Beauty amongst the thorns

June 10, 2019 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
June 9, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Even in life’s challenging and difficult times, we may still experience beauty; sometimes when it is least expected. And that, in turn, can help us through such times.

Call to Worship

By Rev. Mary Katherine Morn

Beauty does more than awaken us.
It also admonishes us.
It demands something…
We are here, in religious community, not to hide from the anguished cries or the tender lullabies.
We are here, in religious community, not to protect our hearts from breaking.
We are here together to borrow courage for the task of coming alive.
We are here so that together we might heed the admonitions of beauty.
Answer its call to create; protect; and preserve.

Reading

John O’Donohue

It’s the question of beauty … there are individuals holding out on front lines, holding the humane tissue alive in areas of ultimate barbarity,where things are visible that the human eye should never see. And they’re able to sustain it, because there is, in them, some kind of sense of beauty that knows the horizon that we are really ca!led to in some way. I love Pascal’s phrase, that you should always keep something beautiful in your mind. And I have often – like in times when it’s been really difficult for me, if you can keep some kind of little contour that you can glimpse sideways at, now and again, you can endure great bleakness.

Sermon

“Where beauty is apparent, we are to enjoy it.
Where there is beauty hidden, we are to unveil it.
Where there is beauty defaced, we are to restore it.
Where there is no beauty at all, we are to create it.”

I loved that quote from the late minister, theologian and social justice activist Robert McAfee Brown.

I love it, because I think it captures so well the complex and profound ways in which we are called to interact with beauty in our world.

Beauty is the monthly theme we are exploring in our religious education classes and activities this June, so let’s take a bit of time to explore beauty together in worship this morning also.

Research has even begun to show that attentiveness to beauty may be beneficial us to psychologically and physically. Most of the studies have been based upon experiences of beauty in nature; however, now the research has begun to expand to such experiences through the arts and music.

Here are just some of the potential benefits that have been found:

Emotional well being.
Pro-sociality – having concern for others.
Greater life satisfaction.
Reduced stress.
Lower heart rate and blood pressure.

Here is how philosopher, futurist and social media and television personality, Jason Silva says that “Beauty Can Heal Us”.

Silva video

“Beauty can shake us out of our jadedness … Let the music make you cry … gaze upon the fading sunset.”

So, first, “where beauty is apparent, we are to enjoy it”.

That seems simple enough, yet how often do we allow ourselves to pay attention to and enjoy that which we find beautiful? How often to we explicitly set aside time for it in our daily lives?

I know for me, as some of you have heard me share before, one of my spiritual practices, one of the things that keeps me grounded and relieves stress, is to go on a meditative hike in one of our many local nature areas – to allow myself to just get absorbed in observing the beauty of nature.

And yet, in the times that are challenging and difficult, the times when I need it most, I am also most likely to put off this practice that so soothes and relaxes me. I have to remind myself to make the time to experience the beauty that will help me through such difficulties.

“Beauty can shake us out of our jadedness … Let the music make you cry … gaze upon the fading sunset”, Chris.

It is so hard to practice what I preach sometimes, I’ll tell you!

Next, “where there is beauty hidden, we are to unveil it.

It is easier, I think, for us to find beauty in the places that have been more traditionally associated with it – nature, the mountains, the oceanside, a spectacular sunset, those we love, the music that moves us, the work of art that takes our breath away, a stunning moment in a play or movie or dance performance, as just a few examples.

It can be harder to see the beauty in what we might otherwise consider unattractive or mundane. And yet, if we look for it, the beauty is likely always there in these places too.

When I was in seminary, they had us do an exercise called a beauty walk that was based on a Native American tradition. They had us go to an area we would not normally associate with beauty and walk through it slowly, being attentive to the potential for beauty we might have missed before, bringing a camera to take pictures of what we found.

I went to a warehouse/industrial area and was surprised to discover that it was teaming with life and elements of beauty.

Ants dwelling in the cracks in the sidewalk.
Flowers finding places to bloom even amongst all the metal and concrete.
Birds dwelling everywhere they could find.
The interplay between the bright colors with which people had painted some of the buildings.
Landscaping people had created to surround themselves with beauty when they sat at their outside lunch table.
Vegetable gardens people had grown in plots they had created outside the warehouses in which they worked.

My beloveds, beauty surrounds us, both in the classical ways in which we have conceptualized it and in places we might least expect it, as well as within so many of the seemingly mundane moments of our every day lives.

I invite you to try the beauty walk exercise and see what hidden beauty you may unveil.

Here is a short video that I think captures this idea that beauty is to be found in the sublime, as well as in the more mundane.

Video

Finally, “Where there is beauty defaced, we are to restore it. Where there is no beauty at all, we are to create it.”

I think this is at least partially what our call to worship you all read with Mary Jane earlier is expressing.

Our Unitarian Universalist minister, Rev. Sean Dennison, says it like this:

“The ability to see beauty is the beginning of our moral sensibility. What we believe is beautiful we will not wantonly destroy. With this, we are reminded that beauty does more than soothe and heal. It demands. It creates commitment. It doesn’t just say, ‘Love and appreciate me.’ It says, ‘Protect me! Fight for me!'”

So yes, beauty is there for us to experience it with awe and joy. Beauty is there to comfort us and sustain us in our struggles.

And, our experiences of beauty also call us to create more of it – to restore it when it has been defaced and to create it where it has not yet existed.

Beauty calls us to love and justice. It calls us to leave our world more beautiful than the one into which we were born.

And with all of the ugliness, all of the beauty defaced in our world today, I know, for me, it can sometimes be hard to hold on to a vision of that more beautiful world, that world toward which beauty beckons us.

For me, what would be beautiful, what beauty calls us to create, is a world in which children coming to the U.S. after fleeing persecution with their parents are welcomed with loving open arms rather than being torn away from their parents and locked in cages.

Beautiful would be a world in which we have answered the call to abolish immigrant concentration camps and prisons, and children no longer die while under the custody of our government.

Beautiful will be when Alirio, who has taken sanctuary here in our church, and Hilda and her son Ivan at St. Andrews, are all free and no longer fear for their lives.

Better yet, what would be beautiful, what beauty calls us to envision is a world in which we have helped to create conditions in people’s homelands that are safe, secure and prosperous.

Beauty beckons us to create a world in which our own children can attend schools that provide safety, equity, a caring loving environment. Schools where our 5 and 6 year olds and on up no longer have to live in fear and participate in mass shooter drills.

Beautiful will be when we have put into place a federal administration and state governments that all stand up for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersexed folks rather than encouraging discrimination against us by making it legal.

Beauty calls us to build a world in which transgender and all queer folks are able to live out loud as a our true and beautiful selves without fearing violence or even death at hands of hatred and bigotry.

Beauty will happen when women and all people capable of bearing a child have control over their own bodies in all states and regions of our country. Beauty calls us the cast the patriarchy upon the ash heap of history.

Beautiful will be a time when black mothers and fathers no longer have to feel terror over the prospect of their children and loved ones being shot by the very law enforcement that is supposed to protect and serve.

A criminal justice system that actually is just – that would be beautiful, and beauty is begging us to create it.

Beautiful would be Muslims in the U.S. and ALL people of faith living without fear and coexisting in peace.

Each of us living our own religious beliefs without trying to force them upon others. How beautiful would that be?

Beautiful would be saving our planet, bringing democracy to our work places, restoring our institutions of representative democracy to their proper balances of power.

Beautiful would be eliminating poverty and homelessness, wiping out economic and wealth inequality, dismantling white supremacy culture.

Beauty calls us, it lures us to these and all forms of love and justice.

OK, now just go do all of that, and I’ll see you next week.

I think one of the places beauty is too often hidden and must be unveiled is our inability sometimes to recognize our own beauty.

We must know our own beauty to be fully able to experience the beauty in our world, restore that which has been lost and create that beauty which has not yet become.

To build the beloved community, to create that world about which we dream, we must overcome the many messages that we receive telling us we are not enough, not beautiful as we are.

Certainly, our cultural standards for physical beauty, especially for women, exclude all but a small segment of the white European descendent population.

Even more so though, we are discouraged from expressing the beautiful unique wholeness that is each of us.

Here is a poem by Maya Angelou that I think expresses this idea so well.

PHENOMENAL WOMAN
by Maya Angelou

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I’m telling lies.
I say,
It’s in the reach of my arms,
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It’s the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can’t touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them,
They say they still can’t see.
I say,
It’s in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

Now you understand
Just why my head’s not bowed.
I don’t shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing,
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It’s in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair,
the palm of my hand,
The need for my care.
‘Cause I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

My beloveds, you are beautiful.

You are phenomenal.

You hold within you your own unique spark of the divine. You have your own unique set of gifts that only you can bring into our world.

And as a religious community, as a religious faith, we may combine together each of our unique sparks of the divine, blend together our unique gifts to answer the call of beauty.

Together, may we radiate the divine our into our world, restoring beauty where it has been defaced, creating beauty where it has yet to become.

Amen.

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

SERMON INDEX

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PODCASTS

Curiouser and Curiouser

May 6, 2019 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

Click on the Play Button Above to Listen to the Service Recording.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
May 5, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

As a people who have always been seekers of truth and askers of questions more profound than answers, following our curiosity can be a spiritual discipline for Unitarian Universalists.

Call to Worship

LET US BE CURIOUS
Alexis Engelbrecht

Let us be curious.
May we contemplate what we believe and why.
Let us be curious.
May we inquire to learn more about beliefs and experiences different from our own.
Let us be curious.
May we explore the world around us, so that we might broaden our awareness and appreciate the beauty that is, while exploring what else might be.

Reading
Rainer Maria Rilke

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.
Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Sermon

Dr. Michelle Khine had a problem.

Dr. Khine is a researcher whose scientific interest, life long empirical curiosity, involves developing nanotechnology that can be used for healthcare purposes.

Her problem was that at the time, her work with such nanotechnology required a lab with sophisticated equipment that allowed doing the work at the microscopic level.

She had just changed jobs, but the lab at the new job that she had been promised was nowhere near ready. In fact, it appeared to be months away from being equipped and useable.

How would she continue her work and meet the requirements of the grants to fund it that she was bringing with her? Without the equipment she needed to work on a microscopic level, all seemed to be lost.

Then, she remembered a toy from her childhood called, “Shrinky Dinks”.
Shrinky Dink’s are polystyrene sheets that can be cut into various shapes, colored and then placed in an oven, where they will shrink into small, hard plates without losing their original shape and characteristics.

Michelle Khine was curious whether she could use this process to allow her to do her work starting on a larger scale and then shrink everything down, thereby avoiding the need for the expensive lab equipment required to work at the microscopic level.

And thus was born the Shrinky-Dink microfluidics: 3D polystyrene chip.

And thus, did curiosity allow Dr. Khine to save her nanotechnology career with a toy from her childhood.

Dr. Khine’s story, I think, is a wonderful illustration of the power of our human capacity for curiosity. Among other benefits, curiosity is the source of our creative potential.

This month, our lifespan faith development activities and religious education classes are exploring the concept of curiosity, and I thought it would be a great topic for us to examine together for a while this morning.

After all, Unitarian Universalists come from a long tradition of being the
questioners and the curious – those for whom revelation is never sealed but rather is continuously unfolding and therefore always to be explored anew.

The Unitarians got curious about how God as a trinity could make any possible sense and eventually rejected this idea, among several others that had been and often remain Christian dogma.

The Universalists became curious about how a supposed all loving God could condemn those who were supposedly so loved to bum in hell for all eternity.

Eventually, some Universalists came to reject hell altogether, while others thought that sinners might burn in hell for some unspecified time period before God would lift them out of the flames so that they did not have to burn painfully for the rest of all eternity.

I’m glad we continued to cultivate our sense of curiosity and don’t believe that anymore.

Now, some aspects of religion have actually discouraged curiosity – witness the Adam and Eve story about partaking of the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge for example – but all in all, I think both religion and science stem from our curiosity about our human condition, the world and universe in which we find ourselves and the larger questions of meaning in life, death, beauty, truth and ethics.

And they are at times trying to get at, different types of questions and certainly in different ways. As such, I don’t think the commonly held perception that science and religion have to stand in opposition to one another is necessarily true. I think at times they might indeed inform and enhance each other.

Certainly, through science, we have discovered changes that moved us from cave dwelling to landing on the moon to having a phone in our pockets more powerful than the original computers and on and on and it has been our curiosity that has driven our science.

So why do we humans have such a curious nature. After all, our curiosity drives us to spend time exploring not just those big questions I was just talking about, but also to spend time exploring seemingly unproductive curiosities like reading news about people we will never meet, watching movies and reading stories about people who do not really exist, exploring places we will never visit again and learning about topics that seem to have no practical use in our daily lives, just to name a few.

Well one evolutionary theory is that it stems from a trait we evolved called “neoteny”, which means that even as adults we retain more juvenile characteristics compared to other mammals, such as being relatively hairless and having brains relatively large in relation to our body size.

And this neoteny, while making us weaker than our primate cousins, has given us our lifelong playfulness, curiosity and deep sense of attachment to one another, all of which have provided survival advantages.

