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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
May 17, 2026
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

You have probably heard the old “truism” that “Curiosity Killed the Cat”, but did you know that there is a lesser-known version that says, “Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.” What if curiosity can feel risky, but actually holds the key to both individual and collective liberation?

Welcome

Prelude: “Sailing” (Malone) Danny Malone, piano & vocals, Brent Baldwin, pedal steel guitar

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 we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.

Call to Worship

ON GETTING OVER OURSELVES
by Dr. Sharon Blackie

What would happen if we began each day from the position that we don’t know everything, and that what we proudly imagine to be ‘our truth’ and ‘our wisdom’ probably aren’t such perfect reflections of reality after all?

What would happen if we began each day with the realization that it’s entirely possible that we don’t actually know anything that really matters? If we only could cast aside all our categorical certainties, wouldn’t that make each day into a genuine adventure? Wouldn’t we be filled with curiosity, with all that childlike awe and wonder we lost such a very long time ago? Wouldn’t a day like that be so very much richer, so very much more beautiful? So very much wiser?

Affirming Our Mission

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

Anthem

Danny Malone, piano & vocals, Brent Baldwin, pedal steel guitar & vocals

Reading

From CURIOUS: THE DESIRE TO KNOW AND WHY YOUR FUTURE DEPENDS ON IT
by Ian Leslie

Our oldest stories about curiosity are warnings: Adam and Eve and the apple of knowledge, Icarus and the sun, Pandora’s box. Early Christian theologians railed against curiosity: Saint Augustine claimed that “God fashioned hell for the inquisitive.” Even humanist philosopher Erasmus suggested that curiosity was greed by a different name. For most of Western history, it has been regarded as at best a distraction, at worst a poison, corrosive to the soul and to society. There’s a reason for this. Curiosity is unruly, It doesn’t like rules, or, at least, it assumes that all rules are provisional, subject to the laceration of a smart question nobody has yet thought to ask. It disdains the approved pathways, preferring diversions, unplanned excursions, Impulsive left turns. In short, curiosity is deviant. Pursuing it is liable to bring you into conflict with authority at some point.

Centering

Music for Meditation: “Limbo” (Malone) Danny Malone, guitar & vocals, Brent Baldwin, pedal steel guitar

Sermon

CURIOSITY UNCAGED THE CAT

Once upon a time, a traveler came upon a small mountain village. She wondered why every house had bright blue doors except one.

At the very edge of town stood an old gray house with a red door. The traveler noticed that everyone in the village seemed to go out of their way to avoid that old house.

When she would ask why, the villagers would become extremely uneasy.

But the traveler – she could not stop thinking about it.

Why was the door red? Who lived there?

Why was everyone so afraid?

One night, curiosity took hold of her soul harder than caution, so she slipped through the darkened streets of the village and snuck onto the front porch of the old house.

The red door creaked open the moment she touched it lightly.

Continuing to risk her curiosity, she stepped through he door.

Inside, the house she could hear only silence. Dust covered everything.

But, as she looked around, she noticed a single wooden box.

The traveler hesitated only a moment before opening it and reaching in.

Inside she found stacks of letters letters revealing secrets the villagers had hidden for years: betrayals, oppression, stolen land, lies that had divided families.

And, as the traveler read, footsteps sounded outside.

The villagers had followed.

By morning, the entire village was in turmoil. Old wounds reopened. Friends and families coming into open conflict with one another.

The traveler realized that opening the box had unleashed pain that had long been buried – secrets that had been kept unspoken. Finally, an old man cried out:

“Some doors stay closed for a reason.”

The traveler hurried away from the village, that old saying ringing in her ears, “Curiosity killed the cat.”

When I was growing up, I always struggled with that old aphorism, “Curiosity killed the cat”.

“Why would our curiosity be something to fear”, I though, “something that can harm us”.

Aphorisms are what we had before the internet made online memes possible.

Well, anyway, I recently learned that the full version of this old cultural proverb, which we hear far less often, is actually, “Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.”

I like that meme a lot better! It more fully captures the complex, nuanced, and contextual nature of our curiosity.

With that as our full cultural proverb, our story gets a new ending that might go something like this.

But years later, the traveler returned to the village, which had blossomed into a cultural, social, and artistic center for the entire region. Old wounds had been faced and healed. Festering secrets had finally been spoken. Repair, restitution, and forgiveness had been made possible. New and more just ways of doing things and living amongst one another had flowered.

Had the box remained closed forever, the village might never have faced the truth or healed, much less come to thrive.

I am beginning to understand much better now this old aphorism in, this, its more nuanced form.

“Curiosity killed the cat” captures that we fear our curiosity because pursuing it often means taking risks, facing uncomfortable truths, getting our of our comfort zones, having the courage to challenge deeply held feelings and beliefs – let go of any sense of certainty.

“But satisfaction brought it back” recognizes that it is only through pursuing our curiosity, being willing to take calculated risks, that we can experience transformation and transcendence – that we become attuned to the wonder and awe to be found through exploring the mysteries of life and existence.

Curiosity is the key that un-cages the cat – the liberation that brings it back.

Remaining open to the mystery, allows us to let go of preconceptions and judgementalism so that we are freed to swim within the love that flows through us and our universe.

And I believe that this is true at the individual, societal, and spiritual- existential levels.

Now that was some was some big flowery language, wasn’t it?

So let’s get curious and break this down more tangibly for each of these levels.

At the individual level, our curiosity can free us from the cage of confirmation bias – that all too human tendency.

We all perceive our world through stories we tell ourselves or that we learned from others about who we are, how the world works, what other people are like, etc.

And we cling to these stories because they are how we make sense of the world.

We get very uncomfortable when new information challenges our self – stories, so we tend to filter out anything that questions the accuracy of them. We tend to only let ourselves take in information that reconfirms these pre- existing stories.

That’s confirmation bias.

The problem is, we spend a lot of mostly negative time, energy, and emotion engaging in all of this confirmation bias – upholding stories that may not be true and are no longer serving us well.

We get really anxious.

We worry and ruminate.

We get all judgmental about ourselves and others.

Challenging our stories, getting curious about whether they are really accurate is scary, so we cling to our biases instead, despite what it costs us!

The paradox is, as Dr. Jud Brewer, researcher and author of Unwinding Anxiety, has found that pursuing our curiosity is the key to freeing ourselves both from these unhelpful stories and the potential harm continuing to hold onto them can cause.

Here’s Dr. Brewer himself describing how a certain kind of curiosity can liberate us from anxiety and the worry and rumination loop it can create.

VIDEO

Many of us don’t actually know how our minds work. And this is especially true with anxiety. It can really feel like a black box. In fact, we might feel anxious and then start worrying as a way to do something to control that anxiety. And in fact, we can start to feed what’s described as a habit loop around this.

The trigger is the anxiety. The behavior is the worry. And then that feeling of control is the reward that our brain gets that says, oh yeah, I’m going to do something about this.

But paradoxically, our brains start to get wise to this and see, you know, worry doesn’t actually feel that good unto itself. And so that reward that I’m getting is not very rewarding. And then worry starts to spin out of control where the worry creates more anxiety, which creates more worry. And then we go into this black hole or this spiral of anxiety and worry.

So what can we do? The good news is we’ve been studying how our minds work for a long time in my lab, and we’ve got some very interesting data that might suggest some actually pretty simple solutions. So we can actually hack into this process, this habit loop, where anxiety can trigger us to get curious about what these thoughts and emotions and sensations actually feel like in our bodies.

And that leads to a completely different reward because curiosity itself feels better than being anxious or worried. So instead of getting caught in this endless worry loop, when we’re anxious, we can actually turn our awareness and just ask this question, “Hmm, what am I feeling right now? Where am I feeling this? What are the thoughts that are going through my head?” And that helps us not get caught up in those worry habit loops so that we can simply bring that curious awareness in and tap into that rewarding quality of curiosity itself.

If you don’t believe me, get curious you can try it for yourself.

In similar ways, we can liberate ourselves from being judgmental by getting curious.

So, for example, if the story our family taught us was that we have to be A+++ perfect at everything, we can instead suspend self-judgement through allowing ourselves to get curious by, oh, deciding to take singing lessons, or learn tap dancing, or play pickleball, or write novellas even if we are not very good at these things but just because we enjoy pursuing them.

If on the way home from church today, some “jerk” cuts you off in traffic, try replacing, “What a self-centered jerk” with “Hmmmm, I wonder if he is late to pick up his kids, or to visit his mom in the hospital, or maybe was just listening to some music he loves and got so absorbed in it that he wasn’t paying attention?”

Getting curious about others can free us from our judgmentalism about them.

Now, here’s a humorous example of how being judgmental rather than curious can get us into trouble. It’s from the television series Ted Lasso. Rupert, an antagonist in the series, is about to loose a high stakes wager over a game of darts because of his judgementalism.

VIDEO

Man, what do I need to win? Two triple 20s and a bonsai.

Good luck.

You know, Rupert, guys have underestimated me my entire life. And for years, I never understood why. It used to really bother me. But then one day, I was driving my little boy to school and I saw this quote by Walt Whitman painted on the wall there. It said, “Be curious, not judgmental”.

I like that. So I get back in my car, and I’m driving to work, and all of a sudden, it hits me. All them fellas that used to belittle me, not a single one of them are curious. You know, they thought they had everything all figured out, and so they judged everything, and they judged everyone. And I realized that their underestimating me, who I was, had nothing to do with it. Because if they were curious, they would ask questions. Questions like, “Have you played a lot of darts, Ted?” Which I would have answered, “Yes, sir. Every Sunday afternoon at a sports bar with my father from age 10 to 16 when he passed away.”

If you’re curious about even more practical ways to practice curiosity, I’ve put the 28 Building Blocks of Radical Curiosity from the book, Radical Curiosity, by Seth Goldenberg Here.

Shout out to my husband, Woodrow, for pointing me to it!

Now, I want to turn to how, societally, I believe curiosity can be a key to unlocking collective liberation for us all.

As our reading earlier told us, one of the reasons that down through the ages we have been taught that “curiosity killed the cat” is that curiosity is unruly, it doesn’t like the rules, it challenges the norms and brings us into conflict with authority.

When we get curious, we begin to see inequality injustice, suffering. So we’ve been taught to fear our curiosity and to control it. We’ve been taught that as a means of social control and a way to keep us divided.

Because if we get curious about each other we might find common ground and come to love our differences rather than fear them and that could create a powerful united force for collective liberation.

Indeed, when we start to get curious about one another, we begin to challenge our stories and judgements about each other. We celebrate difference as enriching for us all.

I begin to see that my destiny is inescapably tied to your destiny.

And thus, racism, bigotry, tribalism, fear of the other fall before the love that blooms out of what that curiosity is teaching us.

Scott Shigeoka is a curiosity researcher and scholar who describes himself as a queer, Asian-American.

A few years ago, he went on a journey across rural America to engage with folks whose perspectives were very different than his own, including going to MAGA rallies.

What he found was that by suspending his judgement about these folks, without erasing his own identity or hiding his differences, by getting curious about them, they in turn began to get curious about him.

And though neither he nor these folks entirely changed their perspectives or how they might vote, they did begin to stop “othering” each other. They dropped the stereotyping and began to embrace each others common humanity.

I’m going to let him describe something vital he discovered about the relationship between curiosity and love.

VIDEO

I learned something really critical about love. And yes, I’m going to drop the L word right now, y’all. I think it’s really important. There’s that old adage that some of us might have heard that love is a verb. But my question was always, okay, what’s the verb? How do we actually practice this? What’s the action?

And what I’ve learned through my years of research and experience is that the best way that we can love better is for us to practice curiosity. Because when we practice curiosity, we turn towards someone. We say, I want to know your story. I want to know who you are. I want to understand your full humanity, your nuances, your complexities, everything that makes you you. And I want to do this not because I want to change your view or your perspectives or who you are. I want to do this because I want to get to know you because you matter to me, because I care about you, because I love you.

Curiosity is not just this intellectual tool. It’s also this heart-centered force that we can bring into our life. And I think it’s a practice that we really need right now in our country and in the world.

If you’d like to explore even more real life ways to practice this curiosity, take a look at the book he wrote as a result of his travels called, Seek: How Curiosity Can Transform Your Life and Change the World.

