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Rev. Jonalu Johnstone
January 8, 2023
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

The past has shaped us. We rest in the present. We look forward to the future. How do they interact together to help us find our center?

Chalice Lighting

This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.

Call to Worship

LET ASTONISHMENT BE POSSIBLE
by Rev. Gretchen Haley

Whatever you have come in
anticipating
Whatever you expect
Or worry
For our world, for the future
For our lives-
Let it go

Make space in your heart to be surprised
Make room in your soul
For a new story to take shape
Let astonishment be possible

At this life that remains a miracle
Imagine here the bursting of joy
Relentless and resilient
Coming in waves
Washing over us
with music,
and story
silence,

and still this dreaming together
Being hope for each other
and courage
to believe
in this new day dawning
for us all.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Meditation Reading

WE ARE ABLE
by Vijaya Balan

Things happen, moments are created, faces are remembered and feelings are tightly grasped within the dry skin of our cracked hands,
Cracked hearts too maybe?

Where do we go but forward,
Remembering absent friends, lost loves, broken dreams and a hope to bury it all in that dark backyard behind our weathered but sturdy home,

We will move on, forge new paths, break new barriers, repeat a thing or two,
but oh well,

We all have some familiar cycles in our life right?
We are resilience built on the foundation of faith and belief, We are unwritten pages, with past chapters that can fill a library, a library that none might visit,
And we will still go ahead and do everything that we want to, regardless of what anyone else ever said,

We are beings with a field of uncertainty surrounded by determination at the most unexpected moments,
Love and let go, love and cherish, love and be broken, love and not expect anything in return, love and be loved back a 1000 times,

We are the sum of billions of atoms,
We are the moments we create and the things that happen, We are the beliefs of more than thousands of faiths in this world,

We are the tragedies of past, the conundrums of the present and the triumphs of tomorrow,
We are able,
We are capable of all of them,
We are capable and able.

---

Austin UU History Lesson

WHERE DO WE COME FROM?
– Leo Collas

Unitarianism was brought to Austin by the Reverend Edwin Miller Wheelock in 1868.

Wheelock was a Harvard educated lawyer who also graduated from Harvard Divinity School as a Unitarian minister. He was a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and was even open to Transcendentalism.

He served in the Civil War as a chaplain in the Union army, and afterward worked with the Freedmen’s Bureau in the gulf coast area of Louisiana and Texas. He was married and had 2 children.

His specialty was in education. He developed curriculums to teach formerly enslaved children how to read. His work was very effective, and in 1868, the governor of Texas moved him to Austin and appointed him as the first Superintendent of Schools. This may just sound like a nice, progressive career path, but there is a really interesting backstory to all of this that makes it a really amazing story.

Wheelock was a devoted abolitionist. He was passionate about what we now call “human rights” and was outspoken about the immoral institution of slavery. Here is the story about that.

Soon after he got his first Unitarian ministerial appointment, in Dover Massachusetts, he delivered a stirring sermon supporting the raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry Virginia by fellow abolitionist John Brown. Brown, in October 1859, raided the Federal Armory intending to start a slave liberation movement that would spread to the southern states. It wasn’t well planned, and the enslaved people it was meant to liberate didn’t exactly know what was going on, so it failed. Brown was tried for treason and was hanged on December 2, 1859, the first person executed for treason in the history of the United States.

Wheelock’s sermon made him kinda famous. He was asked to speak in Boston, and his sermon was printed in newspapers.

Wheelock’s sermon didn’t pull any punches on the topic of slavery: “withholding the key of knowledge, abrogating the marriage relation, rending families asunder at the auction block, makes the State that protects it a band of pirates, and the church that enshrines it a baptized brothel.” The State of Virginia put a $1500 bounty on his capture – dead or alive – for treason. Luckily for Wheelock, the civil war broke out in 1861. He immediately enlisted and became a chaplain in the Union Army.

That’s how he got appointed to work with the Freedmen’s Bureau during reconstruction.

But think about it. Here is this man who was once hated throughout the South, somehow able to work with both the Southern gulf states and the Federal government to do something that the people of the South found unimaginable – teaching reading to those they had enslaved! He was able to do it, and do it successfully. And he got a high-ranking position in Texas from Governor Pease – who was a former slave owner!

Wheelock had some mighty diplomatic skills.

He served in a number of high-ranking jobs in Texas government, including as the Superintendent of the School for the Blind. Texas was not really ready for liberal religion at that time and Wheelock knew that. He went to Spokane Washington in 1887 to form the Unitarian Society of Spokane and serve as its minister for 2 years. He came back to Austin and in 1891 started a Unitarian ministry here. That ministry survived Wheelock’s death in 1901 (he was 72), and continued through WW1. Rev. Wheelock’s daughter, Emilie, carried the mantle of Unitarianism in Austin after her father’s death and for the rest of her life. From what I have gathered, she had a lot of her Father’s diplomacy and courage. Emilie was married to a British man by the name of John D. Howson, who was associated with the International Great Northern Railroad and the Austin National Bank. They had 1 child, Edwin, who died as an infant in 1889. Emilie’s great social justice passion was for getting the vote for women. She was involved in every organization that promoted women’s rights, and she was a leader of many of them. Emilie was a charter member of the Austin Woman’s Club and was involved in the formation of the Texas Federation of Women’s Clubs. After years of working toward women’s suffrage, Emilie was 59 years old when the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920.

Austin Unitarianism survived quietly, evolving after WW1 into the Community Church of Austin, which ceased in the winter of 1951 when it morphed into the Unitarian Fellowship of Austin. Services were held in people’s homes initially. Among the founding members was Emilie Wheelock Howson, who was by then 90 years old.

Emilie called in all of her favors to get things jump started for this church. I think she knew it was going to be her last hurrah. The YWCA gave the fellowship space to meet, then the Texas Federation of Women’s Clubs did. Other Women’s organizations gave equipment and administrative assistance.

Finally, in 1954, the Unitarian Fellowship of Austin had grown strong enough to call its first minister, and become incorporated as the First Unitarian Church of Austin. There were 66 families committed to the new church, with 81 members, and it continued to grow.

Sadly, in 1957, Emilie Wheelock Howson died. She was 96 years old. But she wasn’t done helping this congregation. She left this congregation a legacy of $100,000 (equivalent of about $1M today) which was used to purchase land and build a church here at this site. The building was dedicated in January of 1961 with “Howson Hall” named in Emilie’s honor.

Rev. Wheelock and his daughter Emilie played key roles in the forming of this church, but they were not the only ones. It was their spirit, their determined commitment to the spiritual practice of social justice that helped inspire others. I’m certain there were many individuals who inspired them.