And it turns out that in a complex world, even those seemingly unproductive curiosities we are prone to explore that I mentioned earlier provide an advantage. They do so by keeping our brains open to novelty and new learning, so that we do not remain stuck in old but useless thinking algorithms when we encounter new challenges or threats.

What may have seemed to be useless learning in our past can turn out to be very useful knowledge later on.

Curiosity then is what keeps our learning alive and drives us to engage our full learning capacity.

As Albert Einstein once said it, “I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious.”

And it turns out that some research has found that maintaining that passionate curiosity is associated with better health and greater longevity, as well as developing and retaining higher intelligence.

In other studies, people who were actively curious about others more easily established close relationships, found greater satisfaction in their relationships and were less likely to express racism and other forms of prejudice.

Other studies found engaging with novelty and remaining curious are correlated with a sense of overall life fulfillment and happiness.

Now, while it is important to note that “associated” or “correlated” does not establish cause and effect, still these studies might give us reason to consider whether actively keeping our sense of curiosity alive might be good for us.

Here are a few practices in which can engage that may help us do that. For a faith steeped in questions more profound than answers, we might even call them spiritual practices.

1. Reconnect with play. Children are naturally curious, and play is one of the ways that as children we explore ourselves and the world about which we are learning.
We too often lose our our sense of play as adults; however, even as adults, play can still open up novelty for us.
And actually one good way to engage with play is to be around and play with children. They can teach us how to do it again!
One warning though, those curious children may surprise you.
I loved one story I found about a little boy who was curious about why his mother’s hair was beginning to turn grey.
So, one day, when they were at the playground and his mom was playing seesaw with him, he asked her, “Mommy, why are some of your hairs turning grey?”
Thinking she might use this playful occasion as a teaching lesson, the mom replied, “It’s because of you dear. Every time you do something bad one of my hairs turns grey.”
“Oh,” replied the little boy innocently, “Now I know why grandma has only grey hairs on her head.”
2. Intentionally building our knowledge enhances our curiosity to learn even more reading, attending talks, watching documentaries, traveling to new places, making lists of things we want to explore for a few examples. Studies have found the larger our knowledge base, the more likely we will be curious to learn even more.
3. Get comfortable with uncertainty and being uncomfortable. Being curious by necessity involves exploring the unknown, and while novelty and surprise can cause us tension, they are also some our greatest sources of joy and learning.
For folks who watch sports for example, part of the enjoyment is in the tension of not knowing what the ultimate outcome of the game will be.
4. In every conversation, think of questions too ask, not things to say next. Listening more activates our curiosity and can add much greater depth to our conversations and relationships.

So those are just a few of the ways I found that we can keep our sense of curiosity alive and fulfilling.

Now, with the exception of religion and sometimes play, the ways we can pursue our curiosity and practice keeping it alive about which I have spoken so far have been in terms of very concrete and literal thinking.

I want to turn now to some more emotional, embodied and metaphorical ways we can both explore that about which we are curious and also keep our curiosity active.

There are times when we are curious about things that we either do not have the ability to fully understand because of our current scientific limits or that are just not as easily understood and expressed on a concrete and literal level.

Love, beauty, meaning, morality, justice and injustice, human cruelty and human altruism, God or that which is ultimate, to name just a few examples – these are just a few of our human curiosities that may be further explored metaphorically.

And one way that we explore these types of interests is through storytelling. Whether told orally, written, expressed through television, movies theatre or the opera, the power of stories is that they help us understand things that may require us to go beyond literal, intellectual thinking. They help us approach matters that can only be pointed at metaphorically and that must be felt in our bodies, hearts and souls in order to better grasp at their meaning.

And by the way, you can experience the power of storytelling, at an event called, “Story Telling Under the Stars,” here at the church, on our courtyard at 6:30 p.lU. this evening.

Likewise, the visual arts, poetry, music, dance and the other performing arts can also help us to experience that about which we are curious but that may be best approached through metaphor. These too can move us beyond only the intellectual and help with that which requires the engagement of our emotions and senses.

And all of these not only help us with that about which we may be curious but need more than only a literal approach, they also stimulate our curiosity even further.

How often has reading a good fictional book gotten you interested in exploring some subject brought up within the story?
Or seeing a movie gets us interested in visiting a place we have never traveled to before.
Or an engaging night at the theatre get us interested in a moral issue we had never thought much about, etc.

Experiences of storytelling, music and the arts then are other vital ways in which we cultivate and expand our curiosity.

My friends, we were meant to be curious creatures.
And science and religion are important.
Learning about the really big stuff matters.

But so too does the more mundane – something in which you get interested may seem to have little practical value in that moment, but go ahead and pursue your curiosity about it anyway.

Later on, it may well have value you would have never anticipated. At the very least it will keep your thinking adaptable and open to novelty.

So, yes, please do keep coming to church! Yes, keep up with what science is teaching us.

But also read that story about people you likely will never meet, attend that concert featuring music that is new to you, sing out loud, read up on shrinky-dink microfluidics just because your curious about it, spend hours admiring your favorite artwork, explore lands to which you may never return, start a new hobby just because it interests you, play with the abandonment of small children.

These too are spiritual work because they stimulate our curiosity and keep it alive and well.

Or as Kurt Vonnegut put it, “We are here on earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.”

Benediction

As we go out into our world now, may we go with the courage to pursue the curiosity that transforms us and moves us toward wholeness, compassion and transcendence.
May we carry the spirit of this, our beloved religious community with us until next we gather again.
May the congregation say, “Amen” and “Blessed Be”.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

The Holiness of Wholeness

April 1, 2019 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
March 31, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

How do we nurture our whole selves, especially those parts of ourselves that we may have been taught were no acceptable? How do we create communities and a society that are more whole?

Call to Worship

ALL OF YOU IS HOLY
Anonymous

Forget about enlightenment,
Sit down wherever you are,
and listen to the wind that is singing in your veins.

Feel the longing, the fear, the love in your bones.

Open your heart to who you are, right now,
not who you’d like to be,
not the saint you’re striving to become,
but the being right here before you, inside you… All of you is holy.

You’re already more and less
Than whatever you can know.
Breathe out, Look in, Let go.

Reading

WHOLENESS
Parker Palmer

If I am to let my life speak things I want to hear, …
I must also let it speak things I do not want to hear and would never tell anyone else!

My life is not only about my strengths and virtues;
it is also about my liabilities and my limits, my trespasses and my shadow.

An inevitable, though often ignored, dimension of the quest for ‘wholeness’ is that we must embrace what we dislike or find shameful about ourselves as well as what we are confident and proud of.

Sermon

“Making the World Whole Again” Video

During the upcoming month, our Lifespan Faith Development ministries and religious education classes will be exploring the topic of “wholeness”.

How do we become our whole selves?

What are some ways we can bring wholeness to our relationships with those whom we love?

How do we create wholeness and holiness within this, our beloved religious community?

In our larger community?

Our society?

Our world?

One of the things I loved about the video with which we started just now is how, among other things, it points toward one of the paradoxes we encounter when we start examining this idea of wholeness.

In order to help make our communities and our world more whole, we must move toward wholeness ourselves as individuals.

And yet, it can be so difficult to do that when our society and our world can seem so fragmented and tom apart sometimes.

So our journey toward wholeness, by necessity, is both an individual trek and yet a passage that must also be done in relationship and community with others and our world.

Now, it might help to take a moment to examine what we mean by wholeness or to become our whole selves.

There were several quotes that I found reading the materials for this topic that might be helpful.

“Happiness is just one part of our existence, wholeness is to embrace all that is within us. It’s to embrace our shadow qualities, to embrace our self-doubt, fear, anxiety, as well as the brightness, joy, and curiosity. It is all welcome”.

That’s from Dan Putt, a consultant and entrepreneur who works with folks on developing the ability to take risks and embrace change.

That quote, and the reading from Parker Palmer that Carol read for us earlier I think both remind us about an aspect of finding wholeness that can be difficult – embracing and accepting the parts of ourselves that we do not like as much; the things we are not as good at; the sides of ourselves that might make us feel vulnerable about being judged by others.

Part of learning to be whole is loving even the parts of ourselves that we may not like or that cause us challenges sometimes.

My parents divorced when I was twelve, and my mom ended up having to work more than full-time to make ends meet. As the oldest child in the family, that meant I often ended up caring for and to a degree parenting my younger sister and brother.

Later, as I moved into adulthood, I started to recognize this pattern I could easily fall into of taking on the needs of others – parenting people who were themselves adults and could therefore take care of themselves.

Family Systems Theory calls this “overfunctioning”, and it is something I have to monitor about myself even today.

The thing is, that experience of helping to raise my brother and sister and all of the tendencies it created within me are a part of who I am now – the whole human being I have become up until now.

And those tendencies are not necessarily entirely unhealthy or bad. For instance, I suspect that they are a part of why I have spent most of my adult life within the caring professions, which has been amazingly rewarding.

Perhaps paradoxically again, embracing the wholeness of ourselves, including the areas on which we may want to do some work means first, we have to accept those areas in order to be able do that work, and second some aspects of our whole selves may be both sometimes problematic and sometimes beneficial. In some instances, wholeness is not either/or.

Unless you’re a narcissistic psychopath, in which case you don’t get to go “oh, that’s just part of who I am.”

Anyway, author and editor for the spiritual series “On Being”, Kristin Lynn says “Wholeness is never lost, it is only forgotten.”

What a wonderful way to think about wholeness, and one that I think leads us to some other ways in which our sense of wholeness can be challenged.

Inevitably in life, we face loss and sorrow. Inevitably, we will encounter the judgements and prejudices of others.Inevitably, we will run up against constraints that cultural and societal norms place upon the expression of our full and whole selves.

When we lose a person or even a creature that we love, a job, a physical or mental ability, it can feel like our wholeness has also been lost.

I remember after my stepfather, Ty, died, my mom saying that it felt like a part of her was missing. It felt that way to me too, and I remembered feeling that same way after other times of loss.

The thing is, we so often would not give up one moment of our relationships with those we loved and have lost. We carry them with us. They and our loss of them become part of the whole person we now are.

Parker Palmer says it like this

“We all know people who’ve suffered the loss of an important person in their lives.
At first, they disappear into grief, certain that life will never again be worth living.
But, through some sort of spiritual alchemy, they eventually emerge to find that their hearts have grown larger and more compassionate.
They have developed a greater capacity to take in others’ sorrows and joys, not in spite of their loss but because of it.
Suffering breaks our hearts – but there are two quite different ways for the heart to break.
There’s the brittle heart that breaks apart into a thousand shards, a heart that takes us down as it explodes and is sometimes thrown like a grenade at the source of its pain.
Then there’s the supple heart, the one that breaks open, not apart, growing into greater capacity for the many forms of love.
Only the supple heart can hold suffering in a way that opens to new life.”

The supple heart allows us to find wholeness.

Similarly, when we experience the loss of physical or mental abilities we once had, it can feel like we are less than whole.

I went through this when I was temporarily disabled by an impacted nerve in my neck a while back. It did feel like a loss. I’m fortunate that it eventually got resolved, so I never had to reach acceptance and find a new sense of wholeness for myself.

I have a friend who was born with a condition that left her physically disabled in a number of ways. She says that her journey toward wholeness has involved unlearning the many ways in which other people and societal systems labeled her as and made her feel incomplete.

And far too many of us have felt limits imposed upon us, barriers to becoming our whole selves because of gender role stereotypes and restrictive gender binaries, because of our race or ethnicity or religious beliefs (or lack there of) or our sexuality or our gender identity (or lack there of) and on and on and on.

I’ll talk a little more about this in a moment, but for now I want to note that even the scars we bear from our losses, as well as those we may bear from fighting to become our full, whole selves even up against oppression and restrictive mores – they too, these scars are a part of who we are now – the whole person we have become.

Many of you are probably aware of Kintsugi (Kin Sugi), the Japanese art that provides a beautiful metaphor for what I am trying to express, but here is a short video that explains it better than I likely could.

Kintsugi video

Here is another quote related to all of this that I loved, from a UU named Paula Goldade

“As a Unitarian Universalist, I have come to see that universal salvation is not just for all of us but for all of me. There is no crevice inside of me that love cannot touch.”

Now, so far, I have been concentrating mainly on how we become whole as individuals, but I want to return to this idea that we also must be in relationship to find wholeness. We must work to create wholeness in our communities and our worlds to know wholeness for ourselves.

Here is one more quote that I loved, from our own Unitarian Universalist minister, Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael

“We don’t really know our own wholeness until we see the wholeness of another or work to serve wholeness in our world. Wholeness, a sense of our own fullness, a spiritual realization of our own strength and beauty, is given when we give of ourselves… We heal our own aches by healing the aches in others. We put back the pieces of our own souls by helping others redeem their own wholeness.”

I think she is so spot on there, and I also think that this has implications for the work we are called to do in our world to build the beloved community.

My friends, I believe that we, none of us nor our communities or our society – we can never be whole while black lives are still so far too frequently being extinguished and destroyed.

We cannot ever be whole when people are still being forced to proclaim that their lives do matter.

Black Lives Matter.

They do matter.

And we can never be whole when brown and queer bodies are treated as if they are of little significance; when indigenous peoples are treated as expendable; when female and nonbinary gender identities are treated as “less than:”; when entire cultures and religious expressions are demeaned.