I’ve included his model for cultivating transformative curiosity on the church website also.

Well, this brings me to that final level where I believe curiosity can liberate us – the spiritual-existential level.

Our curiosity about the larger questions of life – of meaning and purpose and mortality and an intuition of being a part of something much, much larger than ourselves, I believe this curiosity drives our both our interest in science and in spirituality.

These are our, methods, our ways to quell existential anxiety by exploring the great mystery.

And when we do, we often discover within it, as Shigeoka did with those folks who had been such a mystery to him, that there is a love that flows through all of us and through all that is.

A healing love. A fierce love.

And if we call that fierce love “God”,then it is our curiosity that leads us through the red door into the divine.

And that, satisfaction, brings us back to create more love in our village – in our world.

Amen.

Extinguishing the Chalice

We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we hold in our hearts until we are together again.

Benediction

from CURIOSITY AND POLITICAL RESISTANCE
by Perry Zurns

“This particular configuration of the curious impulse begins by fidgeting with the fissures of social mores and political strata, poking and prying in search of a new space to stand tall.

It bravely barrels into the darkest recesses of suffering and pain, steels itself, and lays bare the true face of social inequality and social death.

And it raises its head to the sky, imagines as-yet-inconceivable worlds of justice and of peace…

This curiosity is politically resistant.

This curiosity is from and for the margins… comes alive in the streets and poetry, in shared meals and political protests….

When curiosity’s insubordinate potential is tapped, it investigates the suffering of the marginalized, it casts radical doubt on the status quo, and it fearlessly imagines new and better futures.”

May the congregation say, “Amen”, and “Blessed Be”
I love you fiercely.
Go in peace.

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Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
April 26, 2026
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Rising authoritarianism. The climate in crisis. War without reason or remorse. Racism, misogyny, and bigotry unbridled. Democracy, equality, justice seemingly at threat in so many places. And, of course, our dreams for our own individual life can sometimes feel at risk also. And yet, what if creative potential, our own and the world’s, is still virtually limitless? What if, through all the chaos, we are being lured toward possibilities that we have not yet dared to dream? What if we are being called to create something new?

Welcome

“Allegretto from Sonata Op.166” (Saint Saens) – Madeline Warner, oboe; Valeria Diaz, piano

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 we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.

Call to Worship

HOPE ALWAYS COMES EASIER
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

when it’s morning,
when the birds are already
weaving music through the trees.
Easier when the dew
still shines on the leaves
and the world is warming.
In these ripening moments,
it’s hard to remember,
was it only hours ago,
how darkness poured over you
like oil in the ocean.
How nothing seems possible then.
But here, here is the bright red neck
of morning, humming through the shadows
on emerald wings, and here you are,
rising to meet it, not even
because you want to,
but because something in you rises
and carries you with it into the day.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Anthem

“Oblivion” (Piazzolla) – Madeline Warner, oboe; Valeria Diaz, piano

Reading

BUILDING THE WORLD WE BELIEVE IN
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

I haven’t given up on humans yet.
Though here in America where masked agents
pull women and men from their homes–
people who build our communities, our country–
we are so far from the goodness I imagine.
In second grade, I remember making forts
at recess with small snow balls we’d
squeeze in our hands. So carefully,
so gently, we would place them, one on top
of another to create a small home.
And then, maybe every time, when
the recess bell rang, a group of boys
would linger and at the last moment
they would kick our snow walls down.
It is in all of us, the bully, the one
who enjoys destruction, the one who
wants to feel powerful, strong.
But it is also in us all to speak out
for each other, to stand up for each other,
to say no, this is not okay. It is in us all of us
to gather the way we did in second grade
with our small mittened hands, going out
the next recess, and the next, and the next,
to build together again. Because we can.

Centering

Music for Meditation: “Love Theme” (Ennio Morricone) – Madeline Warner, oboe; Valeria Diaz, piano

Sermon

We are not solely the products of our past.

We are not static objects of a severely restrictive present moment, bound forever by our current state and the current conditions in which we find ourselves.

We are each of us, and all of us, a continuously changing, ever evolving process of becoming, unfolding, far less constrained by the past or the present than we are still extraordinarily free to choose from almost endless creative possibilities for truth, beauty, love, justice and the common good.

So says process theology, a perspective rooted in the discoveries of quantum physics, through which we have learned that while you, and I, and this pulpit, and the rocks outside those windows, indeed all that we think of as static matter, are actually energy in process, changing in each and every moment.

Thus, we have new choices in each and every moment.

For process theology, God, then, is the ultimate metaphysical process of our universe, offering us, calling us to creative, life-giving choices, inviting us to create the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.

That’s according to theologian Monica A. Coleman in her book, Making a Way Out of No Way; A Womanist Theology.

Coleman quotes Alfred North Whitehead, the originator of process thought, as saying that

God “is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it to a vision of truth, beauty, and goodness”.

And because processes do not exist as distinct objects but instead involve an ever evolving flow of constant change, they interact. They influence and change one another. They are interrelated, and thus interdependent.

So, since you and I are these ever changing processes, we are also interdependent with one another and with all of creation.

If you’re feeling a bit processed out at this point, bear with my theologizing just a little bit longer.

This concept that all is process and thus all is interdependent, leads process theology to envision God, not only as that ultimate process that calls us to our greatest creative potential, but that also interrelates with us – holds, comforts, and feels with us at the same time.

Whitehead called God, “The fellow sufferer who understands.”

Our present day Unitarian Universalist Theologian, Rev. Dr. Rebecca Ann Parker puts it like this,

“This is not merely a metaphor, but an actual presence, alive and afoot in the cosmos, an upholding and sheltering presence that receives and feels everything that happens with compassion and justice, offering the world back to itself in every moment with a fresh impulse to manifest the values of beauty, peace, vitality and liberation. God is everlastingly emergent, alive, responsive, creative, at one with the chaotic, messy universe in which we live.”

OK, that’s a lot of heady philosophical stuff, I know.

And you may be thinking, “All right, Rev. Chris, but why should all of this theology stuff matter to me! I’m not sure I am buying this ‘process God’ stuff.”

Here’s why this way of thinking may can be helpful.

When I wrote the description for this service, I cheerfully started it as follows:

• Rising authoritarianism.
• The climate in crisis.
• War without reason or remorse.
• Racism, misogyny, and bigotry unbridled.
• Democracy, equality, justice seemingly at threat in so many places throughout our world.

And, so often, our dreams for our own individual lives can feel at risk also.

Now, I would understand if when you read that, you were like, “Geez, I hope they’re providing Prozac and magic mushroom tea during the social hour after the service today.”

Sometimes, the present moment can seem pretty bleak, can’t it! And the past that led to it can make us feel like we’re stuck – like we have few if any choices left.

But if everything, including us, consists of these ever unfolding processes of change, then our choices remain almost limitless because we stop thinking of ourselves and the state of our world as static objects.

We open ourselves to the creative call of what Whitehead called God.

Now, whether you can only think of this process concept of God as metaphor for the creative evolution of our universe, or as Dr. Parker terms it, an actual presence alive and afoot in that universe, suddenly, even the bleakest of times can still feel like a call to create change for love, beauty, justice and the common good.

Dr. Parker writes,

“Does this God exist! My intuition says yes. Yours may say no. However the question is answered, it is provisional. The very rocks cry out to tell us that stillness is an illusion and that motion is the reality.”

“Motion is the reality” That, in my opinion, is the key insight of process theology. It allows us to know in our souls that, even in the hardest of times, change is always still possible, because change is always the ultimate reality.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said,

“When our days become dreary with low hovering clouds and our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, we will know that we are living in the creative turmoil of a genuine civilization struggling to be born.”

Those words still seem more than prophetic today, don’t they?

That God of process theology, whether metaphor or actual presence, is still calling us to Beloved Community and our fullest potential, even amidst or perhaps through, the chaos and the turmoil.

Examples of this abound, both in our individual lives and in our communities and our world.

Artist Frieda Kahlo began to paint after an accident left her bedridden for more than three months. She used a specially designed easel so that she could paint while confined to bed and a mirror her father had hung overhead for her so that she could create some of her most famous self-portraits. She endured a lifetime of physical pain but channeled her suffering into bold, emotional art that soothed her own soul and continues to move people today.

In an impoverished, isolated area of Alabama that had been a former plantation called Gee’s Bend, with little resources and where homes were unheated, a group of African American women began piecing together scraps of old clothing and feed sacks to create quilts to keep people warm. Instead of following traditional patterns, they used bold, improvised geometry.

Well, their work eventually got noticed by the art world, and what began as desperate necessity now hangs in the metropolitan museum of art, as well as in museums around the world.

Because of their creative response to the call of adversity, Gee’s Bend is no longer so isolated or impoverished. After being occupied and taken over by the Soviet Union, the people of Estonia maintained their national identity, despite severe restrictions on freedom of expression, by gathering to create massive choral festivals rooted in their native songs and traditions. This “singing revolution”, where what could not be spoken politically was sung collectively, became a safe but powerful container for identity and eventually helped fuel a peaceful path to independence.

Estonia is now a democratic, thriving country, having answered God’s creative call toward justice and the common good through song.

And yes, I am now be using the process theology God concept without qualifiers and will let you interpret it with whatever qualifiers you might wish.

There are so many more examples.

Beethoven composed some of his greatest works after losing his hearing.

Ukraine has found ever more creative ways to withstand a 12 year onslaught by a larger power in war they did not seek.

During the great depression, people in this country helped each other survive by forming cooperative kitchens, community gardens, barter systems and many other forms of mutual aide.

The list goes on and on and on. Change is always still possible.

The great process continues.

God is still luring us, even through adversity, toward almost endless creative possibilities for truth, beauty, love, justice and the common good.

Now, speaking of adversity, I want to return to that list I read earlier of what we are witnessing and enduring now.

You see, I think that even through our current turmoil, God may be calling us to something new, offering some of us a novel perspective, beckoning us to consider new creative possibilities.

I think that a lot of even well intended folks who come from a location of privilege, even if it not of their choosing, tend to see the ascendency of MAGA, and Trump, and the architects of the racist, bigoted, patriarchal, anti-democratic Project 2025 as an aberration – a cancer in the American system that just needs to be removed so that we can heal a system that has gotten broken.

The theology we are discussing today though, invites us to understand systems as really a set of processes designed and combined to create desired outcomes.

But, these systems and processes were designed by humans, not the divine.

And the desired outcome, the design intent, is to privilege certain groups of people over others – to concentrate power within the very few to the detriment of everyone else.

And so, well-intentioned folks who have never the less benefited at least somewhat from that system, are being called amongst the chaos to understand what many black folks, and BIPOC folks, and queer folks, and certain uppity women already know.

The system isn’t broken. It is functioning exactly according to its design intent. It is a system that grew out of enslavement and disenfranchisement and subjugation.

And what is driving the MAGA and Project 2025 folks is that the progress that has been made over nearly two and a half centuries now to mitigate the harms of such processes, that progress has begun to threaten the entire system with collapse, and so they are acting to preserve their concentration of power. They’re not even pretending differently anymore.

And simply getting them out of office won’t change a system for which they are that system’s ultimate design intent.

So, our divine calling then, it not to try to repair a system that isn’t designed to create truth, beauty, love, justice and the common good – we are being called to build the Beloved Community – new systems and processes that nourish souls, transforms lives, and do justice.

That sounds familiar.

Now, though, but what does that look like?

Well, that could be material for a whole series of other sermons.

And stay tuned, because it’s going to be. For now though, it looks like, just as a few examples:

• designing voting systems that actually encourage voting and make it simple and accessible,
• healthcare that actually cares (witness what other democracies have done),
• Public safety and justice system processes that concentrate on community security, restoration, actual rehabilitation and far less on the subjugation of BIPOC people, which seems to be a large part of the design intent of the current system, including the so-called immigration system.
• Economic systems that are far less hierarchical and even democratic – such as B corporations and other models for employee and stakeholder co-led businesses already successfully operating here in the U.S. and around the world. And while we are at it, we might replace taxation, investment, wage, labor, social support, anti-discrimination and anti-racism law in the U.S. with systems that actually reign in inequality rather than expand it.