After Howson Hall was built in 1961, the classroom wing was built in 1968, and in 1987 this beautiful sanctuary was added. There are many stories about all the things that have taken place here, many people who have worked toward compassion and justice in this place from racial integration, to LGBTQ rights, moral treatment of immigrants and refugees, reproductive justice, the list goes on. In 1961 when the initial church building was new, the Austin American Statesman published an article entitled “Unitarian Service Features Dancing”. I’m sure that caused a collective clutch of the pearls around the city. But little did they know, we were just getting started.

Sermon

Thank you, Leo. It’s important to hear and know the stories of our past. To find ourselves, our center, which is this month’s theme, we need to learn from the past, to rest in the present and to look to the future. Or, as the poet said earlier, “We are the tragedies of past, the conundrums of the present and the triumphs of tomorrow.” Of course, we are also the triumphs of the past, the joys of the present and the uncertainties of tomorrow.

I no longer believe that my biography begins with my birth. I can’t tell my personal story without also telling you about my mother and my father, who met in the military and courted going to Broadway shows on USO tickets and who gave me both my genes and a nurturing environment. My story even includes my grandparents, who shaped my parents. Would I be who I am if my mother’s parents hadn’t run a dairy in Oklahoma? If her grandparents hadn’t moved to Oklahoma from Illinois and Iowa? If my father’s father hadn’t come to Maine from Canada? If my father hadn’t been adopted? My beginnings go further back in time than I can even recount, or recall, because I only know them from the stories other people have told me.

We create our stories of ourselves. All of us have stories we tell over and over about our lives – the story of how we met our spouse, of how we chose our career, of the birth of our child, of the death of our parent. We tell our stories to reinforce our experience and so that we can understand better what has happened to us and who we are. This is true for trauma, as well as joy, failure as well as success. It’s why we tell stories of those we love after they die – we are inscribing those stories on our hearts and minds so that our loved one lives on. We really only learn from our experience when we have translated and refined our story. Without putting it into a form, it’s hard to learn from experience. We need the story to make meaning out of the experience, to understand what has happened, to learn so we can move on, whether in the same or in a different way. Commentator David Brooks has written: “If you don’t have a real story, you don’t have a real self.”

We do the same thing on communal levels. Our families have stories, our church does, as Leo shared a bit this morning, our nation does. None of these stories are idle or random. They establish the essence of the civilization, defining how life is to be, how people are to act, and what has the most value. The past is as much story as history – so it matters if and how we include the 1619 arrival of enslaved people in this country, the genocide and land-grabbing against indigenous people, the colonization, the Civil War. None of these stories is singular, they are collections of individual stories, and they always have a particular perspective.

The foundational stories of the Pilgrims coming to Massachusetts have shaped us, both as Americans and as Unitarian Universalists, since the Pilgrims are our direct religious ancestors. Since we’re so deeply influenced by such stories, we need to hear the others, like the Wampanoang people’s story, since they were there when the Pilgrims arrived.

History is never as simple as, “Look at this perfect hero,” or “That evil person ruined everything.” We’d like it to be so, yet the stories really are nuanced, full of imperfect heroes and a tug of war between good and evil where the sides cannot always be identified until much later.

White UU theologian Rebecca Parker gives us perspective on just how broken our world is – and note, she wrote this in the early days of the 21st century, long before the current crises:

We are living in a post-slavery, post-Holocaust, postVietnam, post-Hiroshima world. We are living in the aftermath of collective violence that has been severe, massive, and traumatic. The scars from slavery, genocide, and meaningless war mark our bodies. We are living in the midst of rain forest burning, the rapid death of species, the growing pollution of the air and water, and new mutations of racism and violence.

Parker’s phrase “post-slavery, post-Holocaust, postVietnam, post-Hiroshima world” reminds us of the significance of what we call history. She goes on to tell us that history has left scars. Then, she locates us in the particular context of our present. Today we would need to add post-9/11, post-Jan 6, and living amidst the spread of viruses previously unknown.

Scottish-American moral philosopher Alasdair Maclnttyre says that I can’t answer the question “What am I to do?” until “I can answer the prior question, “Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?””

As consequential, powerful and unavoidable as stories are, they can also mislead us, even trap us in a lie. That’s why we need to continually re-examine, re-tell, re-write the stories.

Have you ever been with siblings and told childhood stories, only to find that you all remember what happened differently? You could consider that problematic – if our memory was like a video-recording that we could trust to be objective. But it’s not. Our memories include our emotional responses, as well as sensory data; our judgments, as well as our observations. Which is why our sibs don’t agree with our memories of that Thanksgiving years ago. We did not live through the same experience.

The advantage to the way we encode long-term memory is that we can rewrite our stories – either to include new information that we didn’t know before or to look at our lives from a different perspective. Psychologists call it narrative therapy, a process of telling a story that grounds a particular problem, then finding new ways of seeing that story, and retelling it, so that the problem is minimized.

Here’s a simple example from UU minister Amanda Poppei. She writes:

I used to believe a story that I was a bad driver. I don’t like driving on highways, lance hit a parking post in a garage, I needed the examiner to explain a three-point turn during my driver’s test. All those things are true, and so the story must be true, too. But over time, I’ve worked on hearing a different story. This story is the one about how I drive all through DC, handling traffic circles like a pro. It’s about good parallel parking skills, and always wearing my seatbelt and using my blinker. It’s about passing my driver’s test the first time, since I did, after all, know how to do a three-point turn. Those things are all true, too, so the story must be true.

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/lBcdD3- HrGkRPgOIXre8mup4a7wuujQJwlkHNdsMKH4Y/edit]

The stories we tell ourselves are interpretative at least as much as reality based. We have some freedom to choose our stories. Not absolute freedom. If your stories drift far enough from real facts, then they become ridiculous fantasies, like the biography of George Santos.

“A tree, whatever the circumstances, does not become a legume, a vine, or a cow,” explains biracial Ghanian Brit Kwame Anthony Appiah in the Ethics of Identity. “The reasonable middle view is that constructing an identity isa good thing … but that the identity must make some kind of sense.”

[qtd. in https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2015/jun /12/rachel-dolezal-black-identity-civil-rights-leader

We don’t get to choose everything about our story because we are shaped by who we are born as and the people we have come from and by the people who are entangled in our lives and memories.

But — since we have stashed emotional and interpretive content in with our objective and sense-based data, we can pull the whole mess out and pull apart what’s there and ask ourselves, “Is what I believe to be true about myself, about my life, really based in truth, or have I distorted it? Have I learned something else? Do I need a new story?”

Part of the challenge is that when new facts we encounter don’t fit into our story, we tend to ignore the facts rather than reconfigure the story. That’s just how our brains are made, so we have to work to overcome that impulse to dismiss what doesn’t fit.

None of us is one thing. None of us has a single story. Your church certainly doesn’t have a single story; nor does our nation. Stories are shaped by who has the power to tell them, by the perspectives they include – and exclude – by the visions they cast and the boundaries they draw. And stories shape us, which means we need to continually examine our stories for truth, for completeness, and for how they serve – or fail to serve – us.