We need all of humanity’s beautiful variations to be fully realized and embraced for all of humanity to become whole.

It seems like you can hardly ever attend one of my sermons these days without also hearing from author and researcher Brene Brown, my personal guru and diva.

I want to share with you a short video from Brown, because I think she has identified a root cause of what lies at our lack of feeling whole sometimes and then bringing and perpetuating that unwholesomeness and unholiness in our world.

She says it has to do with how we are constantly receiving messages that make us feel we can never be enough. And this, in turn, undermines our feelings of belonging and worthiness.

She says that to counter this, we have to be willing to be vulnerable and to live in a way that she calls “wholeheartedly”.

But maybe I should shut up and let her speak for herself.

Brown video

Unitarian Universalist have seven principals that we affirm and promote and the first of those says that we affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person.

I wonder sometimes though if whether we affirm that for and about our self.

My beloveds, you are worthy.

You have inherent dignity.

You are capable of knowing and becoming the whole person you were born and are called to be.

And by doing that – each of us individually and yet also together – by doing that, we may yet bring more wholeness and holiness into our world.

And hallelujah to wholeness and holiness!

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

Journey of the Spirit

March 10, 2019 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
March 10, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

We often talk about our spiritual path. But is that journey inward or outward or both? Sometimes to become our truest self, we also have to unbecome who we are not.

Call to Worship

WE TRAVEL THIS ROAD TOGETHER
by Tess Baumberger

From the busy-ness of every day we gather once a week to remember who we are, to dream of who we might become.

We travel this road together.

As companions on this journey, we share the milestones we meet along the way. Individual moments of joy and sorrow become shared moments of comfort and celebration.

We travel this road together.

We share this journey across differences of belief and opinion
Because we value diversity and because we care for one another.

We travel this road together.

Today as we take the next steps, let us notice our fellow travelers:
The burdens that they carry, the songs that inspire their hearts.

We travel this road together.

As we gather in beloved community, let us open the holy havens of our hearts,
Let us share the sacred places of our souls For we are pilgrims who share a common path.

We travel this road together.

Reading

HAVING COME THIS FAR
by James Broughton

I’ve been through what my through was to be
I did what I could and couldn’t
I was never sure how I would get there

I nourished an ardor for thresholds
for stepping stones and for ladders
I discovered detour and ditch

I swam in the high tides of greed
I built sandcastles to house my dreams
I survived the sunburns of love

No longer do I hunt for targets
I’ve climbed all the summits I need to
and I’ve eaten my share of lotus

Now I give praise and thanks
for what could not be avoided
and for every foolhardy choice

I cherish my wounds and their cures
and the sweet enervations of bliss
My book is an open life

I wave goodbye to the absolutes
and send my regards to infinity
I’d rather be blithe than correct

Until something transcendent turns up
I splash in my poetry puddle
and try to keep God amused.

from Special Deliveries, New and Selected Poems
(Broken Moon Press, 1990)

Sermon

Zen Buddhism has a story in which a man is on a horse which is galloping very quickly down a road.

A woman standing alongside the road shouts, “Where are you going? It seems like it must a very important destination”.

The man on the horse replies, “I don’t know! Ask the horse!”

Sometimes, life’s journey can seem that way, can’t it? Like we are being carried along with much less control than we like to think. Like so much of what happens to us that can suddenly change the direction of our journey is random and beyond our control – illness, falling in love, death, accidents, sudden and unexpected experiences of beauty, joy, wonder and awe.

Our life span faith development religious education classes and activities are exploring the concept of journey this month.

Wow, that’s a big topic.

There are so many ways to think about journey. There are so many types of journeys we take – from literal geographical travel to thinking of life as a journey.

We often talk about our exploration of spirituality as a journey. And that can mean journeying inward, outward or both.

So often, our spiritual journeys, our journeys of personal growth, involve not just becoming our full or true selves but also leaving behind, unbecoming identities, ideas and beliefs we were taught earlier in life involving religion, gender, race, sexuality and so much more.

Facing life’s inevitable difficulties and struggles, as well as moving through life passages (coming of age, marriage, beginning or ending a career, etc) can all seem like their own distinct journeys even as they are also wrapped up within the overall journey of life.

And as I mentioned earlier, so much of what happens to us during life’s journey is beyond our control. Like the man on the horse in the Zen story, we have some agency – we can try to point our journey in a general direction through the education we obtain, the spiritual and health practices in which we engage, the relationships we cultivated etc.

But like that spirited horse in the story, our life events have a mind of their own and our journey can suddenly be altered by unexpected events that cause our lives to go galloping off in a different direction, whether we like it or not.

And so to make some sense of our journey, we create a narrative – we tell ourselves a story to make meaning of our lives, and it is through these stories, how we respond to our journey, that we may find more agency. It is not complete agency because much of the story we create is unconscious and the events of our ongoing journey keep altering the narrative we are creating for ourselves.

However, the opposite is also true. The stories that we tell ourselves can also alter the direction of our journey, and this is especially true if we take the time to examine what implicit, unconscious narratives we are creating for ourselves, thereby making them conscious and explicit. By doing so, we can change the story if it is one that is not helping us; that is pointing our journey in an unhealthy and harmful direction.

Frank Loyd Wright, one of the greatest architects of the twentieth century told the story of how he used to visit his uncle’s farm.

One winter when he was nine, Wright and his uncle took a walk across a snow covered field. His uncle stopped the young Wright and pointed to the tracks in the snow they had left behind.

His uncle told him, “Notice how your tracks meander all over the place from the fence to the cattle to the woods again, while mine go in a straight line from start to finish aiming directly at my goal. There is an important lesson in that.”

Years later, Wright realized he was going to have to unlearn the story his uncle had implanted in his young mind that day.

To become the architect he wanted, to live the life he wanted, he was going to have avoid walking the straight line. “It was then I determined” said Wright, “not to miss most things in life as my uncle had.”

He had taken a story that had been implicit, made it explicit and then changed it to a story that better suited the journey he wished to pursue. Now, of course, recognizing the subliminal stories we are telling ourselves so that we can change them to more beneficial narratives can be difficult, so I want to share with you a few thoughts that might be helpful for doing so.

Many of you are likely familiar with author and comparative mythology/comparative religions scholar Joseph Campbell’s concept, “The Hero’s Journey”.

Here is a short video that takes us through the key components of this concept.

Hero Video

Campbell said that these myths exist in all cultures because they help us make sense of the challenges, fears, and difficulties we face in our own journeys.

We all face problems in life. We all have to leave our comfort zones sometimes.

And yet, how often has it been difficulty, failure, even loss that has eventually led you to an experience of transformation?

What if we all thought of ourselves as on a hero’s journey (and to avoid misogyny and gender binaries a “Shero’s or their o’ s journey)?

Might that help us live more richly and fully? If we could see ourselves as moving through the cycle described in our video, might it help us change what could otherwise be an unhelpful narrative we have constructed when confronted with challenges we fear?

Campbell once said, “In the cave you fear to enter lies the treasure you seek.”

David Whyte is a poet and philosopher that has another concept that I think can help us construct more helpful narratives.

I want to let you hear him briefly describe what he calls, “The conversational nature of reality.”

Whyte Video

I loved that story because I think the immigration officer grabbing his attention so humorously demonstrates this “conversational nature of reality”. It changed the story he was telling himself about that immigration officer.”

I think one of the false stories that we tell ourselves is that we can construct an identity separate and apart from our world and other people, when, in fact, we can only do so in relationship to all that we encounter – this is the conversational reality of our journey.

Whyte talks about having spent almost two years in the Galapagos paying deep attention to the animals and birds and landscape around him. He began to realize, he says, “…my identity actually depended on how much attention I was paying to things that were other than myself and that as you deepen this intentionality and this attention, you started to broaden and deepen your own sense of presence.”

Larry Smith, author, journalist and editor stumbled upon another tool that I think might be very useful to us in unearthing the implicit stories we may be telling ourselves about our journeys.

Smith heard a legend about Earnest Hemingway being challenged to write a novel in six words and Hemingway’s powerful response.

I’m not going to share his response in worship today because it could be emotionally triggering for some of our folks, but you are welcome to ask me about it one on one later.

Smith started a project he calls six word memoirs wherein he ask people to describe where they currently are with their journey – tell their current story and state of mind in 6 words. He created a website for folks to do so.

I think this is a powerful way to access our unconscious stories and get at the emotional content because we have to engage our most creative selves in order to tell our stories in six words.

The six word memoirs people have shared range from the poignant to the humous to both. I want to show you just a few examples. You can see more at www.sixwordmemoirs.com.

Six word video

I may have written that last one after experiencing several unexpected, potentially life-changing and certainly challenging life events all within a short time period.

I invite you, as you are moved to do so, to think about what you might write as your six word memoir. We have provided pens and Postit notes here in the sanctuary. There are more on a table in front of the windows overlooking the courtyard from inside the foyer.

If you choose to share your story, please post it on those same windows in the foyer.

You do not have to include your name if you don’t wish to do so.

Cheating by using contractions is allowed.

Six words!

That brings me to the last thought about unearthing our stories I’d like to discuss today.

I think a wonderful purpose this church serves is sharing our stories like this in this our beloved religious community.

A couple of Saturdays ago, I was here for the launch of the monthly “First Arts at First UU” presentations our Gallery Ministry Team is presenting. First Arts allows artists to showcase their work.

Church member, Shirley Steele shared with us some of her wonderful artwork. Even more so, I was touched with how she shared with us some of her journey as an artist, as well as some of her personal story because, of course, you can’t really separate the two.

At the same time, an Austin Chamber Music concert was going in here in the sanctuary. We had only just gotten permission from the City of Austin to use the sanctuary addition and had not even had our first service with it ourselves.

Some how though, it seemed appropriate, even touching somehow, that one of our partners with whom we have chosen time after time to journey would be getting to use the new space even before us.

Here at the church, we walk our spiritual journeys together in beloved community. Our journeys can bump up against each other and those of our partners with whom we journey, and that can sometimes help us turn our journeys in more life-giving, life-fulfilling, creative directions.

We can share our stories with each other from a place of trust and vulnerability. We can sometimes help each other rewrite the story we are telling ourselves if needed to make our most life-fulfilling journey more possible.

Like with Campbell’s “hero’s journey”, being capable of changing our story in ways that turn our journey toward transformation is an almost divine-like ability.

Helping each other to do so is a gift of grace that we can give to one another.

Amen.

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

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

Trustful and Trustworthy

February 24, 2019 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
February 24, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Unitarian Universalism has historically been a faith that questions and can even be skeptical. Yet, we call ourselves a faith, which implies a trust that we are a part of something larger than ourselves. What does it mean to trust and to be trustworthy? How do we rebuild trust when it gets broken and is it healthy sometimes to withhold trust that has been badly violated?

Call to Worship

THE BLESSINGS OF TRUST SOUL MATTERS

We gather today to receive the blessings of trust.
May the relationships in this room, help us notice we do not walk alone.
May the quiet we share, help us connect to and trust our deepest self.
May the music offered, help us feel and hold tight to the restorative rhythms of the world.
May the words offered, remind us that we too have a voice, one that must be trusted and shared.

Reading

A HIDDEN WHOLENESS: THE JOURNEY TOWARD AN UNDIVIDED LIFE
-Parker J. Palmer

If we are willing to embrace the challenge of becoming whole, we cannot embrace it alone-at least, not for long:

we need trustworthy relationships to sustain us, tenacious communities of support, to sustain the journey toward an undivided life.

Taking an inner journey toward rejoining soul and role requires a rare but real form of community that I call a “circle of trust.”

Sermon Notes

What does it mean to trust? What does it mean to be trustworthy? What does it mean to have faith – to trust that we are a part of something larger than ourselves.

This month, our faith development classes and activities have been exploring these and other questions involving the subject of trust. This morning I want to explore the concepts of trust, trustworthiness and faith a little further.

Research from psychologist John Gottman.

In romantic relationships (and family/friends/etc.) it’s not the grand gestures that build trust over time – it’s the small gestures.

noticing a spouse or partner seems upset and putting aside our smart phone to ask them what is going on with them.
Remembering that your sister has the big presentation that is important to her at work tomorrow and sending a note or giving her a call to wish her luck.
My grandfather brought my grandmother coffee in bed every morning of their life together. He banked lots of trust points for that!

Here at church – yes the caring team checking in when we are in the hospital, the minister doing the memorial service for our loved ones, these are important, but trust in our church community is likely also built upon the smaller gestures:

noticing the visitor who looks lost and not sure where they are supposed to go and offering to help.
the phone call or card to say I heard about your loss and wanted you to know I am thinking about you.
the friendly smile in the fellowship hall
saying “thank you” to the flocks of fine folks who do the many marvelous ministries of this church.

Loss of trust also comes in small moments of betrayal.

So, trust is built in small moments. But what is trust. How do we define it?

One answer can be found in Brene Brown’s video at brenebrown.com. “SuperSoul Sessions: The Anatomy of Trust”. In the video she quotes a definition from trust researcher and consultant Charles Feltman.

“Trust is choosing to make something important to you vulnerable to the actions of someone else.”
“Distrust is when what I’ve shared with you something that is important to me is not safe with you.”

