OK, I am joking. The truth is we all are getting a lot of editorializing.

And yet the data shows that we are lonelier than ever before. We have LESS of a sense of belonging, the more we segregate ourselves with only the likeminded.

Perhaps it is because we never have to be challenged by a different perspective. Perhaps we never have to go out into the wilderness and truly determine who we are, what we believe, what values we hold dearest, because all we have to do is go along with what the people with whom we already agree are saying.

And if we haven’t done the work of knowing who we truly are, we get triggered far too easily. We lose civility. We get on Facebook and spout simple slogans or share dehumanizing posts about our political opponents, which Brown notes diminishes our own humanity and drives us to feel even more isolated.

We avoid having the substantive and much needed conversations that might allow us to find reconnection. Hells Bells, as my grandmother used to say, we avoid even being around those with whom we disagree.

The problem is these are our fellow human beings, our fellow citizens and, far to often, our friends and family members.

The problem is, if we never have those difficult but civil conversations, we will never move forward. We will retreat more and more into our ideological bunkers until the fabric of society itself comes unraveled.

I know I sometimes avoid such conversations because they can be so very, very hard. I’m afraid I will make mistakes. I’m afraid I’ll get hurt.

That’s why it made me feel so much better to hear my Guru Brene Brown say much the same thing.

VIDEO

Good advice – especially for social media.

Another of my personal gurus, Van Jones, human rights activist, attorney, CNN commentator, and author of another recommended book, “Beyond the Messy Truth: How We Came Apart; How We Come Together” also offers much that is very, very helpful on this subject.

Today, I want to share a story he told at a recent conference I attended.

Jones tells of visiting communities in West Virginia where they were having to bring in freezer trucks on Friday nights because too many bodies of people who had died of opium overdoses were coming in over the weekend to hold them all in the local morgues.

Babies were being born already addicted and then losing both their parents.

Jones brought five leaders who had emerged from the 1980s crack epidemic in his community in Los Angeles with him West Virginia to work with five leaders there.

He says that was hard, because when drugs were ravaging his community, it was not treated as a public health issue. It was treated as a criminal issue – with brutality and imprisonment.

They began by sharing pictures of people each of them had lost. Out of that common pain, came a common purpose. They forged relations across their differences and divides.

I want to let you hear him tell about something that happened while they were there.

VIDEO

“The biggest danger we face is becoming what we are fighting”

But how do we avoid that? How do we engage with civility, even when those whom we disagree, are not always so civil toward us?

Well, there are no easy answers. It’s difficult even for these folks with far more expertise on this than me. All three say it is hard. And yet all three also say it is absolutely necessary.

Here are some thoughts.

Brene Brown says that people are hard to hate close up, so move in. Get to know them. Engage with them.

In the best book chapter title of all time, she also writes, “Speak Truth to Bullshit. Be civil”.

We can hold people accountable without using personal attacks. We can hold fast to our values without dehumanizing others.

No shaming, no name calling, no putting other people down.

We can listen and reflect back to people what they say. We can ask, “can I tell you how that makes me feel or what I understand about this?”

Valarie Kour talks about approaching other people with curiosity and wonder. She talks about the importance of sharing our stories and listening to theirs. “Stories,” she says, “can create the wonder that turns strangers into sisters and brothers.”

Van Jones speaks of searching for common ground – not mushy middle ground – but true shared interests. He talks about how he is working with conservatives such as Newt Gingrich on issues such as our criminal justice system, the addiction crisis and creating high tech and clean tech jobs.

It is difficult. Finding compassion, much less love, for those who might harm us is gut-wrenchingly hard. I know. 1’m one of the targets. Certainly none of should try to engage in a situation where we are at threat for physical harm.

I don’t have all the answers. None of us do.

I do know this. I know we have to try. I know we will never build the beloved community if we disconnect from, leave out, 30 to 40% of the population. We have to build a new way.

After the last Presidential election I found myself needing to have this kind of conversation with my mom. She gave me permission to share this story with you.

She had voted for Donald Trump.

I had posted some things on social media that were … strongly worded.

Our relationship had become strained. We avoided the topic. It is hard for love to flourish when pain has been left unspoken.

We agreed to talk. We set ground rules – each of us in turn would talk about our perspectives on the election and its aftermath – no interrupting, no arguing, no trying to convince the other of anything.

And it was difficult. And it was holy. And the ground beneath us and between us shifted, as if God had entered the room and held us both as we moved through that difficult but ultimately loving conversation. My beloveds, we can do this. It will not be easy, but we can build that new way.

We can build the be-(revolutionary)-loved community.

Amen.

Benediction

“We are bound together in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny”.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s words still ring true and powerful today.

And that means that even as we leave this sanctuary today, our work together to help build the beloved community goes on, as we work for justice that can transform both the lives of others and our own.

Likewise, the courage, community and compassion we experience here go with us also.

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

Go in peace. Go in love.

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

Youth Service: Exploring Dreams

May 21, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons

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Senior Youth Group
May 20, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

This year’s Youth Service finds the youth exploring their dreams and yearnings. There will be music, meditation, inspirational stories and the Bridging Ceremony of our youth.

Welcome
Galadriel Logan

Call to Worship
Original poem by Kate Hirschfeld

Affirming our Mission Statement
Julia Heilrayne

Story for all ages
Shanti Cornell

Reading
read by Julia Heilrayne
Mary Oliver “What is beyond knowing”

Homily 1
Julia Heilrayne

Homily 2
Bridget Lewis

Homily 3
Abby Poirier

Music
“Daydream Believer” (Stewart) Will Snider

Bridging Ceremony

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

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

Things I Learned From My Mother

May 21, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
May 13, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

My mother didn’t like being called cute. She wanted to be tall and elegant, but she was cute. She tried to teach me to “drive like a lady,” and she won all the belching contests when we were camping. There are things we want to keep from our mother’s lives and voices, and things that don’t help us, things we can let go of.

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

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