Well, you get the idea. There are so many more examples.

Instead of expending energy on trying to repair systems that were designed to limit the world about which we can we dream, what if we are being called to a boldness that demands the creation of something new.

Now that is truly a divine calling.

My beloveds, as individuals, as communities, as entire societies, process theology shows us that we do not have to and in fact, cannot, remain what we are or what we have been.

God, the poet of the world, is with tender patience leading us to a vision of more truth, more beauty, more love, more Kin-dom of Heaven on carth.

Amen.

Extinguishing the Chalice

We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we hold in our hearts until we are together again.

Benediction

WHAT TO REMEMBER WHEN WAKING
by David Whyte

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?

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

I love you fiercely. Go in peace.

Postlude

“Vivace from Sonata in A minor” (Telemann) – Madeline Warner, oboe; Valeria Diaz, piano

SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 26 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. Chris Jimmerson
March 1, 2026
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

As the song says, “Well, you know, we all want to change the world.” The thing is, we can’t romanticize the revolution. Revolutions can be hard and messy, and last beyond singular lifetimes. The world resists change mightily, at times with the starving of souls and the spilling of blood. How do we sustain ourselves through the long revolution? Perhaps, in the words of author and justice activist Dorothy Roberts, “We have to start with ourselves, and our most intimate relationships…”. Perhaps we start by building what have been called “Islands of Sanity” 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 we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.

Call to Worship

CLEARING
by Martha Postlethwaite

Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world
so worthy of rescue.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

From RESTORING SANITY
by Margaret J. Wheatley

At this time when lives and possibilities are destroyed by casual destructive decisions, l aspire for us to be sane leaders devoted to restoring and awakening the finest qualities of being human – our generosity, creativity, and kindness. We may not change the world, but we can create Islands of Sanity where our human spirits come alive and we contribute in ways that make more possible.

Sermon

THE LAYERS
by Rosemary Wahtola Trommer

Furrowed and runnelled and rough,
the gnarled bark of this old cottonwood.
The dead thickness protects living tissue from cold,
from wind, from flames.

I, too, am older,
but somehow survival shows up for me the opposite.
Any shields I would build up as barriers –
life keeps peeling them away.
What thickens around me now
are layers of dynamic compassion –
vital, vulnerable,ever-growing.

They do not protect against wounds.
Instead, they seem to say,
“Be with what aches, my dear.
Trusting discomfort is the only way.”

So, I’ve been out on sabbatical for two months, leaving me way too much time to think.

Overthink. That cherished Unitarian Universalist pastime and spiritual practice.

And I’ve been reading and watching and grieving and even feeling traumatized by what is happening in our communities, our nation, our world.

A racist President posting racist memes on social media.

A continuing cover up by our Department of Supposed Justice of the sexual abuse and trafficking of children by some of the most powerful people in this country, including, potentially, people within our current administration going all the way up to the President himself.

Not so veiled threats to voting and democracy.

Continuing attempts at the erasure of BIPOC folks, LGBTQI+ folks, and so many more at the Smithsonian, the Stonewall National Monument and on and on.

Illegal military actions, wag-the-dog war, like the one just started.

The invasion and occupation of U.S. cities and states by our own national government, the latest and perhaps most egregious in Minneapolis Minnesota.

I am so proud of and so grateful to our Rev. Carrie for answering the call for faith leaders to go to Minneapolis to bear witness and engage in resistance to the state inflicted terror, violence, and murder being committed by our federal government on the streets of that city.

Well, I could go on and on, as I know could all of you, about the many desecrations of love, justice, compassion, democracy, equity – the very foundations of the way so many of us construct our moral, ethical worldview, not to mention the very foundations of our faith and that of so many world religions – the values to which this country of ours has always claimed to aspire but never lived out.

So, my beloveds, I have been thinking bout a revolution.

And this morning, as our song earlier said, we are gonna be talkin’ bout a revolution.

Don’t give this over-thinker too much sabbatical time, apparently.

I started with that poem earlier because I have been thinking that if we truly want a revolution, truly want to change the world, we are going to have to learn to think about the revolution in news ways.

We are going to have to realize that what the revolution we really want, the one that ultimately creates the Beloved Community, what that revolution is up against is a political ideology that has turn racism, white supremacy, patriarchy, white nationalism, other faith xenophobia and multiple other forms of bigotry and oppression into a religion – a religion it quite often fraudulently claims as Christianity.

And this ideology, this idolatry, is not new.

Indeed, while we are a nation founded in those aspirational values I mentioned earlier, yes, but also founded in slavery, racism, patriarchy, classism and casteism and more.

So this revolution is also not new. This revolution is ongoing. It is a continuation of the revolution BIPOC folks and feminists and womanists and LGBTQI+ folks and so many more have been waging for centuries now.

It is a continuing revolution that will not be short. A revolution that will never easy. A revolution that will too often continue to be opposed with the destruction of lives and the spilling of blood, as we’ve just witnessed in Minnesota and elsewhere.

And so, to sustain the kind of systemic, institutional, cultural change that such an ongoing, long-term revolution will require, will require US to shed our gnarled bark, our barriers of privilege, be vulnerable, get comfortable with the inevitable aches and discomforts of real change – these are the only way to wrap ourselves and others in those layers of dynamic compassion about which the poet writes.

To create the world we dream about at the end of the revolution, which will likely be beyond our lifetimes, we have to live our lives with the vulnerability, kindness, sense of justice, and love of each other as equals that we wish to see in our larger world.

We have to create this in our daily lives, our families, our relationships, our communities, right here within these church walls and then carry it beyond them .

And the lovely thing is, doing so is what will provide us with the resilience to sustain that larger revolution.

I’m currently reading the book, The Mixed Marriage Project; A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family, by award winning researcher and author on racism, class, and gender, Dorothy Roberts.

l’ve also listened to interviews with Roberts about it, in which she grapples with her white father’s (and later her black mother’s) research through interviews with interracial couples over several decades.

Had her mother been a part of her father’s research? How had she herself fit into his project? Could she resolve the disagreement she had held with her father over whether interracial intimacy could be a part of dismantling racial hierarchies in our country as opposed to the structural changes on which she had been concentrating in her own research?

I want to let you hear her describe what she came to:

Video

Throughout my career, I have shied away from the issue of interracial intimacy and interracial marriage. I never really tackled that. And I’ve always thought that it wasn’t as important a topic as the ones I was working on. And I think part of it also was this debate I had with my father about whether interracial intimacy could overcome racism.

And because I felt so strongly that it could not, I think I shied away from grappling with that question in my own research. But as I read the interviews stretching from the 1930s to the 1960s, and he actually went on to interview couples into the 1980s, I started to change my view of that because it was so clear to me that the regulation of race and family and interracial intimacy, interracial marriage has been such an important way that the government has reinforced a racial hierarchy.

And so if I was to be concerned about a racial hierarchy and I want to dismantle it. I think that this topic is one that I should wrestle with. I think it’s really important to grapple with the question of how do we love each other in a racist society? How can we cross the huge chasm of race that’s been created and reinforced historically in America to be able to love each other as equal human beings? And I began to see that that actually is the question I’ve been asking throughout my career. And my father’s papers and working on the memoir and really wrestling more with it was a transformative experience for me.

Elsewhere, she also talks of how she came to reconcile her father’s passion for his research, which began before he met her mother, with his deep love and commitment to his family.

I wonder if before we can fully work for abstract notions of equality in our world, we must engage in the lived experience of loving equally in our own lives.

Now of course, that could be friendships and other types of relationships, but I do think we have to be in equitable relationship across our differences if we ever hope to create change together in solidarity.

Maybe part of the revolution then, is learning not just to love across difference, but to love difference itself.

This creating relationships in which we love our multiple, beautiful ways of being human, love each other as equal human beings in our daily lives and in our communities, is a vital part of how we might sustain the long revolution through what researcher, author and poet Margaret J Wheatley calls “Islands of Sanity.”

Here is how she describes this:

“An Island of Sanity is a gift of possibility and refuge created by people’s commitment to form healthy community to do meaningful work. It requires … unshakable faith in people’s innate generosity, creativity, and kindness.

It sets itself apart as an island to protect itself from the life-destroying dynamics, policies, and behaviors that oppress and deny the human spirit.

No matter what is happening around us, we can discover practices that enliven our human spirits and produce meaningful contributions for this time.”

Sounds a lot like what we aspire to in this religious community, doesn’t it?

And I think folks in the communities throughout Minneapolis and surrounding areas have created their own beautiful version of this,

• forming networks of support,
• providing one another mutual aide,
• setting up rapid response communications systems to warn each other of danger when the federal invasion was drawing close to their communities and to expose the violence being perpetrated upon their communities.

They set up loving communities of mutuality, love, and support – regular folks defending and taking taking care of each other that model the world of which we dream – the Beloved Community for which we strive.

And from there, the revolution spreads.

Not far away from us, in San Antonio, a young woman named Ashley Fairbanks was horrified as she watched the news pour out of her home town of Minneapolis.

She used her social media and website design skills to launch a site called “Stand with Minnesota” to provide direct assistance to families under siege. The site has received over 2.5 million hits and resulted over 20 million dollars in aide being sent to Minnesotans put at risk by the actions of ICE and other federal agents.

This is not a charitable organization – it simply helps neighbors connect with neighbors, people connect with people from across the country to provide aide for folks who have been unable to pay rent, afford transportation costs, shop, obtain food, or tend to the many basic necessities of life for fear of being endangered by federal agents – or because parents have been separated from children – or when folks have been removed from their homes and taken to detention centers halfway across the country.

What started as just one person’s project has created Islands of Sanity in a sea of ideologically driven, intentionally created chaos.

AND, I think, creating these Islands of Sanity will also involve doing what Rev. Carrie and so many other religious professionals did in answering the call to go to Minnesota. They not only joined folks in those communities in solidarity, witness, and support, they leveraged whatever status and privilege may come from being a faith leader and any other social locations they might hold to amplify that witness and support, AND, AND, they were willing to put that privilege, indeed their own bodies and physical wellbeing at risk to be in solidarity.

Sustaining the long revolution will require that more and more of us be willing to do the same in order to create those relationships of love as equals, the Islands of Sanity we will need to survive the seas of chaos that will continue to be thrown our way.

Now, I want to hasten to add that movement organizing, vigils, marches, voting, political activism – the types of social/political justice work in which our social action council and our Texas UU Justice Ministry engage, aimed at creating change at the structural level – these are vital and necessary too.

These activities and the the Islands of Sanity we have been talking about go hand-in-hand.

Living life and creating communities with the vulnerability, kindness, sense of justice, and love of each other as equals that we wish to see in our world, will help give us the resilience we need to sustain our structural/political activism.

And, the Islands of Sanity can provide the beginning of a model, an infrastructure that could be built upon on our way toward that revolutionary end – the Beloved Community.

MY Beloveds, this revolution will not end quickly. It will at times be difficult and heartbreaking. We may not know how it ends within our lifetimes.

Centered in a fierce love though, may we soften our hearts, learn to be with what aches, my dears, trust the discomfort, so that what thickens around us are layers of dynamic compassion – vital, vulnerable, ever-growing.

This is the powerful spiritual strength that will carry us through the long revolution.

Amen.

Extinguishing the Chalice

We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we hold in our hearts until we are together again.

Benediction

from IMPOSSIBLE GENEROSITY
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

I want to give you what I could not give you,
a world where there is no hurt or grief.
a world where you don’t know
ravaged and sleepless nights,
don’t know mornings too quiet
or the color of dirt in the cemetery.

Because I cannot give you this,
I want to give you the certainty
that you can live fully in a world
where there is hurt and grief,
that you can meet what is most painful
and at the same time
turn toward what is beautiful.

I want to give you a love so safe
that you grow into yourself
certain that there is nothing
you can do or not do
that could keep me from loving you.
I have been loved like this, too,
and did not know the enormity of the gift
until I longed to give it to you.

I want you to take it for granted
that love is so vast, so unshakeable,
so true. I want to give you the belief
in your resilience, want you to know yourself
as a flower that grows more vigorously
after it’s been cut back.