“Stories can break. And stories can repair,” said Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie. Indeed. Stories can break. And stories can repair.

Returning to a past that has been distorted or moving ahead to a future that has never been more than a dream. We are going through a time in our nation where the illusion of a shared national story has evaporated. Recognizing the illusion for what it is, maybe we are freed to shift into the future with the scales removed from our eyes.

We need a process of sorting out meaning. We have to see what we want to claim from the past and how to recast it to serve the future. We have to decide which relics are worn out and which fresh enthusiasms we wish to pursue. Knowing more about the past and the present allows us to make more reasonable choices for the future.

The present is more than the dividing line between past and future. Nigerian storyteller Ben Okri says:

… we live by stories, we also live in them. One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted – knowingly or unknowingly – in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.

[A Way of Being Free (London: Phoenix House, 1997), 46, qtd in King, The Truth about Stories, 153]

We hold the past in our present, and sometimes need to let it go. The great Black American writer James Baldwin writes: “It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.”

Only when we have sorted our past can we fully be present in our present and look to the future. UU’s love Utopian visions. Thumb through the hymnal sometime if you don’t believe me. We will never reach those visions – the Beloved Community — until we have better understood our past and acknowledged our present.

That’s true for us as individuals, too.

May we treasure what we can of the past, acknowledge the rest of it, rest contentedly in the present, as we move towards the future we envision together.

Benediction

THAT WHICH IS WORTHY OF DOING
By Steve J Crump

That which is worthy of doing, create with your hands.
That which is worthy of repeating, speak with a clear voice.
That which is worthy of remembering, hold in your hearts.
And that which is worthy of living, go and live it now.

SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 23 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link above to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

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Rev. Jonalu Johnstone
December 11, 2022
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Don’t we all love Christmas? And Advent? And music? Maybe yes, maybe no. We’ll hear the wonder of music as we consider the season and its mixed history and present.

Chalice Lighting

This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.

Call to Worship

I will light candles this Christmas,
Candles of joy despite all the sadness,
Candles of hope where despair keeps watch,
Candles of courage for fears ever present,
Candles of peace for tempest-tossed days,
Candles of grace to ease heavy burdens,
Candles of love to inspire all my living,
Candles that will burn all year long.

– Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman

Affirming Our Mission

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

Moment for Beloved Community

This morning in our moment for Beloved Community, I want to make the case against a moment for Beloved Community. Not because Beloved Community is not valuable or a worthy goal; rather, because Beloved Community is so valuable and such a worthy goal.

Beloved Community will always be aspirational. No particular church or community is, itself, a Beloved Community, no matter how much any of us loves and appreciates our particular community. Rather, Beloved Community is more like the Kindom of God, not Kingdom, but Kindom, a place of relatedness, a place without violence, war, racism, sexism, oppression, homophobia, transphobia, homelessness, hunger, poverty, or climate change. A place where we live sustainably and generously and everyone – of every race, ability, gender and age can thrive, peaceful, happy, healthy, and safe. A place where we grow and offer one another our best selves, always.

So, it’s wonderful that this congregation has set aside this moment during each service to contemplate different aspects of Beloved Community. However, isn’t our whole service about the aspiration of Beloved Community? Isn’t our mission Beloved Community? Don’t we aim to encompass Beloved Community in all that we do as church?

Probably not. That, though is the ideal.

Beloved Community is not a moment; it’s a way of life. So, Rev. Chris, Rev. Erin and I – along with some other staff members — have been thinking about how we make the whole service and the whole church more infused with Beloved Community. We have been attending to the sources we draw from, the readings we share, the ideas we talk about, and the learnings we offer. We have been inviting guest speakers with BIPOC identities. We have begun encouraging use of the UUA’s “Widening the Circle of Concern,” a report from the Commission on Institutional Change as a guideline for examining the racist and antiracist practices that exist within our own institution. We will be offering a Trans Inclusion curriculum in January. We want to view everything that we do through the lens of anti-oppression work and the goal of Beloved Community.

Now, during the holiday season, as has been the tradition, we will not have moments of Beloved Community as part of the service. We may bring back the moments from time to time, or with some consistency, and we may not. We will, though, keep working toward Beloved Community. And we are all happy to hear your feedback about this work and how it’s best done. Because we learn from one another.

Readings

FOR THE DARKNESS OF WAITING
By Janet Morley

For the darkness of waiting
of not knowing what is to come
of staying ready and quiet and attentive,
we praise you O God

For the darkness and the light
are both alike to you
For the darkness of staying silent
for the terror of having nothing to say
and for the greater terror
of needing to say nothing,
we praise you O God

For the darkness and the light
are both alike to you
For the darkness of loving
in which it is safe to surrender
to let go of our self-protection
and to stop holding back our desire,
we praise you O God

For the darkness and the light
are both alike to you
For the darkness of choosing
when you give us the moment
For the darkness and the light
are both alike to you
to speak, and act, and change,
and we cannot know what we have set in motion,
but we still have to take the risk,
we praise you O God

For the darkness of hoping
in a world which longs for you,
for the wrestling and the labouring of all creation
for wholeness and justice and freedom,
we praise you O God

For the darkness and the light
are both alike to you

 

---

 

THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

The music of the spheres.
A harmonious universe – like a harp.

Its rhythms are the equal,
repeated seasons.
The beating of the heart.

Day/night. The going and
returning of migratory birds.

The cycles of stars and corn.

The mimosa that unfolds by
day and folds up again by night.

Rhythms of moon and tide.
One single rhythm in planets, atoms, sea,

And apples that ripen and fall,
and in the mind of Newton.

Melody, accord, arpeggios
The harp of the universe.
Unity behind apparent
multiplicity.

That is the music.

– ERNESTO CARDENAL

Sermon

The Wonder and Controversy of Music and Advent
Rev. Jonalu Johnstone

As a child, I took piano lessons from Mr. Cleveland Fisher, organist at a prominent Washington, D.C., Episcopal church. Every year early in December, he’d admonish me, “You’re probably already singing Christmas carols at your church.”

Mr. Fisher was accusing me — and most of the Christian world — , including the stores as well as churches, of singing out of season. At his church, they reserved Christmas carols until the 24th of December and sang them through the official Christmas season, until the Feast of the Epiphany in January. During the period of Advent, the month before Christmas, they sang Advent hymns, like “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” and – surely, there’s some other Advent hymn, but I’m betting few of us would recognize it. Our choir is doing Advent music today, though. Two points for them! The idea is that in this season of Advent, we are waiting for the birth of the child. He’s not here yet, we’re not even certain if he will come, so we’re in a time of hope and prayer and quiet, waiting.

Of course, the Advent-Christmas liturgical divide is only one of the many ways Christmas songs stir controversy. In the early years of this country, the Puritans and Pilgrims – our own spiritual ancestors — hated Christmas music. Actually, they hated Christmas, making it illegal in Massachusetts until 1681. Even after it was legalized, it was at best tolerated. Schools in Boston stayed open on Christmas Day until 1870.