Dr Brene Brown describes the elements that make up trust with the acronym “Braving”.

BRAVING
B– Boundaries
R– Reliability
A– Accountability
V– Vault
I– Integrity
N– Non-Judgement
G– Generosity
Boundaries – yours are clear and expressed openly and you respect mine.
Reliability – we do what we say to each other and not just once but over and over again. Don’t overcommit.
Accountability – when we make mistakes, which we will, we own it, apologize and make amends. And we allow each other to do so. Exception when trust has been repeatedly been broken and abused – if it becomes clear accountability is not possible.
Vault – we acknowledge confidentiality and hold to it both each others’ and other peoples. Sharing with me something that it not yours to share destroys trust.
Integrity – choosing courage over comfort, doing what’s right over what’s fast fun or easy and practicing our values not just professing them. Example – if say compassion is a value and then I do not act with compassion it shows lack of integrity and destroys trust.
Non-Judgement – being OK with asking for help and not judging when others do. We are better at giving help than asking for it.
Generosity – we make generous assumptions about each others words and actions and we check in with each other. So if I tell a good friend I am having a rough time and then do not hear from them for a while, I don’t start by presuming they are uncaring. Check in. Not assuming good intentions – more the reverse – having the generosity to NOT go immediately to presuming ill intent.

Why I believe this is a spiritual matter; a spiritual discipline, especially for UUs. As I often talk about, we are a faith without creed. We do not have a proscribed set of beliefs we all share. And unlike our friends of some other faiths, some of us do not believe in some higher power, some being in which we can trust to take care of us and our world. So we root our faith, our trust, in a set of principles and values that we share.

Here at this church, we place our faith in the mission we have discerned together, we trust in it as our higher common purpose. And so Unitarian Universalism finds the holy, experiences faith through loving, accountable, healthy relationships with one another, with our communities, with our larger world, with the web of all existence. This is where we experience what some of us call the divine, others that which is ultimate, other that which is larger than us but of which we are a part and can place our trust. And we root our relationship with each other through a covenant, a set of sacred promises that we make to one another about how we will be with one another in healthy, accountable ways. And that requires trust, yet do not think of trust in a large religious community like this doing challenging and sometimes difficult work together as no one will ever make mistakes – no one will ever feel hurt. We Will make mistakes and Agree to be called back into covenant.

BRAVING Trust gives way to live the promises of our covenant and be accountable to it and one another when we fail.

BRAVING provides a framework that can help us keep the promises alive and a way to think about trust that acknowledges the work we must put into it. Otherwise, covenant can become shallow and can be used as a weapon to silence folks when they point out that we are not living out our professed principles and values.

BRAVING implicitly acknowledges that loving, accountable relationships involve risk and they come at a cost but that love is worth it. Besides making mistakes, if we love, we all experience loss, sorrow and grief at some point.

My friends, you can trust that love is more than worth braving it.

BRAVING says that we can trust that love is worth the risk and our efforts to create and maintain it.

BRAVING love is how we do religion as UUs and the place wherein our faith can be found.

May we go about the holy work of braving trust and love together.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

Collective Liberation

January 30, 2019 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
January 27, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

How do we ground our social justice work, our struggles against racism, oppression and the destruction of our environment? Where do we find reliance and even joy? We will examine a theology that grounds this work in our collective interdependence or as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Junior put it, “We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality … This is the inter-related structure of reality.”

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

“IF YOU HAVE COME HERE TO HELP ME, YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME. BUT IF YOU HAVE COME BECAUSE YOUR LIBERATION IS BOUND UP WITH MINE, THEN LET US WORK TOGETHER.”
Aboriginal Activists Group, Queensland, 1970s

Call to Worship
Rev. Chris Jimmerson

I reach for my fullest potential in a world that pits my full potential against yours.

Together, we can all better reach for our full potential.

I am taught to fear difference.

By embracing our differences, we learn, grow and may be transformed.

The privileges I have been given, the power to oppress, leaves me trapped within those same systems of oppression.

Collectively, we can change those systems and liberate us all.

Racism, sexism, classism, radical capitalism, gender and sexuality biases, religious bigotries; these conspire together to bind us all into silos of spiritual emptiness.

Together, we can burst through these silos of disconnection and journey together toward wholeness and holiness.

Come, let us enter into this journey together.

Together, we celebrate our collective vision of Beloved Community. Together, we build that vision.

Reading

A NETWORK OF MUTUALITY
by Martin Luther King Jr.

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.

Injustice anywhere is a threat justice everywhere.

There are some things in our social system to which all of us ought be maladjusted.

Hatred and bitterness can never cure the disease of fear, only love can do that.

We must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation…

The foundation of such a method is love.

Before it is too late, we must narrow the gaping chasm between our proclamations of peace and our lowly deeds which precipitate and perpetuate war.

One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek but a means by which we arrive at that goal.

We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.

We shall hew out of the mouton of despair, a stone of hope.

Sermon Handout

COSTS OF OPPRESSION TO PEOPLE FROM PRIVILEGED GROUPS

Psychological Costs: Loss of Mental Health and Authentic Sense of Self.

Socialized into limited roles and patterns of behavior
Denial of emotions and empathy
Limited self-knowledge and distorted view of self
Discrepancy between others’ perceptions and internal reality
Pain and fears (of doing and saying wrong thing, of retaliation from oppressed groups, of revealing self for fear of judgment, of different people and experiences)
Diminished mental health (distorted view of self and reality, denial, projection)

Social Costs: Loss and Diminishment of Relationships

Isolation from people who are different
Barriers to deeper, more authentic relationships
Disconnection, distance and ostracism within own group/family if act differently

Moral and Spiritual Costs: Loss of Moral and Spiritual Integrity

Guilt and shame
Moral ambivalence (doing right thing vs. social pressures and realities)
Spiritual emptiness or pain

Intellectual Costs: Loss of Developing Full Range of Knowledge

Distorted and limited view of other people’s culture and history
Ignorance of own culture and history

Material and Physical Costs: Loss of Safety, Resources, and Quality of Life

Social violence and unrest
Higher costs (e.g. for good and safe schools and homes, for qualified employees)
Waste of resources (to deal with effects of inequality)
Loss of valuable employees, clients and customers
Loss of knowledge to foster societal growth and well-being
Diminished collective action for common concerns
Negative health implications

Benefits of Social Justice for People from Privileged Groups

Fuller, more authentic sense of self
More authentic relationships and human connection
Moral integrity and consistency
Freedom from fears
Improved work and living conditions
Access to other cultures and wisdom
More resources to address common concerns
Greater opportunity for real democracy and justice

From: Diane J. Goodman, Promoting Diversity and Social Justice: Educating People from Privileged Group (Routledge, 2011). www.dianegoodman.com

Benediction
by Bell Hooks

The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others. That action is the testimony of love as the practice of freedom.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

Potential Ever Emergent

January 13, 2019 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
January 13, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Though Unitarian Universalists are a people of many theological or philosophical perspectives, the human possibility, our potential for doing good in our world has always been central to our world-view. What are the ways in which we are being called toward our full potential. What lures us toward creative, life-fulfilling possibilities?

Call to Worship:

DO NOT LEAVE YOUR CARES AT THE DOOR
By Norman V Naylor

Do not leave your cares at the door.
Do not leave there your pain, your sorrow or your joys.
Bring them with you into this place of acceptance and forgiveness.
Place them on the common altar of life and offer them to the possibility of your worship.
Come then, and offer yourself to potential transformation by the creative process that flows through you and all life.

Reading

FOR A NEW BEGINNING
John O’Donahue

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.

For a long time it has watched your desire
Feeling the emptiness grow inside you
Noticing how you willed yourself on
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the grey promises that sameness whispered
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent
Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream
A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

Sermon

Earlier, we lit the flame of our chalice, calling it into being. And yet “being” is not quite an accurate description. A flame is not a stable object, but rather an ever becoming process of fuel and oxygen being burnt, one flame dying so that the next can arise, giving the impression to our eyes of one steady flame.

A worldview called process theology says that we are like that flame. We are ever changing processes of becoming, changing into something new with each moment of our experience.

For process theology, God is not omnipotent, but rather is a benevolent force, offering to us almost limitless possibilities from which to choose in each moment, luring us toward those potentialities that are life-giving and life fulfilling, that move our world to-ward greater goodness and beauty, that expand our awareness and spiritual wellbeing.

God then holds our experiences, as well as those of all else, to retain what has been actualized in our world.

The non-theistic version of this substitutes the possibility for novelty, the creative processes inherent in our universe, for God. Love and justice become what lure us toward the creative choices that will enhance our live and world.

Now that is probably that shortest, most simplified version of process theology ever spoken. Process theology is much more complex than what I have just outlined.

I wanted to start by sharing a little about it with you this morning though, because I think it provides one useful way for examining the subject of this month’s theme that our Faith Development classes and activities have been exploring – the Soul Matters theme of possibility.

Unitarians and Universalists have always been a people of possibility. When other faiths have placed depravity at the core of humanity, we have seen potential instead.

A couple of Sundays ago, we talked about how what we do not know, uncertainty and mystery can sometimes create within us experiences of awe and wonder and beckon us toward creative exploration and possibility.

Last Sunday, we thought about how letting go of what may be holding us back can oftentimes create new, more life-fulfilling potential for us. For example, letting go of relationships that have become unhealthy or toxic, so that we can spend more time building those that mutually enhance one another’s lives.

Today, I would like to explore some other ways that may offer us more creative means for reaching toward our full potential.

First, I talk about something closely related to the idea of the things we need to let go to make our full potential possible.

Far too often, I think we tell ourselves stories that make the challenging or difficult seem like impossibilities for us.

I’m too old/too young.
I have to be perfect.
What would other people think?
It’s too risky.
I am not good enough/smart enough! talented enough, worthy enough, etc.
If I do this, they won’t love me anymore.

And there are so many more false stories we tell ourselves. I think fear of rejection, loss of belonging, is involved in a lot of these stories. Fear of rejection is one of the big ways we stifle our creative potential.

Jia Jiang is an entrepreneur who, in his early 30s, realized that a childhood incident had caused him to develop an even higher level of anxiety around being rejected than might be the norm. He ran from any possible chance of rejection, which was harming both his personal life and his entrepreneurial efforts.

So, he decided to go into a period of 100 days wherein each day he would do something that was likely to lead to being rejected. He wanted to see what he could learn from this and whether it could help him work through his fear of rejection. One day he asked a complete stranger if he could borrow $100.

Another, he went to a burger joint, had his lunch and then walked back up to the counter and asked for a burger refill. He convinced a Starbucks manager to let him be a greeter all day like they do at Walmart stores. On yet another day, he knocked on the door of a stranger’s house and asked if he could plant a flower in their backyard.

Needless to say, he got rejected a number of times. But, he also began to notice if he stayed engaged. if he did not immediately flee if told, “no”, that creative possibilities began to open up.

When he admitted to the Starbuck’s manager that his request to be a greeter was a little weird, the manger said, “OK, go ahead. Just don’t do anything too weird”.

The person at the first house he asked about planting a flower in their backyard said, ‘no.” By now, a more confident Jia asked, “why”? The person answered that they had a dog that would just dig it back up anyway but then referred him to the lady across the street who loved flowers. The flower is now growing in her backyard.

So in a way, what he did was to desensitize himself to rejection and even learn to embrace it as a gift. I want to let you hear his conclusions from his experiment.

VIDEO

I think Jia’s story also reveals a couple of other ways that we are called to creative possibilities first, we have greater possibilities when we educate ourselves – open ourselves to having our consciousness raised, and, second, we reach our greatest potential in relationship with others.

We can educate ourselves by formal means, but also by putting ourselves in situations from which we can learn, as Jia did.

One of the ways in which we are learning together here at the church, is how we can better recognize and dismantle a culture of white supremacy and other systems of oppression, within ourselves, within our church community, and beyond our walls, as one of our new ends statements related to our mission puts it.

To that end, a subset of our change team, a group that is working on antiracism and multiculturalism here at the church, has put together an exercise for us this morning.

You will see up on your screen and on a handout you have were given on your way in, a question related to the Language of Anti-Oppression, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

What is discrimination against someone based on race and reinforced by systems of power?

a. white privilege
b. Jim Crow-ism
c. racism
d. apartheid

Please decide how you would answer the question and then pair up with someone near you. You’ll each take one to two minutes each to talk about why you chose the answer that you did.

OK, you may begin now.

Let’s come back together now. You’re Unitarians, so I know you are wanting to know if you got the correct answer, but to find out, you’ll have to come to workshop at 12:30 today mentioned on your handout and announcements, where you can learn more of the vocabulary of building the Beloved Community.

So, we can learn from each other. Even further, each one of us can only realize our own greatest potential, I believe, in relationship with others, especially those who have much different life experiences than our own.

We grow the most when we learn to not only encounter but value difference and alternative perspectives. This is one of many ways that our silos rooted in racism, bigotry and ideology harm all of us.

And especially when it comes to movement building, we absolutely must have relationships and community, we must have solidarity, to maximize the social possibilities for which we yearn.