I would keep the hands from cutting you,
but since I can’t do that,
I want to be the soil, the rain, the sun.

I want to give you what cannot be given,
want to give you what you have given me –
the astonishment of living with you
in a time of hurt and grief
and the miracle of watching you grow.

May the congregation say “amen”, and “blessed be”. I love you fiercely.

Go in peace.

SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 26 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. Chris Jimmerson
December 7. 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Transcendence and Transformation are two of our religious values at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin. We’ll explore how our experiences of transcendence can lead to personal growth and transformation, and paradoxically, how working to transform ourselves and our world can lead us into transcendence.

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

From PERSPECTIVES AND POSSIBILITIES
by Psychologist and Author Rick Bellingham

Transcendence can be described as elevating perspective, while transformation is a process of integrating new awareness back into everyday life. Practices like meditation, yoga, or spiritual experiences can lead to a feeling of connectedness to something greater which can facilitate transformation.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

THAT WHICH HOLDS ALL
by Nancy Shaffer

Because she wanted everyone to feel included in her prayer,
she said right at the beginning
several names for the Holy:
Spirit, she said, Holy One, Mystery, God

but then thinking these weren’t enough ways of addressing
that which cannot be fully addressed,
she added particularities, saying,
Spirit of Life, Spirit of Love,
Ancient Holy One,
Mystery We Will Not Ever Fully Know,
Gracious God
and also Spirit of This Earth,
God of Sarah, Gaia, Thou

and then, tongue loosened, she fell to naming superlatives as well:
Most Creative One, Greatest Source, Closest Hope-
even though superlatives for the Sacred seemed to her probably redundant, but then she couldn’t stop:
One Who Made the Stars, she said,
although she knew technically a number of those present
didn’t believe the stars had been made by anyone or thing
but just luckily happened.

One Who Is an Entire Ocean of Compassion, she said,
and no one laughed.

That Which Has Been Present Since Before the Beginning, she said,
and the room was silent.

Then, although she hadn’t imagined it this way, others began to offer names:

Peace, said one.
One My Mother Knew, said another.
Ancestor, said a third.
Wind.
Rain.
Breath, said one near the back.
Refuge.
That Which Holds All.
A child said, Water.
Someone said, Kuan Yin.
Then: Womb.
Witness.
Great Kindness.
Great Eagle.
Eternal Stillness.

And then, there wasn’t any need to say the things
she’d thought would be important to say,
and everyone sat hushed, until someone said

Amen.

Meditation

We shift now into a meditation on the experience of transcendence.

I invite you now, whether you are here in person at the church, joining us online or over public access television, to settle into as comfortable a position as you can.

Feel the ground underneath you, holding you up, supporting you.

And as you find that place of as much comfort as possible, join me in taking a few deep breaths, pausing briefly at the end of each inhale and exhale.

Now, I invite you to reflect on a time when you have experienced a connection with something larger than yourself.

An experience that moved you beyond yourself. When you felt your heart and consciousness expand.

Perhaps you experienced awe and wonder that brought you outside of your ordinary mind and beyond ordinary, everyday experience.

Maybe you had a sense of timelessness and interconnection with all of creation. Maybe even a boundless love.

An experience that moved your heart and spirit in profound ways that might be difficult to express in words – a stillness and a soaring at the same time.

Let’s take a few more breaths together as we hold in our minds and hearts such experiences.

If you haven’t been able to recall such an experience, that’s OK, please feel free to continue with deep, meditative breathing. In fact, meditating on, contemplating transcendence has been shown to actually make us more likely to experience it!

If you have brought a transcendent experience to mind, dwell for a moment in how it felt.

What does remembering it feel like in your body? Where were you? When was it?

Who else, if anyone, was there?

What happened?

What made the experience beyond the ordinary for you?

Where there ways in which you felt you were different afterward?

Now, let’s share a couple of more deep breaths.

Sermon

FIRST UU VALUES

• • TRANSCENDENCE – To connect with wonder and awe of the unity of life

• • COMMUNITY – To connect with joy, sorrow, and service with those whose lives we touch

• • COMPASSION – To treat ourselves and others with love

• • COURAGE – To live lives of honesty, vulnerability, and beauty

• TRANSFORMATION – To pursue the growth that changes our lives and heals our world

This morning, we are exploring two of our religious values here at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin, the first of which is transcendence.

We describe transcendence as “To connect with wonder and awe of the unity of life”.

Studies show that most of us have had some version of these transcendent experiences, and that they can effect us in ways that can lead to transformation, the second of our religious values we will reflect on today.

Now, over the past weeks, we have explored what I call our “C Values” that you can see on the slide here – Community, Courage, and Compassion.

So today, we’ll switch to our “T Values” – Transcendence and Transformation.

Wow. Transcendence. Transformation. We sound just like a church, don’t we?

Our experiences of transcendence are understood in a variety of ways. Some call them experiences of the holy; some use the term flow experiences, humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow called them peak experiences.

They can be brought on by spiritual practices such as prayer and meditation, communal religious practices like worship or rituals – also though, music, art, nature…psychedelic drugs and more.

Maslow described these experiences like this,

“feelings of limitless horizons opening up to the vision, the feeling of being simultaneously more powerful and also more helpless than one ever was before, the feeling of great ecstasy and wonder and awe, the loss of placing in time and space with, finally, the conviction that something extremely important and valuable had happened, so that the subject is to some extent transformed and strengthened…”

It turns out that Maslow’s description was largely correct.

Science is finding that while the exact nature and intensity of individual personal experiences of them vary, these transcendent or Peak experiences do share common characteristics:

• • A sense of belonging and connectedness with others and with all of creation

• • Closely related to this, a sense of both dissolution of self and a flowing or expansion outward toward a sense of unity with all that is

• • Being an an infinitesimal yet intrinsic part of something much greater than one’s self

• • An altering of one’s normal sense of space and time

• Acceptance of paradox; a sense of finding a stillness even as one’s spirit is set in flight.

Perhaps even more importantly, our transcendent experiences have been found to often lead to an altered perspective that can give us a greater sense of purpose, self-contentment and a drive toward more prosocial, compassionate, loving behavior.

The sense of interconnectedness, unity, and being a part of something larger can become how an omnipresent, universal, fierce love finds us within these experiences,

or maybe it is the other way around – maybe our experience of transcendence is how we find our way to fierce love and then bring it back into our world.

Abrahan Maslow thought Peak experiences as he call them could lead us toward becoming our fullest, most creative self as an individual (what he called self-actualization).

He also believed though that they could move us even beyond that, toward living our lives for something greater, which he called self-transcendence.

Here is a brief summary of these terms.

(Video)

So, you may have heard of Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs. Maslow views self-actualization as the capacity to really come into your full potential, express who you were meant to be. But he also saw that as a Right of Passage that allows us to go beyond the single self into what he referred to as self-transcendence. So self-actualization is about fulfilling our potential. Self-transcendence is about furthering a cause beyond the self and maybe we sense it as this profound desire to protect the welfare of all people or to give back to our community.

So, our experiences of transcendence can transform us.

Neuroscientists have even discovered that during transcendent experiences changes occur in our brainwave patterns and our neurochemistry and that this can begin to permanently change our cognitive processing and thus our perspectives and behavior.

Transcendence creates transformation, not merely metaphorically, but physiologically – psychologically – spiritually.

Now, that raises the question though of what we mean by “transformation”.

I think in the context of religion and church, and as it relates to this sense of transcendence, we are talking about spiritual transformation.

Abraham Maslow thought Peak experiences as he called them could lead The kind of change that Maslow talked about that moves us to self-actualization, but then that leads us toward self-transcendence – toward manifesting a fierce love that does justice in our world and strives to build a better and better world.

At First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin, we define this type of transformation like this: “To pursue the growth that changes our lives and heals our world.”

Self-actualization and self-transcendence.

Spiritual transformation.

Now here’s an interesting thing, almost a paradox about spiritual transformation – while experiences of transcendence can move us toward spiritual transformation, it is also true that living out this kind of metamorphosis in our lives and our world can lift us in to a state of transcendence.

It becomes a self-reinforcing cycle – transcendent experience creates transformation begets further transcendence and so on and so on.

When I was in seminary, I did my internship in a church where I witnessed transformation catalyze transcendence like this, which then lead to the potential for further transformation.

Early in my time with them, the church discovered that their much-loved prior lead minister who had only recently left, had committed sexual misconduct within the church.

It was heartbreaking to witness how harmful and extraordinarily painful this was for a religious community.

I can’t really adequately express the pain that had been caused.

By the way, I am not breaking any confidentiality by sharing this story. Both our Unitarian Universalist Association and the church made these circumstances public.

Transparency about such misconduct is a vital part of how a church heals and helps to make such misconduct less likely to happen again.

As the church dealt with the painful aftermath of the misconduct, they brought in an outside minister who has extensively studied and written about it and helped many churches work to heal from such circumstances.

One Sunday afternoon after the worship service, we gathered in the fellowship hall with this minister they had brought in. Almost the entire church membership was there.

She had brought slides and prepared an agenda that would help educate the church about ministerial misconduct, what to expect in its wake, and next steps the church might take.

As she began the discussion though, individual church members began sharing their perceptions and feelings about what had happened.

The differences in their perspectives where sometimes stark.

Yet, the hurt and the vulnerability each of them shared was powerful.

And this minister, this “expert”, laid her plans aside, put away her agenda and let healing begin to emerge.

She transformed what had begun as an educational workshop into a healing circle.

And from that change, this sense of transcendence settled over the room, as one by one folks began sharing their truths, their pain, their love for their church and religious community that now seemed threatened.

I have rarely been so moved.

I don’t have any other way to adequately express what happened that Sunday afternoon than to say that it felt like God had entered that room.

And from that transformative change she made, a communal, transcendent experience emerged on that Sunday afternoon in the fellowship hall of the church, through which transformational healing became possible.

This is the power of living our values.

Just as that guest minister they had invited lived out our Unitarian Universalist faith values of community and covenantal relationship by setting aside her own agenda, living our values here at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin has the power to actualize our highest potential selves and to channel our self-aspirations toward building the Beloved Community.

Our values are the ground from which our purpose arises, as a church community the source of our shared mission.

Our religious values are why First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin exists – they are the reason we do church.

Transcendence. Community. Compassion. Courage. Transformation.

Transcendence is where we encounter the holy.

And out of that sacred stillness, our spirits take flight, compassion and courage arise in us, calling us to build the Beloved Community, thereby creating more holiness in our world.

Transformation is what doing so makes possible.

May this church be the center of our quest for transcendence together.

May transformation then be our work in the world.

Amen. Blessed be.

Extinguishing the Chalice

We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we hold in our hearts until we are together again.

Benediction

FOR A NEW BEGINNING
John O’Donohue

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge…

Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;

Soon you will home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

I send you much love, Go in peace.

SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 25 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. Chris Jimmerson
November 30 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Transcendence and Transformation are two of our religious values at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin. We’ll explore how our experiences of transcendence can lead to personal growth and transformation, and paradoxically, how working to transform ourselves and our world can lead us into transcendence.

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

From PERSPECTIVES AND POSSIBILITIES
by Psychologist and Author Rick Bellingham

Transcendence can be described as elevating perspective, while transformation is a process of integrating new awareness back into everyday life. Practices like meditation, yoga, or spiritual experiences can lead to a feeling of connectedness to something greater which can facilitate transformation.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

THAT WHICH HOLDS ALL
by Nancy Shaffer

Because she wanted everyone to feel included in her prayer,
she said right at the beginning
several names for the Holy:
Spirit, she said, Holy One, Mystery, God

but then thinking these weren’t enough ways of addressing
that which cannot be fully addressed,
she added particularities, saying,
Spirit of Life, Spirit of Love,
Ancient Holy One,
Mystery We Will Not Ever Fully Know,
Gracious God
and also Spirit of This Earth,
God of Sarah, Gaia, Thou

and then, tongue loosened, she fell to naming superlatives as well:
Most Creative One, Greatest Source, Closest Hope-
even though superlatives for the Sacred seemed to her probably redundant, but then she couldn’t stop:
One Who Made the Stars, she said,
although she knew technically a number of those present
didn’t believe the stars had been made by anyone or thing
but just luckily happened.