Today, there’s less open hatred of Christmas spirit and Christmas music by Christians, though non-Christians may tire of it. And people of various faiths find the ubiquitous strains of Christmas spirit blared in malls and doctors’ offices obnoxious. Anybody here? On the other hand, you have those who keep Sirius or Pandora tuned in to the Christmas station – whatever that is – from Thanksgiving through New Years without fail. The variety of Christmas music is staggering from Bing Crosby, who recorded more than 22,000 different seasonal songs, to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, from cathedral choirs to the “Christmas Tree Farm,” by Taylor Swift. Someone’s buying all that Christmas music. And someone else is hating it.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that Christmas music engenders conflict. There may be nothing more controversial in religious communities than music. Ask any church that replaced their choir with a praise band.

Even in this congregation, where we’re pretty mellow, and our music department led by Brent is deeply appreciated, not everyone wholeheartedly embraces all the music. We all have different tastes. And, like all religious communities, we have to guard the lines between entertainment, performance and spiritual depth. Because, though music can stir the soul, the music in a service is never simply performance, or entertainment, but exists at the service of worship – which depending on your philosophy and feelings, mayor may not include applause. I know there are moments when I want to simply hear that final note fade into the room.

Plus, I know that’s “worship” is a controversial word in UU congregations. Who or what do we worship? We ask. For me, it’s simply an acknowledgement of something beyond – something beyond the musicians and the gathered congregation, some inimitable something, nameless, and yet real, almost tangible.

Spirit. The Holy. The Divine.

Because the words we say express meaning, but rarely touch the actual experience of Spirit. That sometimes requires the arts. Twentieth century Russian abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky explored the connection between art and spirit. He talks about three effects of color: physical, psychological and spiritual effects. You can tell by what he writes that his understanding of art weaves together with his experience of music, a passion since his childhood, as both his parents played piano professionally. Like color, music has the same array of effects – physical, psychological and spiritual.

Physically, music is vibration travelling through the air to our ears, and even to other parts of our bodies. People who are deaf, for example, feel music, so can dance as gracefully as those who hear. Babies as young as five months move to music without ever having a dance lesson; their bodies are part of what they hear. Kandinsky writes that painting affects more than the eye, but rather all five senses. Music is the same – it affects more than the ear.

Psychologically, music lowers the stress hormone cortisol, while raising endorphins, oxytocin, and dopamine, diminishing pain and giving pleasure. This hormone interaction can even stimulate that sense of chills you get sometimes with an extraordinary performance. Anyone else get chills with music from time to time? From the physical experience of hearing music, we can actually become more relaxed and happier. Music can even boost our immune system.

The music itself may create a particular mood, evoking the feelings and experience the composer put into it. Music also creates associations – maybe you heard that song at your loved one’s memorial service and it makes you sad. Maybe it reminds you of a particular place or a fictitious landscape or a time in your life or a dream you have for the future. Those associations are personal and vary considerably from one hearer to another.

Music is more than a piece of sound; it is an experience, which blends into the spiritual. The deep breathing required for singing produces many of the same benefits as meditation. Indian mystic Osha said: “Music is the easiest method of meditation. Whoever can let [the]mself dissolve into music has no need to seek anything else to dissolve into.” And it’s a heck of a lot easier to focus your brain on music than it is to make your mind go blank.

Kandinsky calls the elusive nature of art the “spiritual vibrations.” Since music is physical vibration, could it also be spiritual vibration? Pythagoras and other classical philosophers hypothesized a “music of the spheres,” a celestial harmony that came from the orbiting of stars and planets, a delicate music not audible on earth, but ringing through the universe. More than one ancient myth tells of a god or goddess singing the world into being.

Since the first ancient Veda was chanted, music has been part of spiritual pursuits. Australian aborigines blow their didgeridoos. Jews and Muslims sing their religious texts. The Christian tradition claims Gregorian chant and Bach masses, gospel music and Duke Ellington’s “Sacred Blue.”

Music has a presence that works in our bodies, minds and hearts beyond and outside of words. It smooths the rough edges of life, awakens our hearts, focuses our preoccupied minds. It’s as if music has its own spirit that speaks to ours.

And so does Christmas itself, of course. We speak of having the Christmas Spirit? What can be said of it?

It’s never been unambiguous. Many of us UU’s have mixed feelings about the Christmas story. Too many angels. And virgin birth, one of the standards of ancient time — Ra, Horus, and the pharaoh Amanophis in Egypt, the Phrygian god Attis, the Greek Dionysus, Krishna in India, even the Roman Julius Caesar – all born of virgins. And the Greeks regularly gave their heroes gods for fathers – Pythagoras, Alexander the Great, Augustus – all fathered by gods. Many of the other features of the story occurred in pagan traditions first.

What’s more, the two main stories of the birth – one in Matthew and one in Luke – don’t seem to agree on much of anything: Matthew has wise men and Luke has the manger and the shepherds. The usual practice is to mash the stories together for the full-blown extravaganza and cast of thousands – angels and animals, shepherds and magi, stars and stables. Makes a better Christmas pageant, parts for everyone – an experience we’ll share next week.

Nor do the stories align with reality too effectively.

And yet, the story has spoken to people through the ages and across cultures, the story of a child born in a humble setting, proclaimed God incarnate. The miracle of a baby’s birth brought angels and stars in the sky, and shepherds from the field, admiration from high and low. The story has opened hearts. And inspired music in every genre and century of the past two millennia. Somehow, the music reminds us that stories need not be factually true in every detail to have a deeper spiritual truth, to inspire us and remind us of our values – like hope, love, joy and peace.

There’s one more problem we find with the Christmas songs and stories. How do we move to a celebration of birth, of hope, of joy, when so much that is in our world evokes sadness, confusion, anger, fear, or rancor?

I’m going to take a step back into traditional Advent for a moment because Advent acknowledges what a messy world we live in. The prophets are read at Advent rant on about the horrors we experience – how the adversaries surround us, how darkness covers the earth, how warfare, oppression and sin afflict humanity, how the world needs someone to straighten it out. Not much has changed in these hundreds and thousands of years. We may not quake in fear in response to the sun’s decline. Instead, our fear centers on elections, court decisions, gun violence, racism and antisemitism, global climate change and domestic and foreign terrorism.

Advent reminds us of our helplessness in the face of all kinds of limitations – the utter inhumanity we can have towards one another, as well as our own smallness in the scheme of the universe. So, how do we get from there to the celebration of Christmas?

In the Christian tradition, that comes with the birth of a child. It can come in other ways, though. With a change of heart. With a new insight. With support from a friend. It can come with the birth of a child. I have a friend whose grandbaby was born more than 100 days early, small enough to fit in the palm of a hand. Seeing the survival and thriving of that little baby helps me know the resilience of the human spirit, and that miracles do happen in this world.