I love the way poet Marge Percy expresses the possibility to be found in building movements in her poem,

“The Low Road”
What can they do to you?
Whatever they want.
They can set you up,
they can bust you,
they can break your fingers,
they can bum your brain with electricity, … ,
they can take your child, wall up your lover.
They can do anything
you can’t stop them from doing.
How can you stop them?
Alone, you can fight,
you can refuse,
you can take what revenge you can
but they roll over you.
But two people fighting back to back can cut through a mob …
Two people can keep each other sane,
can give support, conviction, love, massage, hope, sex.
Three people are a delegation, a committee, a wedge.
With four you can play bridge and start an organization.
With six you can rent a whole house …
and hold a fund-raising party.
A dozen make a demonstration.
A hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;
ten thousand, power and your own paper;
a hundred thousand, your own media;
ten million, your own country.
It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care to act,
it starts when you do it again after they said no,
it starts when you say WE and know who you mean,
and each day you mean one more.

Here is another take on how movements start.

VIDEO

I think that advice about learning to follow might be a great source of possibility, especially for those of us who are managerial class, white and used to being in positions of authority.

I’d like to end by returning to the process theology with which I began.

What if God is calling you to toward those potentialities that are life-giving and life fulfilling?

What if God is answering your desire to reach for your full potential, with a “yes”?

Or, if you prefer, what if the possibility for novelty, the creative processes inherent in our universe – what if love and justice are luring you toward possibilities that expand your awareness and spiritual wellbeing and move our world toward greater goodness and beauty?

What if the universe is saying, “yes” to the world of which we dream?

How will we answer?

Benediction

GOD SAYS YES TO ME
– Kaylin Haught

I asked God if it was okay to be
melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don’t paragraph my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I’m telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

SERMON INDEX

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PODCASTS

Burning Bowl Service

January 7, 2019 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
January 6, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

We begin the year by thinking about elements in our lives which are doing us a disservice, and what possibilities might become open to us if we let them go. We whisper these things into flash paper and burn them together, scattering the ashes to the wind.

Call to Worship

“We Hold a Place for You”
By Chris Jimmerson

Come into this sacred space.

Bring with you your joys, your hopes – all that you love; that which you hold holy.

Come into this, our beloved community.

Bring with you also your imperfections, your secret fears and unspoken hurts – those things that you still hold but that you yearn to release.

Come onto this hallowed ground.

Bringing too, your wildest imaginings of what, together, we might create or create more of in our world.

Come, we hold a place for you in this our hour of worship.

Reading

“Burning the Old Year”
by Naomi Shihab Nye

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

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

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

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

Sermon

This is the story of a woman, whom I’ll call Eve, though that is not her real name.

Eve sought grief counseling: after losing her husband to Lou Gerhig’s disease.

Eve and her husband were devout Catholics and were married in their Catholic church. They were very much in love. The marriage was a happv one. Eve described her husband as a good father and a wonderful spouse.

After he developed the disease, she took care of him as it progressed which became difficult, as it is a cruel and degenerative disease. As he became more disabled, he resisted becoming more and more dependent, and they sometimes fought.

Still, every night, they would lie in bed with their hands clasped so that their wedding rings touched together, and they would repeat their wedding vows to one another.

Until his very last day, their love for and devotion to one another remained strong.

When she sought counseling, it had been six years since his death.

Eve told the counselor that she knew she needed to move on with her life. to start dating again, “But I can’t take my wedding ring off,” she said. “I can’t date wearing mv wedding ring, and I can’t take it off.”

Intellectually, she knew she had honored her commitment to her husband. Emotionally and spiritually. she could not let go of her belief that marriage is for life, which the wedding ring symbolized so strongly for her.

The counselor worked with her priest to put together a “reverse wedding” ritual for her.

At the same church were they had originally been married, with many of the same family and friends who had attended their wedding, the priest called her up to the altar.

He asked her. “Were vou faithful in good times and in bad?”

“Yes,” Eve replied.

“In sickness and in health?”

“I was,” she replied.

The priest led her through the rest of her wedding vows, but in past tense, and she affirmed in front of the loving witnesses who had gathered that she had loved, honored and been faithful to her husband.

Then the priest said, “May I have the ring, please?”

And Eve took it off and handed it to him.

They had her ring and her husband’s ring interlocked and then affixed to the front of their wedding photo.

Eve later described finally taking the ring off to her counselor by saying, “It came off as if by magic.”

This story illustrates so perfectly the power of ritual.

Like Eve, sometimes we can know intellectually that we need to let something go, and yet it can be so difficult to move past it emotionally – spiritually.

Ritual allows us to embody our thoughts and intentions. It allows us to hold them in a much deeper place inside – or to release something from that same deep place – from our hearts and souls, not just our minds.

That’s why we have made it our tradition here at the church, to begin each New Year by conducting a burning bowl ritual- each of us reflects upon something that we are carrying that may be holding us back – something we would like to let go because it may be keeping us from fully living out our life goals and values – reaching out with love to manifest more of what we would like to see in our world.

Then, we whisper whatever it is into the pieces of flash paper you were given as you came in and toss them into the flame in our bowl and watch it burn away before our very eyes.

Here are some examples of what we might want to let go:

Trying to control things that can’t be controlled.
Making other people do right
What other people think of you
Taking over other people’s problems
Helping when you weren’t asked to help
Having the same old conversation over and over

Burning Bowl Ritual

May your life, your spirit be unburdened of that which you have burned here today. May you experience a lightness and a joy. So unburdened, may your heart reach out in love to help build the beloved community. Amen.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below.

PODCASTS

Gathered here in the Mystery of this Hour

December 31, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
December 30, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

As we close out this year and look forward to the new year, the mystery and uncertainty of what is to come also opens up almost unlimited possibilities and creative potential.

All of this month of December, our faith development/religious eduction activities have focused on mystery.

What does it mean to be a people of mystery?

For a faith tradition such as ours, wherein both our Universalist and Unitarian forebears were the heretics, the questioners, the embracers of mystery and questions more profound than answers, I think this is a great topic for us to be exploring.

What does it mean to be a people of mystery?

And I think that exploring mystery and uncertainty can drive both a sense of humility and a sense of increased spirituality – humility over the enormity of what we do not yet know, some of which lies beyond the current tools available to us through science humility when we consider what a tiny part of the vastness of our universe we are; that our lives are but a blip in the magnificence of eternity.

And yet I also find a sense of the spiritual in knowing that we are a part of and integrally interconnected with that great vastness, that eternal movement of time, that sacred web of all existence.

And grounded in that sense of humility, embracing that we exist in uncertainty, diving into all that still remains mysterious to us, I think opens up the possibility of almost limitless exploration, creative opportunity and both personal and societal transformation.

I want to share with you how Neuroscientist and author David Eagleman expresses this need to embrace uncertainty, mystery and what we do not know.

Eagleman video

Given the enormity of what we do not know, Eagleman goes on to talk about his discomfort with the duality going on in the debate between the so called “new atheists” and religious fundamentalists. He says that we know far too little to rule out the possibility of God with such certainty, and we know far too much to believe any of the world’s religious stories so literally.

Now, whether or not you agree with him, he holds out the prospect that if we let go of the either/or thinking, and, like when science does not yet have the tools for measuring and observing certain phenomenon and must therefor hold multiple hypothesis at once, if we open ourselves to exploring the multitude of possibilities between these two extremes, we may find new opportunities for spiritual creativity and growth.

He calls this possibilianism, a sort of mysticism rooted in reason and the scientific method – more on that later.

Speaking of mysticism, I looked back at some research I did for a sermon on the subject a couple of years back and was reminded that mystic sects have developed within all of the world’s major religions.

These are people who, depending upon their individual belief systems, have found that God or the Divine or enlightenment or nirvana or a sense of transcendence or an experience of the holy or peak experiences – these were to be found by embracing uncertainty, diving into mystery.

Even non-theistic humanists and scientific naturalists have folks who find a sense of awe and wonder, connection to something larger than themselves by staring up at the vastness of the stars at night or marveling at the beauty of a sunset.

And I have found this embracing of the unknown quite comforting as we move through all of the uncertainty generated by our construction and renovation process.

In fact, I wrote us a call and response liturgy to help us embrace the uncertainty. You do not need anything in writing because it is very simple. I will speak, and then when I gesture toward you, please say with me, “It’s a mystery”.

It’s more fun if we say it like that — like my South East Texas relatives would, “It’s a mystruy”.

OK, ready?

I wonder when we’ll get to use the new area of the sanctuary? It’s a mystery.

I wonder when the new kitchen will open? It’s a mystery.

I wonder when we’ll get our parking back? It’s a mystery.

I wonder when we will lose the use of Howson Hall for a bit? It’s a mystery.

The staff offices? It’s a mystery.

The classrooms? It’s a mystery.

All together three times now. It’s a mystery. It’s a mystery. It’s a mystery.

OK, I do not exactly experience God or anything in that, but surrendering to the uncertainty does relieve some anxiety and I have a growing sense of excitement about the creative possibilities for growing our church and our faith that this time of uncertainty will eventually create for us.

So let us embrace uncertainty and the vast mysteriousness within which we dwell, For the Israelites of biblical times, the mysteriousness of God was considered so vast and beyond human comprehension that even his name was beyond human ability to pronounce correctly. Even trying to say his name was blasphemy and could get you stoned to death by your neighbors.

Well, your male neighbors as women were not allowed to participate in anything like stonings.

Except in the imaginings of Monty Python that is.

Python Video

A humorous illustration of why Eagleman says we know too much to take ancient scriptures literally.

So, mystery and uncertainty are a part of life whether we like it or not. Yet, they can also be, when we are willing to embrace the uncertainty, to swim in the mystery for a while, a powerful source of awe and wonder and creative possibilities. Mystery can stimulate transcendent experience and lead to spiritual transformation.

I’d like to share with you just a part of author and world traveler Pico lyer’s talk, which he titled, “The Beauty of What We will Never Know”.

VIDEO

I loved the image of the Dali Lama having the wisdom to say, “I don’t know” when that is the simple truth. What powerful modeling of the wisdom to be found in a little humility in the face of circumstances for which we cannot have certainty.

And I loved the quote, “the opposite of knowledge …isn’t always ignorance. It can be wonder. Or mystery, Possibility” and his observation that it is often the things we don’t know that push us forward even more more than the things we do.

Later in that same talk, Iver also observes that mystery is a source of intimacy in our personal relationships – that we cannot ever know everything about those whom we love and that is actually a wonderful wellspring of continued growth and deepening of our relationships.

I certainly have experienced this with my spouse Wayne, Even after 27 years, we still have more mystery in one another to explore. He still surprises me sometimes. We still have more to learn about one another.

And even if it were some how possible to learn everything there is to know about someone else, which it isn’t because we will never have the same lived experience, even if it were possible, they would still be growing and evolving and changing.

So the Wayne I met all those years ago and the Wayne I talked with over coffee before leaving the house this morning are not the same. And the Wayne I will meet for lunch later will not be exactly the same as the Wayne I was with this morning.

We are always in a process of becoming with each experience and each passing moment, and for Wayne and I that has driven an abiding and ever deepening love and intimacy and an enchantment with the ever unfolding mysteries of one another.

And so Iver says it is with our human relationships and our broader human lives and spirituality – the mystery creates almost unlimited possibilities and creative potential.

I agree with him, and that brings me back to David Eagleman’s possibilianism that I mentioned earlier and called a sort of mysticism rooted in reason and the scientific method,

Possibilianism says that we cannot claim certainty over that for which we have no way of being certain – the existence or none existence of God; even how we might conceive of such; how we find meaning; our place within this vast universe.

Possibilianism requires that we be open to ideas that we don’t have any way of testing right now, be open to new, previously unconsidered possibilities and be comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind all at once.

It also requires, though, that we apply reason to these ideas and when possible test them with scientific methods.

I think it is also important to note that this is not agnosticism, a sort of passive response to questions we cannot answer, but rather an active diving into the mysteries.

I loved this explanation of the difference:

Agnostics end with the lack of an answer.
Possibilians begin with the lack of an answer.
Agnostics say, we can’t decide between this and that.
Possibilians say, there are other choices than this or that.
Agnostics say, I Don’t Know, it’s impossible to answer that question.
Possibilians say, I Don’t Know, there must be better questions.

For those of you desperately searching your smart phones about now, it’s possibilian.com. You can find links to articles and videos on the subject there also.

It occurs to me though, that possibilianism might be one great avenue of exploration for we ever questioning, ever seeking, ever heretical Unitarian Universalists.

As we move into a new year filled as it is with uncertainty and mystery over what is to come, perhaps we can all try on possibilianism for a while.

Perhaps we can become that people of mystery.

In doing so, we might just open up almost unlimited possibilities and creative potentialities.

May it be so. Amen.

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SERMON INDEX

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Glowing Embers

December 9, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons, Uncategorized

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
December 9, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

As we celebrate the holiday season, it is good to remember the origin of these traditions and rituals, why they still matter to us, and how they may ground us in wonder, awe, and mystery.

Call to Worship

“Determined Seed”
By Laura Wallace

As frozen earth holds the determined seed,
this sacred space holds our weariness, our worry,
our laughter and our celebration.

Let us bring seed and soul into the light of thought,
the warmth of community, and the hope of love.

Let us see together, hear together, love together.
Let us worship.