One Who Is an Entire Ocean of Compassion, she said,
and no one laughed.

That Which Has Been Present Since Before the Beginning, she said,
and the room was silent.

Then, although she hadn’t imagined it this way, others began to offer names:

Peace, said one.
One My Mother Knew, said another.
Ancestor, said a third.
Wind.
Rain.
Breath, said one near the back.
Refuge.
That Which Holds All.
A child said, Water.
Someone said, Kuan Yin.
Then: Womb.
Witness.
Great Kindness.
Great Eagle.
Eternal Stillness.

And then, there wasn’t any need to say the things
she’d thought would be important to say,
and everyone sat hushed, until someone said

Amen.

Meditation

We shift now into a meditation on the experience of transcendence.

I invite you now, whether you are here in person at the church, joining us online or over public access television, to settle into as comfortable a position as you can.

Feel the ground underneath you, holding you up, supporting you.

And as you find that place of as much comfort as possible, join me in taking a few deep breaths, pausing briefly at the end of each inhale and exhale.

Now, I invite you to reflect on a time when you have experienced a connection with something larger than yourself.

An experience that moved you beyond yourself. When you felt your heart and consciousness expand.

Perhaps you experienced awe and wonder that brought you outside of your ordinary mind and beyond ordinary, everyday experience.

Maybe you had a sense of timelessness and interconnection with all of creation. Maybe even a boundless love.

An experience that moved your heart and spirit in profound ways that might be difficult to express in words – a stillness and a soaring at the same time.

Let’s take a few more breaths together as we hold in our minds and hearts such experiences.

If you haven’t been able to recall such an experience, that’s OK, please feel free to continue with deep, meditative breathing. In fact, meditating on, contemplating transcendence has been shown to actually make us more likely to experience it!

If you have brought a transcendent experience to mind, dwell for a moment in how it felt.

What does remembering it feel like in your body? Where were you? When was it?

Who else, if anyone, was there?

What happened?

What made the experience beyond the ordinary for you?

Where there ways in which you felt you were different afterward?

Now, let’s share a couple of more deep breaths.

Sermon

FIRST UU VALUES

• • TRANSCENDENCE – To connect with wonder and awe of the unity of life

• • COMMUNITY – To connect with joy, sorrow, and service with those whose lives we touch

• • COMPASSION – To treat ourselves and others with love

• • COURAGE – To live lives of honesty, vulnerability, and beauty

• TRANSFORMATION – To pursue the growth that changes our lives and heals our world

This morning, we are exploring two of our religious values here at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin, the first of which is transcendence.

We describe transcendence as “To connect with wonder and awe of the unity of life”.

Studies show that most of us have had some version of these transcendent experiences, and that they can effect us in ways that can lead to transformation, the second of our religious values we will reflect on today.

Now, over the past weeks, we have explored what I call our “C Values” that you can see on the slide here – Community, Courage, and Compassion.

So today, we’ll switch to our “T Values” – Transcendence and Transformation.

Wow. Transcendence. Transformation. We sound just like a church, don’t we?

Our experiences of transcendence are understood in a variety of ways. Some call them experiences of the holy; some use the term flow experiences, humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow called them peak experiences.

They can be brought on by spiritual practices such as prayer and meditation, communal religious practices like worship or rituals – also though, music, art, nature…psychedelic drugs and more.

Maslow described these experiences like this,

“feelings of limitless horizons opening up to the vision, the feeling of being simultaneously more powerful and also more helpless than one ever was before, the feeling of great ecstasy and wonder and awe, the loss of placing in time and space with, finally, the conviction that something extremely important and valuable had happened, so that the subject is to some extent transformed and strengthened…”

It turns out that Maslow’s description was largely correct.

Science is finding that while the exact nature and intensity of individual personal experiences of them vary, these transcendent or Peak experiences do share common characteristics:

• • A sense of belonging and connectedness with others and with all of creation

• • Closely related to this, a sense of both dissolution of self and a flowing or expansion outward toward a sense of unity with all that is

• • Being an an infinitesimal yet intrinsic part of something much greater than one’s self

• • An altering of one’s normal sense of space and time

• Acceptance of paradox; a sense of finding a stillness even as one’s spirit is set in flight.

Perhaps even more importantly, our transcendent experiences have been found to often lead to an altered perspective that can give us a greater sense of purpose, self-contentment and a drive toward more prosocial, compassionate, loving behavior.

The sense of interconnectedness, unity, and being a part of something larger can become how an omnipresent, universal, fierce love finds us within these experiences,

or maybe it is the other way around – maybe our experience of transcendence is how we find our way to fierce love and then bring it back into our world.

Abrahan Maslow thought Peak experiences as he call them could lead us toward becoming our fullest, most creative self as an individual (what he called self-actualization).

He also believed though that they could move us even beyond that, toward living our lives for something greater, which he called self-transcendence.

Here is a brief summary of these terms.

(Video)

So, you may have heard of Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs. Maslow views self-actualization as the capacity to really come into your full potential, express who you were meant to be. But he also saw that as a Right of Passage that allows us to go beyond the single self into what he referred to as self-transcendence. So self-actualization is about fulfilling our potential. Self-transcendence is about furthering a cause beyond the self and maybe we sense it as this profound desire to protect the welfare of all people or to give back to our community.

So, our experiences of transcendence can transform us.

Neuroscientists have even discovered that during transcendent experiences changes occur in our brainwave patterns and our neurochemistry and that this can begin to permanently change our cognitive processing and thus our perspectives and behavior.

Transcendence creates transformation, not merely metaphorically, but physiologically – psychologically – spiritually.

Now, that raises the question though of what we mean by “transformation”.

I think in the context of religion and church, and as it relates to this sense of transcendence, we are talking about spiritual transformation.

Abraham Maslow thought Peak experiences as he called them could lead The kind of change that Maslow talked about that moves us to self-actualization, but then that leads us toward self-transcendence – toward manifesting a fierce love that does justice in our world and strives to build a better and better world.

At First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin, we define this type of transformation like this: “To pursue the growth that changes our lives and heals our world.”

Self-actualization and self-transcendence.

Spiritual transformation.

Now here’s an interesting thing, almost a paradox about spiritual transformation – while experiences of transcendence can move us toward spiritual transformation, it is also true that living out this kind of metamorphosis in our lives and our world can lift us in to a state of transcendence.

It becomes a self-reinforcing cycle – transcendent experience creates transformation begets further transcendence and so on and so on.

When I was in seminary, I did my internship in a church where I witnessed transformation catalyze transcendence like this, which then lead to the potential for further transformation.

Early in my time with them, the church discovered that their much-loved prior lead minister who had only recently left, had committed sexual misconduct within the church.

It was heartbreaking to witness how harmful and extraordinarily painful this was for a religious community.

I can’t really adequately express the pain that had been caused.

By the way, I am not breaking any confidentiality by sharing this story. Both our Unitarian Universalist Association and the church made these circumstances public.

Transparency about such misconduct is a vital part of how a church heals and helps to make such misconduct less likely to happen again.

As the church dealt with the painful aftermath of the misconduct, they brought in an outside minister who has extensively studied and written about it and helped many churches work to heal from such circumstances.

One Sunday afternoon after the worship service, we gathered in the fellowship hall with this minister they had brought in. Almost the entire church membership was there.

She had brought slides and prepared an agenda that would help educate the church about ministerial misconduct, what to expect in its wake, and next steps the church might take.

As she began the discussion though, individual church members began sharing their perceptions and feelings about what had happened.

The differences in their perspectives where sometimes stark.

Yet, the hurt and the vulnerability each of them shared was powerful.

And this minister, this “expert”, laid her plans aside, put away her agenda and let healing begin to emerge.

She transformed what had begun as an educational workshop into a healing circle.

And from that change, this sense of transcendence settled over the room, as one by one folks began sharing their truths, their pain, their love for their church and religious community that now seemed threatened.

I have rarely been so moved.

I don’t have any other way to adequately express what happened that Sunday afternoon than to say that it felt like God had entered that room.

And from that transformative change she made, a communal, transcendent experience emerged on that Sunday afternoon in the fellowship hall of the church, through which transformational healing became possible.

This is the power of living our values.

Just as that guest minister they had invited lived out our Unitarian Universalist faith values of community and covenantal relationship by setting aside her own agenda, living our values here at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin has the power to actualize our highest potential selves and to channel our self-aspirations toward building the Beloved Community.

Our values are the ground from which our purpose arises, as a church community the source of our shared mission.

Our religious values are why First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin exists – they are the reason we do church.

Transcendence. Community. Compassion. Courage. Transformation.

Transcendence is where we encounter the holy.

And out of that sacred stillness, our spirits take flight, compassion and courage arise in us, calling us to build the Beloved Community, thereby creating more holiness in our world.

Transformation is what doing so makes possible.

May this church be the center of our quest for transcendence together.

May transformation then be our work in the world.

Amen. Blessed be.

Extinguishing the Chalice

We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we hold in our hearts until we are together again.

Benediction

FOR A NEW BEGINNING
John O’Donohue

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge…

Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;

Soon you will home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

I send you much love, Go in peace.

SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 25 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. Chris Jimmerson
November 23, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

We know that gratitude can lead to a wealth of psychological, spiritual, and even physical health benefits. Yet, how do we truly cultivate gratitude? If it is as simple as expressing thanks for the good things in our lives, what happens when life seems just mundane or when things get really hard? What happens when folks with power and privilege demand gratitude from those over whom they hold power? How do we make sure our “thanks giving” is an authentic spiritual practice?

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

GRATITUDE
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Gratitude, it happens,
needs less room to grow
than one might think-
is able to find purchase
on even the slenderest
of ledges,
is able to seed itself
in even the poorest of soils.

Just today, I marveled
as a small gratitude
took root
in the desert of me-
like a juniper tree
growing out of red rock.

If I hadn’t felt it myself,
I might not
have believed it-
but it’s true,
one small thankfulness
can slip into an arid despair
and with it comes
a change in the inner landscape,
the scent of evergreen.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

THE FOUNTAIN
by Denise Levertov

Don’t say, don’t say there is no water
to solace the dryness at our hearts.
I have seen
the fountain springing out of the rock wall
and you drinking there. And I too
before your eyes
found footholds and climbed
to drink the cool water.
The woman of that place, shading her eyes,
frowned as she watched-but not because
she grudged the water,
only because she was waiting
to see we drank our fill and were
refreshed.
Don’t say, don’t say there is no water.
The fountain is there among it’s scalloped
grey and green stones,
it is still there and always there
with it’s quiet song and strange power
to spring in us,
up and out through the rock.

Sermon

Quote

“Conventional gratitude is based on distinguishing what we like from what we do not, good fortune from bad fortune, success from failure, opportunities from obstacles… But what about all the obstacles, unpleasant people, and difficulties in our life? …we should be especially grateful for having to deal with annoying people and difficult situations, because without them we would have nothing to work with. Without them, how could we practice patience, exertion, mindfulness, loving-kindness or compassion? It is by dealing with such challenges that we grow and develop. So we should be very grateful to have them.”

So says Buddhist teacher and author, Judy Lief.

The spiritual topic we’re exploring this month in our religious education classes and spirituality groups is “Nurturing Gratitude”

And, indeed, a wealth of research has shown that gratitude is one the most powerful spiritual practices in which we can engage.

It benefits us in a multitude of ways psychologically, physically, and spiritually.

Practicing gratitude is even associated with increased life satisfaction and extended lifespan.

Turns out, the age old words of wisdom about counting our blessings may well be sound advice.

So why then does that pesky Buddhist Judy Lief insist that I have to be grateful for people who annoy me?

Well, it turns out that counting our blessings, practicing gratitude only for the good things in our life is necessary but not sufficient.

Studies show that even simple gratitude practices like writing down three to five things each day for which we are thankful can benefit us greatly and that, in fact, we can’t just sort of automatically adopt an “attitude of gratitude” We need an actual practice such as this to kind of bring the gratitude into our spiritual sensibility.

This practice of listing 3 to 5 gratitudes each day has been one of my spiritual practices for many years.

The thing is, for a long time, I only listed good things that had happened to me, things that brought me happiness, my pets, the comforts in my life, people I loved who brought me joy.