One way the bridge from Advent to Christmas often comes is through the music. When our hearts are touched and opened, we may may find our souls soothed in troubled times. We may find the link that takes us from the strange mix of hope and despair that characterizes Advent to the true joy of Christmas.

Despite those staunch traditionalist Christians like Mr. Fisher who do their best each year to fend off Christmas carols until as late in December as possible, we Americans tend to plow right through from Thanksgiving, or Halloween, to Christmas joy, without touching the mire of Advent. And here’s where those traditionalists have a point. We try to shift into the Christmas spirit – the feasting and gifts and songs – without the reflection on our human condition. That’s when Christmas can morph into a season of values misspent – to debauchery and drunkenness and family fights and maybe even tragedy.

But, if we let Christmas come while acknowledging and holding the challenges that Advent brings us, then we allow transformation to overtake us – and, we are ready to truly celebrate.

Our challenge is to face squarely the world we live in with its division, its violence, and its oppression, and hold onto hope, peace, joy, and love.

That may sound impossible, but if you can do it, even a little, the hope, peace, joy and love transform you and the spirit of Christmas does rise up in gratitude and rejoicing. If you can picture that child who should not have been born yet who breathes on her own, you can hold onto hope. If you can remember hugging your own child, or parent, or lover, as if your very life depended on it, you can hold onto love. If you have known a time when the tears you cried were a deep welling beyond sorrow that came from loving life, you can hold onto joy. If you can summon the moment when you heard that perfect harmony, you can hold onto peace.

Even in the presence of tragedy, hope, peace, joy and love triumph.

So, we sing. We sing whether or not anyone claims we’re out of season, by the calendar or by the news story. As Leonard Bernstein said: “This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” We sing because we know that hope, love, joy and peace are ours and are the only way that we will survive and find comfort. Always. Amen.

SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 22 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link above to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

PODCASTS

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Jonalu Johnstone
November 13, 2022
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Octavia Butler writes in “The Parable of the Sower” that the only lasting truth is change. In this week after the election, we’ll consider change and its impact in our political system and in our lives. “All that you touch, you Change. All that you Change Changes you.

Chalice Lighting

This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.

Call to Worship

By Katie Kardarian-Morris

Here we have come into this sacred space –
quieter now with our readiness
Hushed voices, hoping, trusting for so many things:
For connection, for communion
For inspiration, for information
For healing, for wholeness,
For words, for music,
For celebration and consolation,
Here we have come into this space bringing all of who we are,
Let us be willing … however we are changed.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Moment for Beloved Community

In this post-election moment, it seems a good time to remember why we, as religious people in religious community, care about elections. There are some easy answers – that as Unitarian Universalists, we value democracy; that we want to make real our values in the world.

I also want to remind us why we don’t care about elections. In his blog this week, Rev. Chris told us something about the specific legal limits. I want to remind us of the larger limits, the limits that Divinity sets. We as a religious community are not concerned with power for the sake of power, for obtaining or maintaining our own privileges. It’s easy to be tempted by power, to get drawn into winning and losing and strategic choices. As religious people, though, we are called to a higher standard – to examine carefully, to not deal so much in strategy, or our personal bottom line, as to deal in the moral bottom line. The Rev. Dr. William Barbour of the Poor People’s Campaign has written:

[A] moral movement claims higher ground in partisan debate by returning public discourse to our deepest moral and constitutional values …. We cannot allow so-called conservatives to hijack the powerful language of faith; neither can we let so-called liberals pretend that moral convictions are not at play in public policy debates. Every budget is a moral document or it is an immoral one.

[The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics and the Rise of a New Justice Movement, p. 128]

A political group focuses on what can be achieved, the art of the possible. As a religious people, we are focused on bigger issues of values and principles, the broader questions of how we ought to live in the world and what the world ought to be like. Part of our obligation as a religious community, as a prophetic community, is to notice and name right and wrong. We’re at a place in history where those qualities are shining in bolder relief.

So, the work is not ended because the election is over. We are called to remind our elected leaders whoever they are – of the moral imperatives that motivate us, whether we mostly agree with those leaders, or mostly disagree with them. We speak with moral authority because the Beloved Community we build is not just this church, but our whole world.

Unlike candidates and parties, we are not about political strategies and tactics. I’ve been involved in politics enough to know the angling and alliances that politics require. In politics, compromise is messy, and morality often obscured. We cannot be obsessed by strategy and tactics. We never want to become centered on having power alone – always on the moral ends, not the political ends. I’m not naive enough to believe that the strategies are completely avoidable. We will be involved in some of those conversations.

Sometimes, though, we may need to do things that may not be the most strategic. We may meet with elected representatives who we feel it’s a waste of time because of our radical disagreement. We may speak either more strongly, or more diplomatically than some of our allies. We may not value strategy as much as truth. Because sometimes something just needs to be said. And we never know what seeds we may have planted. And we keep at it.

May we always side with love – for everyone. In so doing, may we build Beloved Community now and always.

One way that we challenge the status quo and keep our sights on the future is to support organizations that help us in the building Beloved Community.

Meditation Reading

In 1993, the prescient Black sci-fi writer Octavia Butler published the first part of her Earthseed series, Parable of the Sower. In it, she depicts a dystopian future fueled by climate change, hordes of refugees, and increased social inequality. Her protagonist Lauren Olamina develops a religion out of her observations. Among them are these:

All struggles
Are essentially power struggles.
Who will rule,
Who will lead,
Who will define,
refine,
confine,
design,
Who will dominate.

All struggles
Are essentially power struggles,
And most are no more intellectual than two rams
knocking their heads together ….

When apparent stability disintegrates,
As it must-
God is Change –
People tend to give in
To fear and depression,
To need and greed.

When no influence is strong enough
To unify people
They divide.
They struggle,
One against one,
Group against group,
For survival, position, power.
They remember old hates and generate new ones,
They create chaos and nurture it.
They kill and kill and kill,
Until they are exhausted and destroyed,
Until they are conquered by outside forces,
Or until one of them becomes
A leader
Most will follow,
Or a tyrant
Most fear. …

Any Change may bear seeds of benefit.
Seek them out.

Any Change may bear seeds of harm.
Beware.

God is infinitely malleable.
God is Change ….
As wind,
As water,
As fire,
As life,

God
Is both creative and destructive,
Demanding and yielding,
Sculptor and clay.
God is Infinite Potential:
God is Change ….

Create no images of God.
Accept the images
that God has provided.
They are everywhere,
In everything.

God is Change –
Seed to tree,
tree to forest;
Rain to river,
river to sea;
Grubs to bees,
bees to swarm.
From one, many;
from many, one;
Forever uniting, growing, dissolving –
forever Changing.

The universe
is God’s self-portrait.