Reading

“One Small Face”
by Margaret Starkey

With mounds of greenery, the brightest ornaments, we bring high summer to our rooms, as if to spite the somberness of winter come.

In time of want, when life is boarding up against the next uncertain spring, we celebrate and give of what we have away.

All creatures bend to rules, even the stars constrained.

There is a blessed madness in the human need to go against the grain of cold and scarcity. We make a holiday, the rituals as varied as the hopes of humanity,

The reasons as obscure as ancient solar festivals, as clear as joy on one small face.

Sermon

Well, here we are, back in the church if not quite yet back in the sanctuary, after the church went dark for two weeks, literally, as the building contractors had to cut the electricity so they could install the new power system.

Last Sunday, we did our service over internet live steaming from our Senior Minister’s house.

That was fun, but your ministers, Meg and I, have missed getting to be with you in person, as have all of our church staff folks.

So, here we are, back in the building, but with the construction still ongoing and suddenly, (at least it seems sudden to me!) suddenly in the middle of the holiday season.

We do plan to be able give ourselves and each other a great big gift of being able to return to our newly expanded and renovated sanctuary at least in time for our Christmas pageant and Christmas Eve services.

Merry Christmas indeed! We hope!

I’d like to talk today about the history and origins of some of the Christmas rituals and traditions we will be observing here at the church, and for many of us, with our families and loved ones.

I will focus on Christmas traditions and practices because they are those that we have inherited most directly from both our Universalist and Unitarian forebearers.

I want to note though, that I found a listing of almost 40 different religious holiday observances from a variety of religions throughout the world that have been or will be observed between November 1 of this year and the middle of January 2019.

They include the Hindu Diwali festival of lights, as well as a number of other faiths that hold light festivals; Hanukka; Buddhists marking the day that the Buddha first experienced enlightenment; the Baha’i faith celebrating the birth of their founder; and the Zoroastrian faith observing the death of their founding prophet – just to name a very few.

Each of these have their own traditions and rich histories, and, like with Christmas traditions and rituals, whether or not one believes the religious stories associated with them literally or not, I believe they help carry forward cultural memory.

They convey understandings about the human condition and experience – indeed about what it means to be human. They carry forward a people’s values and priorities. They shape our relationships with one another and promote bonding and community building.

And knowing something of the history and origins of our holiday observances may help us better understand the cultural memories they are conveying and the deeper meaning behind why they remain important to us.

The rituals and traditions that we most commonly practice around Christmas here in the U.S. seem to have actually arisen from a variety, a sort of conglomeration, of sources.

We also seem to have melded practices with secular origins and traditions from non-Christian practices with the Christian religious story of the birth of Jesus.

Speaking of which, I love a meme that’s been going around that says, “Three wise women would have asked directions, arrived on time, helped deliver the baby, brought practical gifts, cleaned the stable, made a casserole and there would be peace on earth.”

I also love how one of our Unitarian Universalist Ministers at First UU Dallas, Aaron White, recently summarized in one paragraph the biblical story of Christmas and the life of Jesus. He writes:

“Jesus is born to an unwed, teenage woman of color. She, the child, and her husband cross national borders without documentation, … fleeing violence in their home country. The child grows up to be a homeless teacher who leads a radical movement of people that refuses the boundaries of creed, class, or role in society. He travels around giving a version of free healthcare to anyone who asks and feeds the poor without judgement. He preaches a love so radical, and an allegiance to relationship over power so compelling, that it becomes illegal. The most powerful military force in the world deems him a threat. He is then tortured and executed by the state … ”

Not quite the version I was taught at the little Southern Baptist church we went to when I was a child. Something to think about as our government lobs tear gas at women and children seeking asylum at our border.

Anyway, let’s talk about how we think some of our Christmas practices may have originated and including how they might have come to be associated with that Christian religious story of Jesus’ birth.

Putting up Christmas trees reflects ancient practices of a number of societies that would decorate with evergreen trees, wreaths and garlands to remind themselves that life would return during this time of year when cold winters could make the world seem lifeless and bleak except for the evergreens.

Because it was also the time of year for many societies when the days were short and there was far less sunlight, folks would often light candles on or near the evergreen elements they had brought into their homes. This is likely one of the places where our practices of lighting candles at Christmas, as well as decorating with Christmas lights originated.

I’m sure glad we have LED lights now. Placing lit candles on tree branches seems like a fire hazard to me.

It is thought that the Germans of the 16th century originated the Christmas Tree as we know it today. A popular play of the time about Adam and Eve had a prop called a “paradise tree” – a fir tree hung with apples to represent the Garden of Eden. Entranced by the paradise tree, Germans began bringing trees into their homes and decorating them.

The Christmas Tree became popularized in America and Britain when in 1832, Charles Follen, a Unitarian Minister who had come here from Germany, and his wife put up a festively decorated tree, and their fellow abolitionist Harriet Martineau wrote glowing about it in the magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book.

In 1846, Queen Victoria and her German husband Prince Albert were sketched in the London newspaper standing around a Christmas tree with their children, which further popularized the practice both in Britain and in America.

Another of our traditions, Santa Claus, comes from several legends about a Bishop in fourth century Asia minor called St. Nicholas. Left a lot of money by his parents who died when he was young, he helped the poor and gave secret gifts to people who needed them, especially children. This is likely part of from where the tradition of giving gifts at Christmas comes.

In one of the legends, St. Nicholas helped the daughters of a very poor man who did not have enough money for a dowry so that they could be married according to customs of the time. St. Nicholas, so the legend says, secretly dropped a bag of gold down the chimney, and it fell into a stocking that had been hung by the fire to dry -likely the origin of both our current practices of hanging Christmas stockings and the idea of Santa Clause coming down the chimney to bring Christmas presents.

Over time, the stories and images about St. Nicholas blended with myths about a gift giving Father Christmas in England and Kris Kringle in the U.S., and eventually these all kind of got combined together to form the myths, stories and practices we now associate with Santa Claus.

So, how did these and other traditions get conflated the Christian story of Jesus’ birth get conflated, and how did we come to settle on December 25 as the date for it?

Well, the truth is we do not know for sure. In fact, Christians thought in around 200 A.D. that the birth had taken place on January 6, based upon calculations folks and done using events of Jesus’ life laid out in the New Testament. In fact, the modern Armenian, Russian and Greek Orthodox churches still celebrate it on this date.

I was not until the mid-fourth century that most Christians had moved the date to December 25. How and why that happened is still a matter of some debate, but here is the most common theory.

During this same time of year that many cultures decorated with evergreens, most of them also had celebrations and rituals centered around solstice, the shortest day of the year, but that also harbingers the eventual return of the sun and longer days.

Solstice falls on December 21 or 22 on our calendar, but in the Julian calendar of places like Syria and Egypt, it fell on December 25th and was celebrated as the Nativity of the Sun. It was observed with dramatic rituals where from within their shrines they would call out, “The Virgin has brought forth! The light is waxing!”. In Egypt, the new-born sun (that’s s-u-n) was even represented by the image of an infant.

In Scandinavia, they celebrated Yule starting December 2, igniting huge Yule logs that would burn for up to 12 days.

This time of year was also when wine and beer made during prior months was finally fermented and ready to start drinking – a fine tradition that many fine folks continue on Christmas even today.

The Romans celebrated Saturnalia, a time of drinking and general debauchery during which the social order would be reversed and peasants would party and demand that those who were their masters the rest of the year give them gifts, food and libations to avoid being the victims of pranks and great mischief.

As the theory goes, Christian church leaders kind of coopted these and other secular and pagan traditions and practices by placing Jesus’s birth on December 25, as a way to increase the chances that Christmas would get adapted through association with these existing rites.

After this, and down through the Middle Ages, the practice of the poor celebrating raucously in a drunken, Mardi Gras-like atmosphere and demanding sifts from the wealthy continued, but only on Christmas day and only after first attending church that morning.

Then, along came Robert Cromwell and the Puritans and spoiled the fun for everyone. They cancelled Christmas. Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity would have been incensed.

In fact, in the U.S., the Puritans even made it illegal to celebrate Christmas in the City of Boston.

Party animals our Puritan ancestors were not.

It was actually the Universalists and some Unitarians who later began to restore the practices that have become how we now celebrate Christmas, especially the focus on home, peace, family, gifts for children and charity (though both the gifts to children and charity could and can still be used to reinforce the social hierarchy).

So, that is a very abbreviated summary of at least some of the possible origins of Christmas traditions.

I said earlier, that whether or not we believe in the the story of Jesus’ birth and life in a literal way, these practices and traditions convey cultural memory, human truths in metaphorical ways.

Just in those that we have discussed today, a number of these human understandings emerge:

The cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth – the amazing, evergreen tenacity of life;
The magic and the creative potential of new life that a spark of the divine may manifest itself through anyone of us;
Moving between seasons and again the circular patterns of nature;
The values of generosity and charity, but also how these can be used to relieve social pressure and thus reinforce the existing social order;
The importance of staying connected with family and loved ones;
The power of ritual, communal bonding to hold societies together and support individuals even during challenging periods;
The need for balance between light and darkness;
And, finally, the ways in which we must prepare ourselves for moving through liminal times.

It strikes me that those last three hold powerful meaning and beauty for us as we move through changes and disruptions at our church during this holiday season.

Liminal times are those time periods when we are in transition, at a threshold, leaving one condition behind but not yet fully where we are going.

Like for some of the the societies we have discussed who were in the transition from the shortest days of sunlight to the eventual return of the sun, limited by the shortened days and the coldness of winter – no crops to plant or harvest yet – travel and other activities limited by the cold and weather – uncertain yet of when this all would change again, these liminal times are often times of uncertainty and mystery.

We are experiencing that here at the church. We have had to delay and reschedule activities due to the construction. We are worshiping in a temporary space, even as we dream of reclaiming a larger and more beautiful than ever sanctuary, where we hope to welcome many more from our area who might find a spiritual home here and join us on our religious journey.

I am moved that during this very time of the year, our church itself was in darkness for a while to literally create enough power to make something new and even greater possible.

That’s synchronicity.

I do not associate light with all that is good and darkness with that which is difficult. For one thing, 1 think there is racist cultural baggage inherent in such an association.

1 think, we need both. The seed needs darkness to germinate. The caterpillar goes into the cocoon before emerging anew as the butterfly. We need the night to sleep and restore ourselves.

Likewise, too much light will burn the crops in the field, deprive us of healthy sleep and disrupt nature’s necessary cycles.

For me, there is something mystical about this intermingling of light and darkness. This time of year, I love to sit at night with just the Christmas tree lights and fireplace on. There is something about that interplay between the darkness and the glowing but limited light that fills me with awe and wonder and binds my soul to those long ago ancestors we have been discussing today.

This Christmas Eve, after the sun has set, we will do a ritual in which we all hold candles, and then we will turn off the lights, and light one another’s candles until all of them are glowing, and sing Silent Night together. Again, that interplay creates such a powerful, mystical and spiritual communal experience for me.

I believe in the spiritual power of this religious community.

I believe we have the rituals and communal bonds that will move us with grace through this liminal time.

I believe we have the wisdom to value the interplay of light and darkness, knowing it is together that they bless us with amazing, evergreen tenacity and resilience.

I believe that as we move through this holiday season and beyond it together, we will rebirth ourselves again and again as a religious community – a First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin with all of the magic and creative potential of new life, manifesting the divine more and more in our world.

Well, here we are – happy, joyous, blessed holidays.

Amen.

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

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

We Remember

November 25, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
November 25, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

The path that led us to where we are now informs all the possibilities of our continuing journey. We will explore how our memories, both those in our mind and those buried deeply within our DNA, ground as well as challenge our human potential.

Call to Worship

We Come to Love a Church
Andrew C Kennedy

We come to love a church,
the traditions, the history,
and especially the people associated with it.
And through these people,
young and old,
known and unknown,
we reach out —

Both backward into history
and forward into the future —

To link together the generations
in this imperfect, but blessed community
of memory and hope.

Reading

Joy Harjo, 1951

Remember the sky that you were born under, know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the strongest point of time.
Remember sundown and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled to give you form and breath. You are evidence of her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their tribes, their families, their histories, too.
Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.

Sermon

Why is it that I can remember every word of Robert Frost’s poem, “Stopping by Wood on a Snowy Evening” even though I memorized it for a school assignment way back when I was in the second grade, and yet in the time it takes to walk from the living room to the kitchen in my house I often forget why it was I went to kitchen in the first place?

Well, that’s actually a more complicated question than it might seem, but, to oversimplify, the reason has to do with differences in how, where and what types of information get laid out in the brain for short versus longterm memories.

All of this month, our Life Span Faith Development programs have been exploring what it means to be a people of memory, which for the most part involves long-term memory.

This morning, I would like to also explore this with you here in worship because I believe that memory and how we construct, and sometimes deconstruct and then reconstruct it, is deeply spiritual in nature.

It is a huge topic. Whole sermons could and actually have been written just on dealing with traumatic or painful memories, for instance.

This morning though, we will be focusing on three areas:

how we construct memory as individuals,
socially, communally, culturally constructed memory.
and finally current research on the potential that memory may be transmitted genetically and/or epigenetically across generations.