I left out the annoying people and the difficulties in life.

But this counting only my blessings came to feel harder to do and to feel incomplete, when, for instance, my stepfather died only shortly after I was ordained here at this church.

When a pandemic hit, and I was stuck at home all of the time.

When my spouse became very ill during a challenging time for doing ministry, and then entered hospice and eventually died.

The research shows, and I certainly experienced, that we have to learn to appreciate all of life as a gift, even during those terribly difficult times.

Living and loving fully means we will endure sorrow.

If we can only find thankfulness for the things that happen in life that we like, our spiritual wells can easily run dry when the hard times hit, which they inevitably will.

I want to share with you what late night host Stephen Colbert had to say about this, in part because I am so grateful for how much he annoys Donald Trump.

Colbert Video

“It’s a gift to a gift. It’s a gift to exist. And with existence comes suffering. There’s no escaping that. But if you are grateful for your life, which I think is a positive thing to do, and Not everybody is, and I’m not always, but it’s the most positive thing to do, then you have to be grateful for all of it. You can’t pick and choose what you’re grateful for.

So what do you get from loss? You get awareness of other people’s loss. Well, that’s true. Which allows you to connect with that other person, which allows you to love more deeply and understand what it’s like to be a human being, and to connect with them and to love them in a deep way that not only accepts that all of us suffer, but also then makes you grateful for the fact that you have suffered so that you can know that about other people. It’s about the fullness of your humanity. What’s the point of being here in human if you can’t be the most human you can be?”

Now, I want to be careful here to mention that what he says, while beautiful and valid, also comes close to a theology that I reject called “redemptive suffering”.

The theology of redemptive suffering has been used to keep oppressed folks in positions of pain and suffering far too often, such as when a religious leader tells women to stay in an abusive relationship and just be grateful for the reward they will receive in heaven.

Yes, that still really happens.

“Just bare your cross like Jesus did” is not a a valid theological stance.

I think what we’re learning is not so much that we need to be grateful for the bad things that happen to us, but for having been able to move through them and having learned and grown along the way, for, as Colbert notes, how experiencing our own fragility can help us recognize the fragility of others and thereby love them even more deeply.

What we’re learning is: Be grateful for the gift of life. Live fully. Embrace all of life.

There is this irony that it can be the most difficult to access gratitude during these difficult times, and yet these are the times when we may most need it.

Author Sarah Ban Breathnach captures this as follows.

“Gratitude holds us together even as we’re falling apart. Ironically, gratitude’s most powerful mysteries are often revealed when we are struggling in the midst of personal turmoil. When we stumble in the darkness, rage in anger, hurl faith across the room… While we cry ourselves to sleep, gratitude waits patiently to console and reassure us; there is a landscape larger than the one we can see.”

I want to share a story from poet and spiritual advisor Mark Nepo that I think captures this idea so movingly. I give you his words, because I don’t want to do them injustice by paraphrasing. He writes:

“When my father was dying, I was alone with him in the hospital and found myself feeding him applesauce. The moment opened and my whole being, my whole life, was suddenly concentrating on slipping the spoon with the utmost care into his mouth, waiting for him to swallow, and then sliding the spoon slowly from his lips, so as not to disturb his labored breathing.

 

We repeated this ritual tenderly, spoonful after spoonful. And in the rare quiet of a January afternoon, wonder began to fill the room. I began to cry softly. There seemed to be a glow about us.

Through my thoroughness of care, I’d found a transparent instant in the middle of all our trouble, in the middle of his dying. And in this moment of tenderness, all of life opened. We had fallen into the center, which felt like the dot of clarity cleared in a lake by one drop of rain from which the water ripples in every direction. My father and I were in that still dot of clearness…

As I slipped the spoon from his mouth one last time, I felt that I was in the moment of every child who ever fed their dying parent. I kissed his forehead and held his hand, both of us more alive than we could remember, completely covered in inexplicable wonder.”

This burst of gratitude for the sacred blessing of caring for a loved one we will soon lose is a powerful way that people are able to move through grief.

Now, many of life’s challenges are not this intense though. Sometimes, the challenge is just that things are not quite living up to our perhaps sometimes unrealistic expectations.

One of our wonderful church members, Angela Smith posted on Facebook the other day about something from the letters her terrific husband Charles writes to her each day.

With their permission, I share it with you now

“My hubby’s letter this morning reflected on the fact that life sometimes doesn’t meet our expectations, but still what happens may be good enough. So today I invite you to join me in sharing his intention to be “grateful for the good enough!”

Amen, Mrs. and Mr. Smith.

Somewhat related to this, I will also quickly add that much of life is neither the extremes of unadulterated joy nor times of sorrow, suffering or disappointment.

Much of life is more ordinary or mundane.

So, we must also embrace the more common aspects of life too.

Perhaps a result of losing a spouse of 33 years, I find myself extraordinarily thankful for some of the more ordinary moments within the fierce and wonderful love I share with my fiance, Woodrow – just coming to the art gallery opening here at the church together or grocery shopping with each other.

OK, I want to shift gears a bit now, and explore a potential downside to gratitude or at least the imposition of it, with thanks, actually to Woodrow, who brought this to my attention.

That’s not the downside. That’s very much an upside.

A number of recent studies have found that expectations of gratitude by folks in groups with greater power – professors with students, whites with BIPOC folks, men with women, cis-heterosexual with LGTBTQI+ folks for instance – this expectation can result in the pacification of folks in the group with less power.

When gratitude comes to be seen as obligatory in such conditions of inequality, folks can be less likely to work for their own liberation.

Even more insidious, during longterm and/or extreme periods of inequality or abuse, folks who are being oppressed can develop an almost “Stockholm Syndrome” kind of gratitude, a survival instinct that comes from being so dependent for so long on whatever crumbs those in power choose to dole out.

I think we see this expectation all the time.

The calls by some recently for LGBTQI+ folks to feel grateful that the Supreme Court didn’t take up a case that could have revoked the right to marry the person we love – a right we fought so hard to gain only a few years ago.

“Be grateful that we didn’t take away this basic human right.”

BIPOC folks are repeatedly admonished to give thanks for all the “progress” that has been made.

Again, “be thankful for those rights we have chosen too give you and could decide to refuse again.”

Our President and Vice-President chiding the President of Ukraine over not expressing enough gratitude to the U.S. for protecting our international commitments and own national interests.

The list could go on.

Perhaps the lesson for those of us who have sometimes experienced oppression is that we don’t owe thanks to anyone else for them doing the right thing or allowing us the basic human rights they enjoy.

And for those of us who sometimes find ourselves in a position of privilege and power, if we give to others with an expectation of gratitude, we’re not being generous, we are being transactional and, in fact are acting to maintain our own privilege.

Especially when what we are, quotation marks, “Giving”, is that which was already their fundamental rights as human beings. And I thought I was going to make it through a whole sermon without a social justice rant.

Perhaps I should be grateful that our right to rant still exists.

My beloveds, despite these challenging times in which so many of those basic human rights we cherish are being threatened, we still have so much for which we can still be grateful.

We don’t have to give thanks for whatever crumbs are doled out.

We have the spiritual resilience to resist and to refuse to be pacified.

We have been given the gift of life, and a fierce love that dwells within us and within all of our days, from the mundane to the heartbreaking to the ecstatic.

A fierce love that guides us and leads us to justice and the Beloved Community if only we listen to its call.

And for that, we MUST be grateful.

Amen. Thanks be

Extinguishing the Chalice

We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we hold in our hearts until we are together again.

Benediction

For our benediction today, I leave with you the words of botanist, environmentalist author, and the director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, Robin Wall Kimmerer, abbreviated from “The Honorable Harvest”

Know the ways of the ones who take care of you,
so that you may take care of them.
Never take more than half. Leave some for others.
Give thanks for what you have been given
Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.
Sustain the ones who sustain you

Amen Blessed be. Go in peace.

SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 25 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. Chris Jimmerson
November 9, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Courage and Community: These are two of our religious values at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin. How do our values of courage and community intersect and interact? In what ways do they call us to be and act in our world? Rev Chris explores how these values bring our religious community alive to meet the challenges of our times.

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

LIVING OUR VALUES

Transcendence
To connect with wonder and awe of the unity of life

Community
To connect with joy, sorrow, and service with those whose lives we touch

Compassion
To treat ourselves and others with love

Courage
To live lives of honesty, vulnerability, and beauty

Transformation
To pursue the growth that changes our lives and heals our world

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

IT IS OUR TURN TO CARRY THE WORLD
by adrian marie brown

we are each other’s safety.
right now and every day,
decide who you will protect,
yourself, your own, and who else.

it’s time to cover all that we love.
land, creature, place, person,
intertwine your roots with mine.
in this way, our lives become miracles.

there will be strangers.
they will become comrades.
we will each say our needs.
we will learn to let our community come closer.

every part of us is a shield,
our words, our trust, our hearts,
our bodies in action,
and the freedom to think for ourselves.

we are the adaptation.
no oppressor can imagine.
our love is water.
form shifting power, river, vapor, life.
we flood each other with belonging.

we are building our stamina.
we dream of the real world.
we carry god and we see god in each of our faces.
your holiness is not too heavy, not for me.

our attention and our courage show us
the next stand to take,
the next hill on which to hold each other,
and if needed, the next hiding place, survive.

our imagination and memory
from the wisdom of our ancestors,
find our future in the rubble,
find the seeds in our songs.

we choose our freedom.
we keep each other’s souls intact,
safer than any cage of empire.
we know something better is coming.

we are each other’s safety.
we see each other’s free selves.
we will hold on tight in public, in private,
over and underground.

and we will never let go.
we will never let go.
we will never let go.
we will never let go.

Sermon

NOTE: This is an edited ai generated transcript.
Please forgive any omissions or errors.

Today’s sermon is brought to you by the letter C. Remember when people would talk about words that began with that sponsoring letter. Of course, on Sesame Street, when Cookie Monster said that, the letter C was for cookie, or COOKIE, as he would say it. Most of you remember that.

Well, here at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin, three of our five religious values also begin with the letter C, as you may have noticed when we read those values. Values are the transcendent timeless qualities our religious community strives to embody in all that we do. And out of those values our mission emerges. Our mission is our purpose as a religious community, the overarching differences we hope to make in our lives and in our world.

Well, early next year, the church board will lead us through a best practice. A best practice of periodically revisiting that mission as well as the goals that we call Ends that kind of help us know how and how well we’re living out that mission. So we’re dedicating a few services before then to delving into our values as we prepare for that process. We talked a while back about our compassion, one of our C values, so today’s sermon will be sponsored by our other two religious C values, courage and community.

Courage we define that as: To live lives of honesty, vulnerability, and beauty.

Community: To connect with joy, sorrow, and service with those whose lives we touch.

I love the way this church defines both courage and community because it’s different than the way they are often thought about and is certainly very different than how they are seen by the ideology that currently controls our national and Texas state governments.

That’s an ideology, an ideology that seems to view courage as seizing power over other people, projecting an air of invulnerability, dominance, and control, an ideology that wants to construct a society of hierarchy based on fear, division, and the subservience of the many to the very few, which is the antithesis of beloved community.

Well, for us, the courage to live our lives expressing our honest selves, our vulnerability, is the beautiful way in which we try to connect with joy, sorrow, and service with one another, and our world. And having a sense of belonging, that’s where we find the courage to embrace our true selves and thereby express our unique beauty and shine our light into the world. By these definitions courage and community are interrelated. It requires courage to forge true community within which we realize we are fragile and We need one another. And so often being in community, having that sense of deep belonging is the source of our courage to rise up against the kinds of extreme injustice and that totalitarian ideology we find ourselves confronting.

As in our poem earlier, in community, we are each other’s safety. We build each other’s stamina. We find the courage to choose our freedom. We keep each other’s souls intact.

When I was a young man, I was an early adapter of technology that would eventually become today’s smartphones. I had this personal digital assistant, a device that was only a little smaller than this hymnal called a handspring visor. You could keep your calendar in it, the contact information for friends and associates, make notes, that sort of thing. And there was this module you could get that would plug into it and allow you to use it as a basic cell phone, as well as do very rudimentary email on it. Yes, I was and still am a techno geek.