Sermon

I take some comfort in reading dystopian novels like Octavia Butler’s because at least our situation is not THAT bad …. Yet. The novels reassure me, too, because they show people coping with those situations that are far worse than our own. And that helps me believe that, even if it does keep getting worse, we will go on living, struggling, coping, loving, and being. We will keep dedicating children and holding the hand of the dying.

At one point in Parable of the Talents, the narrator expresses understanding for people who want a strong leader who wants to make America great again remember this was written back in the 1990’s:

” … they’re afraid and ashamed of their fear, ashamed of their powerlessness. And they’re tired. There are millions of people like them – people who are frightened and just plain tired of all the chaos. They want someone to do something. Fix things. Now!” [p. 607]

I’m in awe of how Butler foresaw the politics we struggle with today. The election this week did not go as badly as it could have in most of the country. But I didn’t vote for anyone who got elected. The nation is still deeply divided. The government is deeply divided. And, yes, there is so much fear and shame and tiredness and chaos and impatience – desire for things to just get fixed. Or to go back to some mythic good ole days.

Of all the emotions that characterize our times, impatience may be the most dangerous. Yes, hate is horrible, chilling. Anger is scary in ourselves and in others. Fear is difficult to endure and leaves us unable to think well. Shame freezes us. Tiredness wears us down. Impatience, though, has its own subtle danger – it keeps us from the excruciatingly slow untangling of complex social, economic, racial, and political issues, and reduces us to bumper sticker slogans and “easy” solutions that aren’t really solutions at all. It convinces us we are doing something – because we are doing something even when what we are doing is counter-productive, or worse yet, counter to our values.

So we need religious community to remind us of those values, of what is of worth, so we act more and more according to our values rather than according to our instincts or fears or impatience.

We will go on. Somehow. And religious community is one of the places where we find both the means and the inspiration to go on. The lessons for a time of dystopia may lend themselves to our own time.

Butler’s novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents tell about the people of Earthseed, a religion discovered by the central character, a Black teenaged woman. She and the people she lead finds comfort and solace in the fact of change, even saying God is Change, despite the horrors and violence they live in. If change really is the only lasting truth, what spiritual lessons can help us with change? After all, people have offered that idea of the eternity of change through the millenia. Around 500 years before the Common Era, Heraclitus of Ephesus is quoted as saying, “Everything changes and nothing remains still; and you cannot step twice into the same stream.”

Buddhism is known for its teachings that all is impermanent – which is much the same as saying that only change is unchanging. Whatever is happening now will not continue. So, when it is something pleasant seize the moment because it will not endure. And when it is unpleasant, know that it is impermanent so you will not always suffer. There are Five Buddhist remembrances, all related to the pervasiveness of change. They come from the Upajjhatthana (You-paja-hana) Sutta:

• • I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.

• • I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape having ill health.

• • I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.

• • All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.

• My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

Upajjhatthana Sutta (“Subjects for Contemplation”) –

Some commentators have called these “Buddhism at its very best.” Kuon Franz a Soto Zen priest from Nova Scotia sums them up this way:

Everything is going to change; nothing is ever going to be as I want it to be, as I need it to be, as I think it should be. I can’t keep the perfect thing. I can’t keep anything.

There is plenty to say about these precepts. “I am of the nature to grow old,” is one I certainly find more and more true every day. Much could be said about our culture’s resistance to the truth of growing old. That’s for another day, though.

“I am of the nature to have ill health.” We have become so much more aware of this during COVID times, when we can’t count on so much because of periodic outbreaks. And as winter approaches, flu and RSV and colds are increasing. Our culture also seems to bring the expectation that we can cure or prevent anything, and it’s not true. That sermon, too, is for another day.

“I am of the nature to die.” The late Rev. Forrest Church, an esteemed and controversial figure, said that “religion is the human response to being alive and having to die.” Multiple sermons could be preached on that one. But not today.

“All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change.” Ah! Here’s where are today. All of us need a certain amount of predictability and stability. We each have a difference tolerance for change, though. Some people thrive with stability – knowing from day to day what will happen and how. Living in the same place for a long time. Staying in the same job.

Others of us have a little problem with boredom, wanting to change it up a bit more often. My mother taught every grade from first through middle school during her career. She said recently that many of the teachers liked to keep the same grade every year. She thought that was boring – she liked to teach different grades. Kept her on her toes.

I have to remind myself that many people have less tolerance for change than I do. We all have to recognize, though, that if we do not make changes, it doesn’t prevent change from coming. Change will come. It does. Summer turns to fall to winter. Babies turn to toddlers to tweens to young adults. People grow ill and die. And we’re living in a time of hastened change. Elections turn some people out of office, while others gain power. Technology morphs almost daily. Climate change increases fires and droughts and floods and hurricanes. Diseases appear and spread. New music and art and fashion emerge and gain popularity, only to be quickly replaced by the next new trend.

And with that accelerating rate of change, more people are thrown off, longing for something firm and steadfast, dependable. Sometimes, because so much is changing around them so quickly, they can become fixated on holding on tightly to something that, in the scheme of things may not seem all that important. And yet …

Also, we might see any change as good or bad. Those are not inherent characteristics, though. Change isn’t good or bad – it simply is. “All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change.”

The single most important way to deal with that is to accept it. Not to cling to what has moved on. Sure, we mourn it, we feel our feelings – knowing that those feelings, too, are impermanent. And then we let it go. Easier said than done, I know.

Finally, the fifth remembrance:

My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

Things and even people will change and eventually disappear. Our actions, in some strange way, cast a longer shadow, are more persistent. What we do matters. That’s why it’s so important that we make deliberate choices about how we will act — in our everyday lives, in our connections with people we love and with people we do not know, in our activism. Zen priest Franz has something to say about it:

“And while you get to choose which actions you take, you don’t get to choose what those consequences will be. It’s like aiming a bow and arrow while you’re running: you know what you want to hit. Maybe you’ll get it. Maybe you won’t. You just do your best, but you have to accept the consequences for what happens because what other option is there? So Remembrance #5 is saying that what you do matters-so live like it does.” – Kuon Franz

There’s the tough part, eh? We get to choose how we act, we do not get to choose what the result of those actions are. That means we have to – oh, here it is again – let go. Let go of the outcomes. We can vote; we can even work to turn out the vote. We cannot control who will win. We can voice our opinion. We cannot choose the results. Winning and losing are not spiritually grounded concepts. They are temporary and illusory. They are bound to ego.

Now, that doesn’t mean, don’t do anything.

Remember? Your actions matter. And, it doesn’t mean that your work was wasted, even when you appear to have lost. Because we are imagining a better future as we work for it. And we cannot know what seeds we have scattered that may later bloom.