At the individual level, what science is discovering is that we do not lay down memories like a computer records factual pieces of data onto a disk.

Rather, especially with long-term memory, our brains weave our memories into a narrative, a story that we are constantly creating to make sense of our world, create meaning in life and maintain a sense of an individual identity or self.

And we do not in reality lay down our longterm memories entirely as individuals but often in relationship with others and our environment, as we move through life experiences moment by moment.

This is the first of the reasons that I believe that memory is an essential and profound aspect of our spirituality. It is relational, and it helps us find meaning and create an ongoing story about who we are and how we fit in our world.

That we construct our memories in this way explains why the loss of memory associated with conditions like Alzheimer’s can be so devastating and so heartbreaking. It takes away people’s ability to make sense of their world, isolates them and disintegrates their sense of self and meaning in life. Several studies have found that being touched by loved ones, familiar music and being offered ritual-like communal activities can sometimes help such folks at least partially reconstruct their personal narratives and make greater sense of their world.

It also helps explain why our memories can be factually incorrect sometimes; how we can in fact have memories that seem real but that in reality never actually happened to us; and how different people experiencing the same event can come away with very different memories of that same event.

Let me give you a few examples.

How many of you have ever discussed a childhood memory with siblings, family members or childhood friends only to find yourself arguing over very different memories of the same event?

This happens to me all of the time with my younger sister, and she is constantly getting it wrong.

This is likely because neither of us laid down pure factual data – we each were creating our own narrative and so we each laid down a memory that made sense within that narrative.

In his book, “Uncle Tungsten,” Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and best-best-selling author wrote the following about memories his from childhood, living through the bombings of London by Germany in the winter of 1940-1941:

“One night, a thousand-pound bomb fell into the garden next to ours, but fortunately it failed to explode. All of us, the entire street, it seemed, crept away that night (my family to a cousin’s flat) – many of us in our pajamas – walking as softly as we could (might vibration set the thing off?)…

On another occasion, an incendiary bomb, a thermite bomb, fell behind our house and burned with a terrible, white-hot heat. My father had a stirrup pump, and my brothers carried pails of water to him, but water seemed useless against this infernal fire-indeed, made it burn even more furiously. There was a vicious hissing and sputtering when the water hit the white-hot metal, and meanwhile the bomb was melting its own casing and throwing blobs and jets of molten metal in all directions.”

Sacks was shocked, when later one his brothers read what he had written and told him that his memory of the first bomb was correct but that, in fact, when the second bomb had fallen they had both been away at boarding school.

How could he have such a detailed memory of an event, complete with images in his mind’s eye of his family members fighting the fire and the burning molten metal, if he did not actually experience it, Sacks asked himself.

It turned out that another of his brothers who had been there for the second bombing incident had written them a vivid and detailed letter about it, and that Sacks had been enthralled by the story – so much so that the images and details it aroused in his mind became laid down as a memory of having actually been there. And as a young child, it would have neatly extended the already existing narrative created by his memory of having actually been there for the first bombing.

Subsequent studies using brain imaging technology have found that scans of memories from actual experiences and scans of memories our brains have created will show exactly the same brain patterns.

Some of you may remember when Brian Williams, the news anchor, got into trouble after going on David Letterman and falsely claiming that he had been on a helicopter hit by ground fire in Iraq. He was accused of falsifying this story, lying, in effort at self-aggrandizement.

Now, we can never know for sure what went on in Mr. William’s brain, but many memory researchers believed a very similar thing may have happened to him. He was in a helicopter in Iraq when the incident happened, just not the one that got struck, and he had accurately reported the incident two years earlier. Overtime, though, as he had interviewed the people who were actually in the helicopter and learned the vivid details, it is possible his brain conflated his actual experience with the intense images generated by his knowledge of the flight that was struck.

So, by the time Mr. Williams went onto David Letterman, it is possible that his brain had constructed a memory that seemed every bit as real to him as having been at that second bombing had seemed to Oliver Sacks.

I think there is an aspect of the spiritual here also – a spiritual lesson about checking our recollections to make sure that the story we are telling ourselves is true – that our ongoing narratives have not distorted a memory, especially in ways that could be harmful.

For example, there are now numerous incidences of African American males spending years or even decades in prison, put there based upon the eye witness testimony of white people, only to be exonerated when DNA testing became available.

White people have been fed a narrative about who is most likely to commit crimes and that narrative can construct incorrect memories that have the potential to devastate black and brown lives.

And that leads us to social, communal, cultural memory, because the things we choose to remember as communities and societies and the ways in which we choose to remember them also can have profound effects upon our lives and those of other people.

We construct cultural memory as a group or society though the stories and histories we tell or choose not to tell; through the rituals, traditions and holidays we observe and prioritize and those we do not; through the arts, music, theatre, religious practices and the very use of what language, symbols and words we chose to employ.

And like with individual memory, it is important that we examine, question and sometimes deconstruct and then reconstruct what narratives we are following and reinforcing as we pass on cultural memory.

For instance, the ways in which we have minimized the brutality and savageness of the genocide committed against native Americans; our white washing of the cruelty and monstrousness of slavery and the subsequent treatment of African Americans in the U.S.; our avoiding the images of the lynchings of black and brown Americans and on and on and on; these create an incomplete and false narrative, an untrue story, a cultural memory that is steeped in denial and allows the continued supremacy of white culture and people over all others.

We fail to teach how white elites encoded the concept of race into law to slightly privilege indentured white people over enslaved African Americans so that they would not join together to rebel against such oppressive systems.

In our own state of Texas, it will only be in the next school year that our children will be finally be taught that slavery was the primary cause of the civil war rather than sectionalism and states’ rights.

Within Unitarian Universalism, we can also fall prey to this. For instance, we often pass on a cultural memory about our how Unitarian, Transcendentalist forebearer, Theodore Parker, was such a leading and passionate abolitionist. We less often convey that he also believed whites to be the superior race, called African Americans docile and lacking in intelligence and referred to the Mexican people as “A wretched people; wretched in their origin, history, character, who must eventually give way as the Indians did.”

And this is just one of many such examples.

This is a spiritual issue. We have a moral obligation to do our best to ensure that the cultural memories we are transmitting are not continuing harmful narratives – a real and daunting challenge as we are often caught within those same false narratives ourselves.

Now, I want to switch gears and touch briefly on some of the science being investigated regarding whether a transmission of another kind of memory may be possible epigenetically or even genetically. Some of the research is still pretty early on, and some of it is the subject of much scientific debate. Still, I think it also has potential spiritual implications involving ancestry and heritage.

Epigenetics is the study of changes in organisms caused by modification of gene expression rather than alteration of the genetic code itself. Some research indicates that in animals, emotional “memory”, such as a propensity toward anxiety or the opposite, a tendency toward calmness and resilience, can be passed down epigenetically through several generations by the transmission of chemicals, methyl groups, that attach to the DNA and regulate gene expression. Some studies claim to have found this in humans also now.

Over much longer time periods, some researchers are exploring whether a kind of memory might also be encoded through alterations to the DNA itself.

Because my life is ruled by three terribly spoiled Basenji dogs, I was fascinated by the study of how humans and dogs have co-evolved over likely tens of thousands of years. Dogs and humans now seem to be born with an ability to read and interpret correctly each other facial expressions and vocal tones. When humans and their dogs interact, both species release oxytocin, the same bonding hormone released when humans interact with their new born children.

I was also fascinated by research with savants, people seemingly born with musical genius, artistic brilliance or even complicated mathematical skills who display such abilities without any training and at too early an age for their abilities to have been learned.

Likewise, scientists are studying people who after experiencing a head injury suddenly develop prodigious musical, artistic or mathematical ability, again without ever having had formal training in these areas. Is this evidence of some kind of genetic memory? We will have to stay tuned as the exploration continues.

I’ll close by sharing with you an experience I had recently that I think illustrates a number of these concepts about memory and demonstrates just how powerful memory can be.

Many of you have heard me talk before about how important my maternal grandparents were in my life and the love they gave me as they helped my mom raise me.

My grandparents, Leo and Ann, often took us on camping trips with them, and I have wonderful memories of being with them in the piney woods of East Texas and elsewhere.

They loved to travel and drove all cross the U.S., stopping to spend time in forests, including many a pine forest.

And, like Oliver Sacks had from his brother’s letter, I have these secondary memories from the images I created in my mind when they would return from one of their trips and share with us vivid descriptions from their adventures.

Last month, I spent a week exploring the white mountains of Arizona. One morning, I got up very early and drove way up into the mountains to a nature park called Wood Canyon Lake.

As drove into the park, I found myself in the middle of a beautiful pine forest. It was rocky, and small patches of snow reflected the morning sunlight, which was steaming through the trees at a slightly sideways angle because it was still so early.

And suddenly, I had this experience that was as if Leo and Ann were present there in my rental car with me.

I was such a powerful experience that I had to pull the car over and stop, and I struggle even now to put it adequately into words.

I can tell you though, that my grandparents had built their clothing closet out of cedar, so they had always carried a slight smell of cedar with them, and that faint aroma of cedar came back to me again under the beautiful canopy of pine trees.

And there had always been a way that I felt when I was with my grandparents that I never felt any other time. And that feeling swept over me again – an unexpected blessing and reminder of being worthy of their great love.

This is the spiritual power of memory. I got to spend a few moments with my grandparents once more, even if only through that great power of recollection.

And the ethics and values that they instilled in me were renewed and reignited.

My beloveds, this is one more aspect of the spiritual power of memory.

Not only can we remember, and when necessary, deconstruct and then reconstruct memory in ways that are more life giving, so too, like my grandparents, can we construct much of how we will be remembered.

May ours be a legacy of love, justice and stories truthfully told. Amen.

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

Love’s Sanctuary

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

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
October 14, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

We have talked about the ancient history of offering sanctuary as we have with Sulma and Alirio. In the broader context, we all need sanctuary, a respite, a sacred place to get re-centered. We will discuss what it means to be a people of sanctuary.

Call to Worship

This place is sanctuary
Kathleen McTigue

You who are broken-hearted,
who woke today with the winds of despair
whistling through your mind,
come in.
You who are brave but wounded,
limping through life and hurting with every step, come in.
You who are fearful, who live with shadows
hovering over your shoulders,
come in.
This place is sanctuary, and it is for you.
You who are filled with happiness,
whose abundance overflows,
come in.
You who walk through your world
with lightness and grace,
who awoke this morning with strength and hope,
you who have everything to give,
come in.
This place is your calling, a riverbank to channel
the sweet waters of your life, the place
where you are called by the world’s need.
Here we offer in love.
Here we receive in gratitude.
Here we make a circle from the great gifts
of breath, attention and purpose.
Come in.

Sermon

“Yeah though I walk through the valley of the shadow, thou art with me.
Though my heart’s been torn on fields of battle thou art with me.
Though my trust is gone and my faith not near In love’s sanctuary thou art with me.”

That’s the first verse of Austin-based, singer/songwriter Elyza Gilkyson’s song, “Sanctuary”. Gilkyson also wrote the beautiful song, “Requiem” that you just heard.

I wanted to share the song “Sanctuary” with you this morning, because even though I do not sing it anywhere near as well as she does, I think the song captures so much about the concept of sanctuary and it’s different meanings.

I saw Gilkyson in concert once, and she said basically that she has intentionally left the the “Thou” in “thou art with me” in a sense of mystery and the unknown.

First UU Alive

September 16, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
and Jules Jaramillo
September 2, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Our spirits become most fully alive and connected to our human potential when we are able to embrace our UU faith and spirituality in our daily lives. Join Jules and Rev. Chris as we explore the wonderful possibilities of our UU Living Tradition.

Call to Worship

Now let us worship together.

Now let us celebrate this congregation’s highest religious 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. Today and all the days of our lives.

Now and in our daily lives, we nurture and cultivate these higher spiritual commitments.

Reading
by Sophia Lyon Fahs

The religious way is the deep way, the way that sees what physical eyes alone fail to see, the intangibles of the heart of every phenomenon. The religious way is the way that touches universal relationships; that goes high, wide and deep, that expands the feelings of kinship…

Life becomes religious whenever we make it so: when some new light is seen, when some deeper appreciation is felt, when some larger outlook is gained, when some nobler purpose is formed, when some task is well done.

Sermon

I was standing on an outdoor platform in Chicago, waiting for the train that would take me to my class that morning. The platform was located under a street that ran across a bridge overhead, partially blocking the morning sun.

Still, one, wide ray of sun was shining though, and it was snowing very, very lightly. Tiny, fragile snowflakes were being held aloft by a brisk wind, swirling in circles in the air.

They danced through the bright ray of sunlight, reflecting it in dazzling patterns, as if thousands of miniature mirrors were whirling and casting their own small rays of light in almost infinite directions – tiny spirits dancing and floating and spreading light into their world.

Needless to say, I was captivated, standing transfixed until the sound of my train approaching drew my attention.

I turned toward the sound of the train. As I did, I made eye contact with an elderly gentleman who was leaning on a carved wooden cane for support. He was smiling. There was a joyful glint in his eyes. I smiled back.

Without exchanging a word, we both knew that we had both been mesmerized by the beautiful ballet of sunlight and snowfall. We both knew that we had somehow been profoundly moved by it.