That was during the time that AIDS was ravaging the LGBTQ plus community, and there were no effective treatments. I was working in HIV-AIDS community-based research.

A few years later, I was upgrading to a new and improved device. When I realized that a bunch of the folks listed in my contacts had died, I removed 37 names that day. 37 folks who had died of AIDS not a single one was over 40 years old.

I’ve often thought since about how the communities most over run by aids in those days found the courage to not only survive that level of loss, but to also endure governmental and societal scorn and neglect while at the same time building institutions that would provide the research and services needed to protect and care for one another, to demand change, and eventually to survive the disease, at least as communities, even while we lost far too many beloved individuals.

The courage was communal. The LGBTQ plus community and the other communities so devastated by the disease found a way out of no way together by turning toward one another, both within their own communities, but also, also by forging new syblinghoods of solidarity and mutual aid between their communities and by do so forming an even larger “we” of each other’s thinking. The adaptation no oppressor could imagine.

And the belonging each of us found in that expanded community of shared vulnerability and combined strength helped each of us as individuals find the courage and resilience to keep going. Keep fighting, keep knowing something better was was coming.

Fast forward to today. I know what’s happening in America right now is frightening on an extremely broad scale and for so very many people and communities. It’s terrifying, and that is the intent. To keep us afraid, to wrench apart communities of potential solidarity, to rob us of any sense of being each other’s safety, to divide us, to zap our courage by attacking our faith in mutual support and belonging.

Yet, yet, my beloved’s, those C values, courage and community done with compassion are the antidote to this anti-Christ ideology that has taken hold in our country.

Now, I believe that there are two faith or wisdom stories that we too often hear in incomplete ways and that we must reclaim in their fullness in order to be able to live out those values.

And the first is that when Jesus said to love our enemies, he somehow meant that we are supposed to be nice to them, As if we’re to coddle those who would oppress us or others.

No, no. I believe that Jesus was expressing that fierce love that I called God and that simply demands we have the courage to include even the oppressor in our dream of the beloved community so we do not fall into the same exclusion and divisiveness that are the tactics of oppression.

But fierce love also demands that we offer ourselves first as shields and shelter for the oppressed and downtrodden. That we speak the Truth to those that would oppress even when it is hard, even when it is risky, even when they don’t want to hear it, that ultimately we hold them accountable, even while continuing to also hold them within the beloved community. Perhaps in a secured location where they can’t continue to do more harm to themselves or others. That was only partially a joke.

The full faith story tells us that kindness, compassion, are not the same as niceness.

The other wisdom story that we too often failed to tell in its fullness and therefore missed the wisdom contained within it is that of the hero’s journey made famous by author and scholar Joseph Campbell.

Too often though we don’t hear his version. Instead, we hear this truncated, capitalistic, individualistic version of the story where the hero goes off to the mountaintop or out into the wilderness and finds themselves, discovers their courage, and goes off all alone to slay the dragon.

But that leaves out essential elements of the story. It’s not telling the whole story. A hero comes out of a community. And yes, sometimes, sometimes we may need to go up to the mountaintop or out into the wilderness alone to dig deep within, discover our true nature and authentic self.

But the rest of the story is that we then return to the community where if anything we are now able to be even more vulnerable, more whole-hearted, more genuine with other folks. The hero’s journey begins and ends in community.

This is where we find our courage. This is how we’re able to shine our light most brightly in the world. In community. Building the beloved community, both requires and inspires bravery. That’s how courage and community are not only interconnected, they are interlocked.

And my beloveds, it is happening. The full wisdom stories are being made manifest in our world, courage, community, and compassion are ascendant. Just a few weeks ago, millions of people across the nation participated in no kings, events, and protests. Communities like Chicago, Portland, and many, many others are rising up to say no to the anti-democratic, cruel, morally bankrupt actions of ICE and other elements of this corrupt administration.

And they are doing so with humor, courage, not niceness, and a new found sense of solidarity among communities within those cities that have not always agreed with each other about everything, but no, know that we need each other to maintain our courage to first survive and then thrive.

Across the country, folks are joining together to fill up food banks and provide other forms of aid for those who are threatened by a completely unnecessary and immoral government shutdown. I am so proud of this church for participating in that community of mutual aid through the food drive we’re doing.

And just this past week, we had an election. In New York City, Virginia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, across the land. People came together to say no to divisiveness and a politics of anti-Christian, white nationalism, because I will not grace that ideology, white nationalism, with the term Christian any longer.

This is not a time for niceness, it is a time for truth-telling. And though the candidates and issues were very different, what they had in common were candidates who found the courage to campaign on their true authentic selves and beliefs and issues such as affordability, fairness, taking care of one another, in other words, the basic elements of creating and maintaining community.

Even more encouraging to me, MAGA forces spent millions running the same vile, despicable, anti-trans attack ads that had seemed to work for them in the prior election. This time though, this time those horrible ads targeting trans folks not only didn’t work, they seem to have backfired. People recoiled against the hate and bile. They realized that attacking the vulnerable isn’t courage. It is cowardice. This election chose true community over structures of dominance and hierarchy.

Now, all of this does not mean the struggle for love, justice, and democratic community is over, far from it. But what all the events I have just described do demonstrate, what people across this country are starting to discover, is that especially in these scary, challenging times, we don’t have to go it alone. We, none of us, can go it alone.

We choose our freedom together. Together, we know something better is coming. Well, that and folks are discovering Jesus never said love means play nice. The hero’s journey begins and ends in community. In community we can all be heroes we can all find our courage because courage isn’t facing our fears and hardships alone it is accepting and acknowledging that we need one another we are interconnected. We need community. We are each other’s safety, and we will never let go.
We will never let go.
We will never let go. We will never let go. Say it with me.
we will never let go.
Never.
Amen.

Extinguishing the Chalice

We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we hold in our hearts until we are together again.

Benediction

As we go out in our world now may we have the courage to become the voice and spirit of God. A fierce love calling us toward the beloved community becoming. Take courage. Know you carry this religious community with you throughout your days.
May the congregation say amen. And blessed be.
I love you fiercely.

I wish you much peace and much love.

SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 25 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. Chris Jimmerson
October 19, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Each year, we make celebration a spiritual practice. We celebrate the differences we make in our world together, the joy that comes from being a part of and supporting this religious community, and our gratitude for all life has to offer.

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

People of our time are losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating, we seek to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be considered is a passive state – it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or a spectacle. Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one’s actions.

– Abraham Joshua Heschel

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

Giving is a celebration. Pledging toward something lifts up and sings out our gratitude for that which bestows beauty and meaning to our lives.

Celebration is a gift we give ourselves and one another. It moves us toward transcendence and transformation.

And when we celebrate our own gifts, those we are blessed to have been created with possessing and those which we choose to bestow upon our world, we bless ourselves more than we can know.

Our gifts of self and self-resources have the power to change our world.

Celebrating them has the power to change us.

– Anonymous

Sermon

I’m still back on, “We are family.” Now you know why Rev. Chris never did musical theatre.

Welcome to Celebration Sunday church family.

You know, I have to admit that at a certain point I was thinking about this service and writing this sermon for it and was honestly kind of going, “I don’t feel like celebrating.”

There’s so much fascism.

Any of you ever feel like that sometimes these days?

If so, it’s natural and understandable, given all that’s happening. I mean, they’re pulling little children, US citizens, out of their homes at night, half clothed, and zip tying them in the streets.

They’re shooting peacefully protesting ministers in the face with pepper balls. Something for me to look forward to, I guess.

They’re removing rainbow street crossings and Black Lives Matter murals right here in Austin – how much more loudly can they make it clear that they want to erase entire groups of us.

Well, you all know. It goes on and on. We all could list so much happening that that violates the very ideas of love and justice.

Any yet, YET love and justice continue rise up, continue to reassert themselves over and over again in our world.

Just look at yesterday, when millions upon millions showed up across the country to declare, “We will not have a king. We will not have fascism.”

Across the country, people are joining together to reclaim love, justice and democracy.

And this church, this religious community can celebrate that we have been, are, and will continue to be a vital part of that movement – that great coming together.

We are showing up. We are providing sanctuary for the weary. We are doing our part to bring fierce love to bear in our world.

Together, we ARE living love.

Together, we ARE nourishing souls, transforming lives, and doing justice to build the beloved community!

Together, we ARE religious family, and we never stop thinking about tomorrow, so as our story earlier titled “WE ARE TOGETHER” says, “If storm clouds gather, and we’re caught in the rain, let’s splash through the puddles till the sun shines again.”

Gotta use a little British there so it’ll rhyme better.

And so, my beloveds, we must still celebrate. We have much to celebrate.

Now, before I go into all that we have to celebrate today, I want to take just a moment to talk about why it is so important – why we must celebrate.

You see, to build the spiritual fortitude we need to keep living our religious values and our mission in our world up against such great challenges, we simply must allow ourselves to experience joy along the way.

We cannot possibly sustain our efforts, unless we pause to celebrate and to rest sometimes.

Celebrating has been found to boost our morale, enhance our sense of joy and emotional well-being, foster unity among groups and communities, and to cultivate gratitude for the many blessings in our lives so that we also get the multiple benefits associated with gratitude.

And we get the benefits of celebrating not only when we celebrate in community, as we are today, but also when we celebrate as individuals.

And even from celebrating seemingly small events in life.

So stop to give yourself a fist pump or celebration dance even over a small accomplishment at work or a success with parenting!

OK, so now I will get on with celebrating you, us, this religious community – First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin.

If you are new to the church and visiting with today, please bear with me as I brag a little about all of the amazing things the folks at this church are doing. I hope maybe you will hear about something that you might like to explore further.

Of course, since Celebration Sunday is intended to be the premier event of our pledge campaign for 2026, we start by celebrating all of you who are thinking about tomorrow by committing toward making sure that this church continues to live love and do justice well into the future.

As you heard, we are about 91% percent of the way toward our pledge goal, with $749,000 already committed toward supporting that mission next year!

And that truly is worth celebrating!

Even more, I believe, I celebrate, we can celebrate that we will get the rest of the way toward our goal of $825,000 – because I know how very committed this religious community is to living out our mission.

I think the first word in that mission may be the most important, because we know that no matter how much we try to do as individuals, we can do so much more, we have so much more power together.

This is why we support the church.

Again, as our story put it, “We may travel alone, free as birds in the sky, but flocking together, we soar and we fly.”

Here is just some of what we do together as a religious family that is more than worth supporting and celebrating.

In the past year, we have become a spiritual home and refuge for over 50 new members. We are seeing an average of 20 to 40 folks who are new to the church visit our worship services in person each week. The online version of our worship services is averaging 500 to over 1000 views per week.

We continue to expand and diversify our worship and music, both in content and style, to become more welcoming and inclusive of folks with wide varieties of life experiences.

And, our services and music videos have been picked up and rebroadcast by smaller Unitarian Universalist Communities from throughout the country.

Our children and youth religious education programs are growing and growing stronger!

We’ve added a number of adult religious education programs.

Our small group ministries and spiritual groups now have about 250 total participants, the largest number in our history.

From our story once again, “Walking all together, on paths as yet unknown, may lead us to places that feel just like home.”

To help bring us together and feel more at home, our church connections team is helping more and more folks get involved more deeply in church life, and we have revitalized our Fun and Fellowship Team to help us celebrate and have communal fun and joy more and more often.

Our Senior Lunches are going strong, and we have a number of other breakfast and dinner groups, creating even more fellowship and communal relationships.

We have a strong and active vegan group and have formed our own chapter of the Unitarian Universalist Animal Ministry.

I recently learned that our terrific Brian and Sharon Moore Art Gallery has bookings out through 2027!

AND, we have grown our culture of caring within our religious community, expanding our caring companions activities that provide lay pastoral support, our outreach program, our peer support groups, our memorial services support. In fact, all of our First UU Cares ministries are thriving.

“On our own, we’re special, and we can chase our dream, but when we join up, hand in hand, together, we’re a team.”

And together, we are bringing fierce love into our larger community and our world.

We have 159 folks in our online social action group. And these folks are extremely active, living our mission through a multitude of social justice activities and events.