We’re called as religious people to weigh in on the side of the vulnerable and to name persecution of others as wrong – whether transgender people whose lives are threatened or women whose control of their bodies is at risk or Indigenous people losing their tribal protections or Black people dying younger and owning less or children under threat of gun violence and the mental health emergency. Such oppression is wrong. Not only inadvisable or unfair or even unconstitutional. Just plain wrong. Moral terms.

I saw a cartoon on Facebook. You may have seen it.

An adult and child. The child asks, “But what if they lose?” The adult replies, “Then we keep fighting for the rights of all people.” “And if they win?”

“Oh, dear girl, it’s the same answer.”

It’s the same answer. Win, lose, or draw – we embrace our values, living them out in our lives and in the larger world. Yes, change will come – some days the wind will blow towards us and other days away. We feel the winds and still, ground ourselves in our ideals, our vision, our mission.

If they lose. If they win. Oh, dear girl, dear friends, it’s the same answer. We keep striving for the rights of all people. We can be the change we want to see in the world.

Benediction

I leave you with the words of the Rev. Dr. Sofia Betancourt, professor at Starr King School for the Ministry:

The good news is that we are in control of what we do with our daily living. If we, each one of us, represent a missing remnant in the fabric of our collective future – then together we can lean into a possibility that we have yet to fully experience in human history. A collective wholeness. An unassailable good. That is the kind of salvation I am here to fight for in the small moments of every single day. So may it be for us. May we achieve that collective wholeness, that unassailable good, that Beloved Community.

SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 22 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link above to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

PODCASTS

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Jonalu Johnstone
October 23, 2022
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

We are living in In-between, or liminal, times – in this church and in the world. In between pandemic and virus eradication, in the midst of changing climate, in between senior ministers. We need courage because in liminal times, we are uncertain. Unpredictability can bring danger, confusion, pain and general messiness. In short, crisis. Facing these times with courage, though, can also bring new insights and a new way of being in the world. How will we face in-between times together?

Chalice Lighting

This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.

Call to Worship

IN BETWEEN
Kate R. Walker

In between, liminal, that space where we wait.
Between moments; events, results, action, no action.
To stand on the threshold, waiting for something to end,
And something new to arrive, a pause in the rumble of time.
Awareness claims us, alert, a shadow of something different.

In between invitation and acceptance.
In between symptom and diagnosis.
In between send and receipt of inquiry and question.
In between love given and love received.

Liminality, a letting go, entering into confusion,
ambiguity and disorientation.
A ritual begun, pause … look back at what once was,
Look forward into what becomes.
Identity sheds a layer, reaches into something uncomfortable to wear.

In between lighting of the match and the kindling of oil.
In between choosing of text and the reading of words.
In between voices and notes carried through the air into ears to hear.
In between — creation thrusts ever forward.

Social hierarchies may disassemble and structures may fall.
Communities may revolt or tempt trust.
Tradition may falter or creativity crashes forward.
Leaders may step down or take charge.
The people may choose or refuse.

In between, storm predicted, the horizon beacons.
In between, theology of process reminds us to step back.
In between, where minutia and galaxies intermingle with microbes and mysteries.
In between, liminal, that space where we wait: Look, listen, feel, breathe.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Meditation Reading

Look well to the growing edge” All around us worlds are dying and new worlds are being born; all around us life is dying and life is being born. The fruit ripens on the tree, the roots are silently at work in the darkness of the earth against a time when there shall be new leaves, fresh blossoms, green fruit. Such is the growing edge” It is the extra breath from the exhausted lung, the one more thing to try when all else has failed, the upward reach of life when weariness closes in upon all endeavor. This is the basis of hope in moments of despair, the incentive to carry on when times are out of joint and men have lost their reason, the source of confidence when worlds crash and dreams whiten into ash. The birth of the child – life’s most dramatic answer to death – this is the growing edge incarnate. Look well to the growing edge”

– Civil Rights theologian Howard Thurman

Sermon

I learned a lot about insects in the last congregation I served. With both an ag school and a USDA Agricultural Research Center in Manhattan, Kansas, we had more entomologists – insect scientists – in that congregation than I had ever met before. So I learned something about insects.

The caterpillar inside the chrysalis is literally digesting itself, actually using its own digestive juices to break down its own body into undifferentiated cells, cells that can become anything. Well, not all of its body. There are pieces that remain intact like the tracheal tubes, for example. Plus, there’s some stuff in there already, imaginal discs, that are prepared under the right circumstances to turn into butterfly parts – eyes, antennae, legs, mouthparts, genitals, and of course, wings. Wings that allow the butterfly to take off and soar, leaving behind its old life limited to a small patch of earth to be able to travel anywhere – or at least on its instinctual migration track. But before the wings, there’s the cocoon. No wonder the caterpillar is impatient. Before we get to the glorious wings, we have to soak in the goo. Not a fun place.

Of course, metaphors like caterpillars turning into butterflies cannot fully represent human experience. I simply want to introduce the idea that the in-between time required for transformation is not always easy or pleasant. Any of you ever been through labor to birth a child?

French Reform rabbi Delphine Horvileur talks about a Hebrew word, mashber, which means crisis, yes, and it carries a deeper meaning. It comes from the name of a tool used in birthing, and relates to a place of breach, the mouth of the womb. She says, “It’s a time of anger and hope, death and life. It’s the birthing of something new and no one knows what that’s going to be.

Or maybe you’ve moved? You’re not in one place or another place; you’re in between. In between can feel really crappy. Messy. Unpredictable. Controversial. No wonder we so often want to rush through transitions to get out the other side. It does not always feel good to be in the middle of it.

Another aspect where I draw on the caterpillar metaphor.

The caterpillar has no idea what’s going on, or what it will look like when it’s done. Yes, I know, insects have no self-awareness, despite Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” and Jiminy Cricket and all the cute little animated bugs that have appeared onscreen since. The point is that transformation happens to the caterpillar based on stuff going on inside it, hormones and such, but outside the poor little caterpillar’s voluntary control.

So, have I got you excited about transition yet? It’s a messy, horrible process outside your control and you don’t know what you’ll have at the end of it. Nobody’d sign up for that voluntarily.

Or would we? Have we? In Unitarian Universalism, we do not commit ourselves to a savior, a creed, or a book. We commit ourselves to one another, to a covenant that we share, to a mission that we embrace. We commit ourselves to an approach to religion and spirituality, indeed to a way of life. And a way, that if it is followed, will change us.

I came into Unitarian Universalism from Southern Baptist churches where I had learned about personal salvation and had rejected much of the theology I had learned, though not all of it, and not all of the forms, some of which I still loved. As a young UU, I discovered feminist theology and paganism and embraced a whole new worldview, though not in a well integrated way. I like to say I went to seminary as a Southern Baptist Pagan Unitarian Universalist. My theological- and even my geographical- journey has meandered in ways unexpected and even unguessable by a younger me. I swore I would never live in Oklahoma, and I’ve lived there longer than anywhere in my adult life. I left Christianity for good, only to rediscover the words of Jesus through new lights. As the cantankerous White Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry has written: “You do not know the road; you have committed your life to a way.”