Riding in the train a few moments later, I could not help thinking that the potential for the religious, the possibility for transformation exists within any moment.

In that small, fragmentary sliver of time on a cold train platform in Chicago, I understood that this person I had never meet and would likely never see again, was, like me, enmeshed in all the beauty and fragility and wonder and suffering and joy that life has to offer.

I was reminded that this understanding is the place from which compassion and love flow.

This idea, that the possibility for transformation is present within every moment, has strong implications for how we think about and do faith development.

If there is transformative potential in every fragment of time, in each encounter – and if we take the work of the church to be at about spiritual growth, then that means we can carry our faith with us beyond these church walls, open ourselves to the ongoing possibility of religious experience in our daily lives Ñ both that which we create intentionally and that which occurs when we are not even expecting it.

And throughout the week, everything we do here in the church can be seen as faith development. Religious education is occurring not just in classrooms, but also throughout the life of the church. Every worship service, every ministry team and committee meeting, every conversation during the fellowship hour has the potential to be transformative.

I wonder, if we take this view, how might our church meetings change? Might they focus less on details and more upon our values and vision? Might we put our mission at the top of every meeting agenda?

Might we, from time to time, begin our ministry team meetings by reviewing our covenant of right relations?

Maybe we infuse our stewardship campaigns with our passion for living out our mission in the world and making real differences in real people’s lives!

Perhaps we pause during meetings for a reflective period or to sing a hymn together that captures our vision for creating a better world.

How about some time for dancing during that Green Sanctuary Team meeting! OK, well at least maybe time for meditation and prayer!

The way that we are together becomes paramount. The how we interact takes precedence, whether in the classroom or the boardroom.

The method is the message, as our Unitarian Universalist education forbearer, Angus McLean famously put it.

Here is another example.

When I was doing my ministerial internship, one project they gave me was to put together an intergenerational Christmas Pageant for one of our December worship services.

The pageant was a Unitarian Universalist version of the biblical nativity story. Our cast included folks ranging in age from four or five to this amazing woman in her mid-eighties who ran circles around me and kept our rehearsals on track.

Putting together a pageant, complete with costumes, props, songs and children dressed up as the animals in the stable had been quite the challenge but lots of fun too.

We had camels, cows, a donkey, some doves and at least a couple of cats.

An ongoing challenge was helping them to remember that there were imaginary stable walls around the edges of our little dais. More than once during rehearsals, a cow or camel would walk right through one of the imaginary walls, and we would have to remind them not to do that!

On the Friday before we were to do the pageant, the news broke about the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary.

On Saturday, I talked with my supervising minister. We had to decide whether to go forward with the pageant or whether it would be too light hearted given the anguishing news.

We decided to go forward; however on Sunday morning, we stood together before the congregation, and offered a prayer for the victims and their families before we be started.

I could feel a noticeable sense of shock and grief among our church members that morning.

We started the pageant.

About halfway through it, one of the children costumed as an animal in our imaginary stable, one of the cats I believe, got so wrapped up in one of the songs in the pageant, that she stood up and started dancing.

She pirouetted right through one of our imaginary walls, whirling and swirling in balletic circles in front of our carefully set up nativity scene.

She was about the same age as the youngest children who had been killed at Sandy Hook.

The woman who had helped keep our rehearsals on track and I were sitting together, and we looked at each other, both wondering if we should get up and lead our little dancing cat back into the scene.

As soon as our eyes met though, we both knew that we had to let her continue.

She was dancing. The music was playing and the people were singing. At one point the song almost faltered. The children were mesmerized by the little girl’s impromptu ballet and the adults were nearly overcome with emotion.

I looked around the sanctuary and saw that the adult’s eyes were glistening, their tears reflecting tiny pinpoints of light in almost infinite directions across our sanctuary.

We kept on singing, and the little girl kept her ballet afloat, and our spirits were dancing through joy and sorrow and back again in small, fragmentary slivers of time.

The music and the singing and the dancing were the method. That we had to continue our part in the creative co-telling of life’s grand pageant was the message.

A young girl’s dancing had transformed a congregation that morning.

I have a spiritual director who says that a key element of spiritual growth is to be always mindful of and open to the possibility of transformative experiences.

I think that’s right.

And, I believe faith formation in our churches can go a step further by helping us to actively carry our faith into our daily lives – to actively pursue transformative experience both in our lives and throughout the life of this congregation.

May we always be mindful of our capacity to transform one another.

Amen.

Text of Jule’s homilie is not yet available. Click the play button to listen.

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

Muppet Theology

August 26, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
August 26, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Jim and Jane Henson created their lovable puppet characters over six decades ago, and the Muppets really began to gain prominence in the early 1970s. Through their decades of television and movies, what have the Muppets had to tell us about life, love and creating community?

Sermon

Swedish Chef Video

I have waited my entire life to begin a sermon with the Swedish Chef doing Rapper’s Delight.

And, choosing this service topic gave me an excuse to wear my new Muppet boots, featuring Animal.

In actuality, I have been thinking about doing this service since back when I was in seminary and having to read many, many, many theology books and write many, many theology papers.

One evening I decided I needed to clear my head of the deep thinking for a bit, so my spouse Wayne and I went out to see a movie.

Thinking it would get me about as far away from theology as I could get, we went to see the muppet movie that was playing at the time that was simply titled, “The Muppets”

By the way, for Unitarian Universalists, theology does not have to involve a God or Gods, though it can. It can also be about a way of thinking about and understanding that which is ultimate, that which is most important for living richly and fully, that which is larger than ourselves but of which we are a part.

Anyway, I am sitting there watching the movie, and I’m like, “Wow, there’s a kind of theology happening here.”

It’s about creating community and struggling together toward a common purpose. The Muppets have always had each other, even when things looked bleak. They stuck together. They stayed in relationship even when they had conflict.

They never let one another give up – they carried each other when needed.

And I sat there thinking, here we have a band of quirky, intelligent, creative oddballs and misfits who somehow find each other and create a caring community where they laugh, cry, play and sing together.

My God, they’re Unitarian Universalists!

I told Wayne all of this. He said, “Shut up and watch the movie.”

I’m joking about that last part. We talked on the way home, not during the movie. We were at Alamo Drafthouse, and the ghost of Ann Richards would have taken us out if we had done so.

Over the past 63 years now, in television programs like “Sesame Street” and “The Muppet Show”, as well as in their movies, the Muppets have modeled spiritual themes rooted in community, belonging and interconnectedness: we can help each other follow our dreams; reconciliation and redemption are possible.

They’ve modeled staying true to yourself and your calling; mysticism and wonder; the effort and the struggle being more important than the outcome; being willing to ask for help when we end it; and to quote one line from the movie, “Life’s a happy song when there’s someone beside you to sing it”.

A while back, I put a public post on Facebook, asking folks, “Over the years, what have you learned about life and living from the Muppets.

Now, I should have known in a mostly Unitarian Universalist crowd that I would get some typically smart aleck responses like:

It’s not easy being green.
Don’t be a grouch or you’ll end up living in a garbage can.
Cookies are good.
Don’t play with electricity like crazy Harry

The more serious responses all also focused on belonging and relationship. Folks had gotten from the Muppets:

The importance of listening deeply to one another.
The power of music to turn strangers into friends and friends into family.
How friends make life exponentially better.
That you might as well embrace life’s weirdness because life is already weirder than you think.
Caring and curiosity will make your own life better.
Our differences are what make life more interesting and creative.
Even with our differences, we can all live on the same street and get along.
We can all come together and create something beautiful if given the chance.

I loved it that one of church couples has decided that everyone has a “Spirit Muppet” in life (you know, like spirit animals), and they have chosen Ralph the Dog and Grover as theirs.

They decided this after reading about slate. com Supreme Court reporter Dahlia Lithwick’s “Unified Theory of Muppets Types” which theorizes a singular factor that divides us in our society: “Every one of us is either a Chaos Muppet or an Order Muppet. “

Here’s how Lithwick explains her Unified Muppet Theory:

“Chaos Muppets are out-of-control, emotional, volatile. They tend toward the blue and fuzzy. They make their way through life in a swirling maelstrom of food crumbs, small flaming objects, and the letter C.

Cookie Monster, Ernie, Grover, Gonzo, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and-paradigmatically-Animal, are all Chaos Muppets.

Zelda Fitzgerald was a Chaos Muppet. So, I must tell you, is former Justice Stephen Breyer.”

Order Muppets-and I’m thinking about Bert, Scooter, Sam the Eagle, Kermit the Frog, and the blue guy who is perennially harassed by Grover at restaurants (the Order Muppet Everyman)-tend to be neurotic, highly regimented, averse to surprises and may sport monstrously large eyebrows.

They sometimes resent the responsibility of the world weighing on their felt shoulders, but they secretly revel in the knowledge that they keep the show running.

Your first grade teacher was probably an Order Muppet. So is Chief Justice John Roberts.

And in this way, we can understand all societal conflict.

Are you an order muppet or a chaos muppet?

Now, whether or not you buy Lithwick’s “Unified Theory of Muppet Types”, I do think that the muppet characters can be thought of as archetypes that capture some of our human traits and, more specifically, our Unitarian Universalist faith characteristics rather well.

Of course, we have to start with Kermit the Frog, who I think can be thought of as representing our Unitarian Universalist rootedness in rationality and the use of reason. He’s a steadfast thinker and philosopher and a natural leader.

There is a great drive in this part of our faith that leads us to contemplation, discovery and progress in our state of knowledge. The shadow side of it though is that we can get so caught up in our heads that we sometimes do not actually act upon that knowledge.

But either way, how can we keep from loving a frog who does a cover of the Talking Head’s “Once in a Lifetime”.

Kermit Video

In contrast, I think Animal can be thought of us as representing our embodied, emotional, passionate side.

This is the side of us that drives to acting upon our faith but can also result in us being hasty and irrational.

Still, it is where a deep well of compassion and love resides. ÇAnimal VideoÈ

Next, I think Fozzy the Bear can represent how we can enhance our faith by infusing it with a sense of fun, fellowship, joy and humor.

While our faith would become shallow if these were all that it involved, fun, fellowship, joy and humor can very much help us sustain and deepen the other aspects of our spirituality.

Even when the jokes are really bad. Waka. Waka.

Fozzy Video

And then there’s Janice, our guitar rocking, deep thinking, mystical side of ourselves.

I also suspect Janice may be Buddhist.

Janice (and we) though have to be careful sometimes to avoid thinking we’re being deeper than we really are.

Janice Video

I have always loved Statler and Waldorf, the grumpy guys that sit up in the balcony and offer unsolicited commentary.

I think maybe they can be thought of as representing our Unitarian Universalist history of skepticism and questioning.

A healthy dose of skepticism and questing has helped keep ours an honest religion.

I think the danger may be that too much skepticism can devolve into sitting on the sidelines and criticizing the efforts of others in our faith.

Statler and Waldorf Video

And, of course, we cannot leave out Ms. Piggy, who as you heard in our reading earlier considers is a feminist, as well as I think represents that there is probably a spark of Diva along with that spark of the divine within each of us.

In fact, in 2015, Ms. Piggy received the Sackler Center First Award for her feminism from the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Gloria Steinem, presented her with the award.

Ms. Piggy has a particular kind of feminism, I think. She embraces her femininity and feminine charm, but is also tough as nails, knows karate and will take you down if you mess with her!

I like to think of Ms Piggy as representing our strong and steadfast commitment to feminism and all struggles for equality and human rights – our affirming and promoting the inherent worth and dignity of every person.

Here’s Ms. Piggy in her own words with some advice on being stylish and living life.

Ms Piggy Video

So, those are just a few of our Muppet archetypes.

My apologies if I left out anyone’s favorite Muppet character. I leave it to you to figure out what archetype they may represent, as well as to discern your own “spirit muppet” if you are so moved.

I am leaning towards Gonzo.

So, to summarize, Muppet theology is about our need for connection, community and belonging.

It is about knowing that creating community can be messy and difficult sometimes, but, if we stay in relationship with each other even during the challenges, we can become our best selves and create something greater than ourselves at the same time.

Muppet theology is about learning that the things that may be our greatest strengths can also be aspects of ourselves that can contain challenges and potential pitfalls.

It is about being there for each other, carrying each other when it is needed, as well as celebrating our uniqueness and our differences.

In these times, wherein cynicism abounds, it occurred to me as I working on this service that the Muppets might seem a bit naive and simplistic these days.

Then I thought, “or perhaps they are expressing some very basic human values from which we can too easily become separated”.

Maybe we could benefit from a return to simple compassion, caring and communality. The Muppets model for us that sense of caring and compassion. They model how if we stay in community, stay in relationship through good times and bad, we can make beautiful music together.

And so it is that I am left with no choice but to close by offering you at least a small part of the Muppets performing Bohemian Rhapsody.

Bohemian Rhapsody Video

And Amen.

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

Loving, Laughing, Living

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

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

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

Reading

After the Blinding Rains
Chris Jimmerson

After the blinding rains came and washed away the foundations;

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

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

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

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

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

And together, we built new structures of meaning.

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

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

Sermon

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

One hundred twenty five people died.

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

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

Entire communities experiencing collective disorientation and disconnection, shock.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I want to read a definition for you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

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