Our amazing social action leader sent out over 70 rapid response requests and calls to action in the past year. Because our state legislature was often in session, many of those requests involved multiple actions, and I am so proud that for each of those actions multiple members of this Church responded.

That is living fierce love in our world!

And each of our areas of social action focus – reproductive justice, LGBTQI+ justice, immigration justice, racial justice, the climate, voting and democracy – each of these social action pillars have also been extremely active, working for love and justice!

That is building the Beloved Community.

“We can change the world with the power of words. Let’s all rock the boat, so our voices are heard!” Sol picked a great story book today, didn’t they?

Well, these are only a few of the ministries and programs of this church that we celebrate today and that your pledges make possible!

There are so many more, including, of course, Mary and our wonderful stewardship team that have made this celebration possible.

If I haven’t mentioned one of the wonderful things you’re involved with in the church, please know that we celebrate you too – it’s just if I mentioned every single terrific thing folks in this church are doing we would have to be here through next Sunday, but Mary wants me to let you go as early as possible so you can all have lunch together and a party to celebrate some more.

Please feel free to continue sharing and celebrating all of these ways we are living our faith, our values, our mission as a religious community.

So, celebrate yourselves and the good you are and do in the world.

The good we do together.

We ARE together.

We ARE family.

We ARE thinking about tomorrow, even as we ground ourselves in the present moment to meet the challenges that fierce love demands of us right now.

Thank you for your commitment.

Thank you for you. Thank you for joining together to create this amazing community of faith and fierce love that we call First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin.

This church cannot exist without you.

Together, you ARE the church.

And that is worth celebrating!

Amen. Blessed Be

Extinguishing the Chalice

We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we hold in our hearts until we are together again.

Benediction

Let us go out now and celebrate together.

Celebrate all we have done together.

Celebrate all we have yet to do together but will.

Celebrate lives of living love.

Celebrate the gifts with which we have been blessed and those we are blessed to be able to give.

Amen. Blessed be. Go celebrate!

SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 25 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. Chris Jimmerson
October 5, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

One of the religious values our church community vows to uphold is compassion, which we define as “to treat ourselves and others with love.” How does treating ourselves with love open us to acting with compassion toward others?

Chalice Lighting

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

Call to Worship

Our Call to Worship this morning is based upon First UU Church of Austin’s religious values.

NOW LET US WORSHIP TOGETHER.
Now let us celebrate our highest values.

TRANSCENDENCE
To connect with wonder and awe of the unity of life

COMMUNITY
To connect with joy, sorrow, and service with those whose lives we touch

COMPASSION
To treat ourselves and others with love

COURAGE
To live lives of honesty, vulnerability, and beauty

TRANSFORMATION
To pursue the growth that changes our lives and heals our world

NOW WE RAISE UP THAT WHICH WE HOLD AS ULTIMATE AND LARGER THAN OURSELVES.

Now, we worship together.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

There is no greater remedy for helplessness than helping someone else, no greater salve for sorrow than according gladness to another. What makes life livable despite the cruelties of chance – the accident, the wildfire, the random intracellular mutation – are these little acts of mercy, of tenderness, the small clear voice rising over the cacophony of the quarrelsome, over the complaint choir of the cynics, to insist again and again that the world is beautiful and full of kindness.

– Maria Popova

Sermon

During what turned out to be the last time my late spouse Wayne was in the hospital, I left work at the church here one day and went up to visit with him in his room.

I got there only to encounter him chastising a nurse over the fact that he was in one of those hospital beds with the rails, and an alarm that would go off rather loudly if he tried to get out of the bed by himself to go to the bathroom or something like that.

He was feeling terrible so understandably was not exactly being being very nice, expressing himself in no uncertain terms, some of which I cannot use here in the sacred space of our sanctuary.

His nurse kept a little smile on her face, listening to him until he seemed to have finished, then said, “I understand. I’ve been in one of those beds myself, and I still can’t let you get up on your own because you’re at a high risk for falling, and I would be at high risk for losing my license.”

So then, Wayne tried pulling rank, informing her that he was a doctor, and that he would be speaking with his hospital physicians and telling them that he didn’t think that bed alarm was really necessary.

Still smiling slightly, she informed him that he could go right ahead, that in her experience she knew more about bedside care then the doctors did, and that she was pretty sure they wouldn’t remove the order unless she thought it was OK. She didn’t because she didn’t want him to hurt himself and make himself feel even worse.

So then he said he was going to demand a different nurse, to which she said that he could go right ahead, that all of the nurses would tell him the same thing and that by the way she supervised the other nurses.

Finally, he threatened to intentionally set the bed alarm off all day and all night until it drove them crazy and they let him get up on his own. She again replied, “Go right ahead. There are more of us, and we will outlast you, and if we have to, we’ll get out the bed restraints.”

Wayne couldn’t help himself; he giggled a little at the fact that she wasn’t backing down and that she knew it was never going to get to that point.

She saw that, giggled too, and said, “so don’t make me spank you.”

Well, the next time I was there when that same nurse was on duty, they had become the biggest of buddies.

On the day that he was released from the hospital so I could take him home, she insisted on being the one to take him down to our car. They hugged and wished each other well as she helped him out of a wheelchair and into the car.

The spiritual theme were exploring this month in our religious education, classes and small group ministries is “cultivating compassion”. We’re putting a link in each Friday newsletter to a terrific packet of information on our monthly theme, in case you would like to delve into it even further.

As you may have noted in our call to worship we read together earlier, Compassion is one of our church’s religious values.

We describe compassion as “to treat ourselves and others with love”

I love that, because it turns our value of compassion into an action – something we must do.

Compassion then is really about living love — that sounds familiar – the agape love, the fierce love, the divine love for humanity and all that is we have been talking about so much here at the church.

Now, today, I’ll concentrate mostly on that part about self compassion – treating ourselves with love.

I focus on self compassion not because our compassion for others in our world is not vital – indeed it is needed now more than ever – I focus on it because until we learn to love ourselves fully, we cannot love our world fully.

Self compassion is how we sustain our passion for social justice.

We have to put on our own oxygen mask first.

Acting with compassion toward ourselves is spiritual practice for offering compassion to others, even those whom we find difficult or with whom we disagree.

I began with that story about Wayne’s nurse, because she so beautifully demonstrated an essential way we practice self compassion – treat ourselves with love.

She set a clear boundary.

She said “no” to him getting out of that bed on his own. She said “yes” to to protecting her own license and “yes” to providing the best care to him that she possibly could with some limits around approaching things with a sense of equality, equanimity, and even humor between them.

Having such a clear boundary, let her empathize with how having been sick for so long he couldn’t be at his best or sweetest and to understand how he might feeling angry over such a loss of personal agency.

By setting a boundary that was compassionate for herself, it allowed her to treat him with love rather than resentment over his words.

And in doing so, she opened up this sense of spaciousness within which a beautiful new relationship between them could emerge.

Researcher and author Dr. Brene Bown says, “Compassionate people ask for what they need. They say no when they need to, and when they say yes, they mean it. They’re compassionate because their boundaries keep them out of resentment.”

Practicing self-compassion begins with setting firm, clear boundaries: knowing what is important to us and what really is not; claiming our own needs and desires while knowing the difference between them and releasing all else; being aware of that to which we must say, “no”, and, just as importantly, that to which we can joyfully say “yes”. Once our boundaries are clear, it leaves open a remaining spaciousness within which our compassion for others can be boundless.

Now, in addition to setting boundaries, here are a few other self compassion practices.

The first of them is to speak to ourselves as we would to a close friend. Most of us would not say to a friend or loved one who was experiencing a challenging life situation, “Well that’s because you’re a screw up and it’s all your fault. You should be ashamed.”

Why do we so often say something much like this to ourselves! Can we instead offer ourselves the comfort and support we would to a good friend?

Next – embrace and offer compassion to our whole selves, including the parts of ourselves that we may not be so proud of or like so much, even if that’s a past self. After all we are each an ever evolving process, so we never really leave behind who we used to be entirely.

Here’s an example of how I had to do this during my formation as a Unitarian Universalist minister.

I was raised in a fundamentalist southern Baptist Church as a young child. Later, I rejected that religious belief system into which I’d even been baptized!

I rejected it because it’s tenants seemed, well, untenable to me.

The problem was, for many years I also rejected all spirituality along with it because I had felt hurt by that religion.

So, for hot minute after I became a Unitarian Universalist, when someone would ask me about my faith, it would go something like this.

“So, Unitarian Universalist. Never heard of that. Is that a real religion?”

To which I would reply something like, “Well, yes. But we’re based heavily in reason and science and don’t believe in a lot of hocus-pocus, supernatural stuff. Hell, we don’t even believe in hell.”

And then they would usually say, “Really? Then how do you get people to give money?”

Our religious self can’t be only about what we’re not anymore.

To fully become a UU minister, I had to forgive and direct compassion toward that little boy who had gotten baptized in the Baptist Church because he wanted to belong so much and who then had to process having felt hurt by religion, once he finally found one where he did belong.

I had to reclaim that little guy and his baptism within holiness for myself.

Next – the science shows that engaging in spiritual practices such as prayer or meditation, especially the Metta meditation we did together earlier, grounds us in the present moment and gives us a sense of our vast interconnectedness with one another and all that is, which is so necessary for compassion and forgiveness toward both ourselves and others.

Buddhist activist, scholar and author, JoAnna Macy says, “You need that wisdom, that insight into the mutual belonging of everything that is interwoven as it is in the web of life.

And when you have that, you see, you know that this is not a war between the good guys and the bad guys, but that the line between good and evil runs through the landscape of every human heart.

And we are so interwoven in the web of life that even the smallest act with clear intention has repercussions through that web that we can barely see.”

Finally, maintaining an awareness that there is this really cool synergy between self compassion and practicing compassion more generally can help keep us focused.

Self-compassion generates compassion for others, as we’ve been discussing.

Acting compassionately toward others benefits us in multiple ways and nourishes our own love of self.

As our reading earlier said, “There is no greater remedy for helplessness than helping someone else, no greater salve for sorrow than according gladness to another.”

Research indicates that the benefits of practicing compassion include:

Psychological and Relational benefits such as reduced stressed and anxiety, emotional resilience, increased life satisfaction, greater feelings of self- worth, less depression, deeper and more authentic relationships.

Physical benefits have also been found like lower blood pressure, reductions in chronic disease, improved immune function, quicker recovery from illness, AND increased longevity”

In the realm of psychological benefits, a recent New York Times article detailed how setting a self-compassionate boundary around our busyness, which we can so easily think is a sign of our worth, saying no to some of the demands on our time, can allow for the rest, relaxation, and contemplation that can free up space for vastly increased creativity and innovation.

We’re taught to feel selfish and guilty about saying “no”, and yet, sometimes, we do more creative good through saying “no.”

Other research has found that this one self-compassionate boundary, setting limits on our own time, has myriad mental and physical health benefits AND it opens up this spaciousness within us in which we are far more able to notice the needs and suffering of others and ourselves and are thus far more likely to act with compassion.

In that same vein, there is even research that says that when we act on compassion often enough, it actually rewires our brains, creates this neuroplasticity through which we become more empathetic and even more prone to being compassionate.

Since I am reclaiming with self-compassion that little religious guy who got baptized all those years ago, I’m going to think of that as a “God-given compassion feedback loop.”

• Setting boundaries.
• Speaking to ourselves as we would a close friend.
• Embracing our whole selves with love.
• Engaging in spiritual practices
• Remaining mindful of the interdependent nature of self compassion and compassion for all.

My Beloveds, if you hear nothing else today, hear this: 

Self-compassion is a sacred act. We cannot truly treat others with love until we treat ourselves with love.

When we treat ourselves with love, we find we must treat others with love. If God is an ocean of fierce love that flows through our universe, then this sacred act is how we manifest God within us, among us, and beyond us.

Hallelujah.

Extinguishing the Chalice

We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we hold in our hearts until we are together again.

Benediction

For our benediction today, I invite you to find a comfortable position, take a deep breath, and then repeat after me:

May I be well; may all be well.

May I experience loving kindness

May all experience loving kindness.

May I dwell in peace and beauty.

May all dwell in peace and beauty.

Amen. Go in peace.

SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 25 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

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