So here we are on a way, a path, a journey. And we discover ourselves in what I like to call liminal times – in-between times. Not only in this church, in the larger world, too. We are living in between the Industrial Age and the culmination of climate change. We are living in between the pandemic and whatever it is that comes next. Politically, we are living in between — I don’t even know how to describe that mess.

And in this church, you are in between called senior ministers. One era is over, and another hasn’t yet started. Yet here we find ourselves – in between, in the goo in the cocoon, in liminal space.

Franciscan ecumenical spiritual and social activist Richard Rohr writes:

The edge of things is a liminal space-a holy place or, as the Celts called it, “a thin place.” Most of us have to be taught how to live there. To function on the spiritual edge of things is to learn how to move safely in and out, back and forth, across and return …. When we are at the center of something, we easily confuse essentials with nonessentials, getting tied down by trivia, loyalty tests, and job security. Not much truth can happen there. When we live on the edge of anything, with respect and honor (and this is crucial!) we are in an auspicious and advantageous position.

And … I remind you that it does not always feel auspicious and advantageous.

The in-between place does not always feel auspicious and advantageous, but has more potential for truth and learning than the center does. We need courage to be here where we are because it is dangerous and unpredictable. Like crossing a street. Potential danger. And potential for truth and learning, if we have the courage for it.

I wonder whether that gooey in-between pupa inside the cocoon, the chrysalis that is neither caterpillar nor butterfly recognizes that it still has tracheal tubes or that the imaginal discs will become butterfly pieces. I wonder if it misses its legs or its eating. I’m sure it can’t imagine what it is to fly.

So, the in-between times are confusing and dangerous and unpredictable. Yet, they are ripe for religious transformation.

And as my UU colleague at Church of the Larger Fellowship Michael Tino has said, “Being comfortable is not the point of religious transformation.”

What, then, is the point of religious transformation? Why would we even want it?

Other religions certainly have staked their claims on transformation. The individual salvation – turning your life over to Christ – of evangelical Christianity; the enlightenment or satori of Buddhism. Other kinds of in-between times that lead to transformation may also have a religious underpinning or tone. The day you decide you have to quit drinking. The moment you receive the cancer diagnosis. The process of grief you endure as you mourn the death of your spouse or sibling or child. Life-changing events, crises, often soaked in pain, take us to an in-between place in our lives that can stimulate transformation. Crises, of course, can be positive, too – coming out, experiencing the birth of a child, awakening to a new career path. And none of it is limited to one part of our lives, but touches multiple parts of our life. Though there is continuity between who we were and who we become, so much has changed that we could say we’re a new person.

Unitarian Universalism is more modest in its aims than many religious traditions, but has an element that points towards transformation. Our third principle includes the encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations. Spiritual growth may seem less ambitious and flashy than enlightenment or salvation, more gradual and ongoing. It’s about the same thing, though – change. We may see one as a steady measured march and the other as a rapid sprint, but they both boil down to change.

As I said a moment ago, transformation often comes in response to crisis, when one cannot go on living as one has, and has to turn some other direction. Some years back, I learned something about learning from UU minister Gary Blaine. Even though my original career was as a teacher, I had never fully realized this, but as soon as I heard it, I knew it was true. The first stage of really significant learning, of truly taking in a new way of organizing your view of the world, is a place of utter confusion, of living in the goo inside the cocoon. Confusion is the sign that your current way of organizing knowledge and making sense of the world no longer works. You have been introduced to a fact that does not fit. You can cram it and force it, or you can deny the fact that doesn’t fit. Or you can reconstruct your worldview. When you are in that place in between world views, you are readying yourself for change.

Oh, you can resist change by denying the reality of things you see in front of you, whether your own mortality, climate change, or persistence of white privilege, male privilege, class privilege, and so on. Denial is a really effective strategy; it can stave off transformation for years.

Besides denial, another resistance tactic is to accept the truth of facts, but refuse to allow them to change anything else in your worldview. So, you might accept that climate change is real and that humans are the instigators, but continue to embrace the idea that the bottom line economic benefits are the only factor to consider in decision-making, essentially not allowing the facts to matter in how you proceed, staving off the crisis for another day. Or, accept the reality of white privilege without accepting that resisting it means you have to change profoundly.

Here’s a secret I’ve learned over and over. Most people do not have a coherent worldview. Rather, we humans have different philosophies we apply in different parts of their lives. Someone might say, “God is Love/’ but only apply the love of God narrowly to people like them. Someone may have one set of eyes for their business life and another for the way they relate to their children. Usually, it’s not as conscious as Machiavellian scheming or as pretentious as hypocrisy. Mostly, it’s poor self-awareness and lack of reflection about the fit between our values, beliefs and actions. As individuals and as a community.

If we want to live an integrated, whole, honest life, though, if we want our community to reflect the values we espouse — and some of us seem driven to try to do that, when we encounter the ways that our behavior does not match our values, we are forced to change. And that’s what in-between times can push us into, if we have the courage to face what we can learn, if we allow ourselves to really notice.

But we have to start in confusion, in between, in the messy goo. Uncomfortable, maybe painful, and full of potential. That’s why we need courage in these times.

I leave you with the full meditative poem by UU Rev. Kate R. Walker

IN BETWEEN
Kate R. Walker

In between, liminal, that space where we wait.
Between moments; events, results, action, no action.
To stand on the threshold, waiting for something to end,
And something new to arrive, a pause in the rumble of time.
Awareness claims us, alert, a shadow of something different.

In between invitation and acceptance.
In between symptom and diagnosis.
In between send and receipt of inquiry and question.
In between love given and love received.

Liminality, a letting go, entering into confusion,
ambiguity and disorientation.
A ritual begun, pause … look back at what once was,
Look forward into what becomes.
Identity sheds a layer, reaches into something uncomfortable to wear.

In between lighting of the match and the kindling of oil.
In between choosing of text and the reading of words.
In between voices and notes carried through the air into ears to hear.
In between — creation thrusts ever forward.

Social hierarchies may disassemble and structures may fall.
Communities may revolt or tempt trust.
Tradition may falter or creativity crashes forward.
Leaders may step down or take charge.
The people may choose or refuse.

In between, storm predicted, the horizon beacons.
In between, theology of process reminds us to step back.
In between, where minutia and galaxies intermingle with microbes and mysteries.
In between, liminal, that space where we wait: Look, listen, feel, breathe.

Benediction

Prayer for Living in Tension
By Joseph M. Cherry

 

If we have any hope of transforming the world and changing ourselves,
we must be
bold enough to step into our discomfort,
brave enough to be clumsy there,
loving enough to forgive ourselves and others.
May we, as a people of faith, be granted the strength to be so bold,
so brave,
and so loving.

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