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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
April 9, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Humans are bound by limited perspectives, which can sometimes lead to faulty decisions when we lack the larger, longer-term view. How do we find that view?

Call to Worship

Visions
by Chris Jimmerson

We gather to see more — our individual perspectives expanded by placing them together in worship of that which is larger than us but of which we are a part.

We celebrate our differences, holding them up as the blessings we give to one another.

We gather to know more, to feel more, to experience more than that which each of us may know, feel and experience in solitude.

We gather to sing. We gather to raise our spirits to higher elevations. We gather to gain a collective vision of love and justice fulfilled.

We gather to worship together.

Reading

exerpt from Thinking Like a Mountain
by Aida Leopold

A deep chesty bawl echoes from rimrock to rimrock, rolls down the mountain, and fades into the far blackness of the night. It is an outburst of wild defiant sorrow, and of contempt for all the adversities of the world. Every living thing (and perhaps many a dead one as well) pays heed to that call. To the deer it is a reminder of the way of all flesh, to the pine a forecast of midnight scuffles and of blood upon the snow, to the coyote a promise of gleanings to come, to the cowman a threat of red ink at the bank, to the hunter a challenge of fang against bullet. Yet behind these obvious and immediate hopes and fears there lies a deeper meaning, known only to the mountain itself. Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.

Sermon

In 1949, a little known University of Wisconsin professor named Aldo Leopold published what would come to be considered a masterpiece in the literature of environmentalism called, A Sand County Almanac; and Sketches Here and There, it contained a section he had titled, “Thinking Like a Mountain”, which opened with those haunting words describing the howling of wolves on a mountainside that Margaret read for us earlier.

In “Thinking Like a Mountain“, Leopold wrote about a shift in perspective he had experienced when as a young man, he and a friend came upon an old wolf and her pack of full-grown pups while hunting deer. They opened fire on the wolves, striking down the old wolf, while the rest of the pack escaped, one with a wounded leg.

Here are Leopold’s own words describing this shift in perspective.

“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view”.

He goes on to describe how he witnessed mountainside after Mountainside where hunters had killed off the wolves, thinking it would result in better deer hunting, or ranchers had killed off the wolves thinking to protect their herds (or both). Instead, without the wolves, the deer and the cattle over-populated, destroying the foliage of the mountainside, wreaking havoc with the ecosystem and causing much of the deer and cattle population to die of starvation.

The wolves, though predators, had been a vital part of the ecosystem. In Leopold’s metaphor, the mountains knew this. They were tall enough to have this broader view and old enough to take a longer view.

This was the change in his perspective. He had gotten a glimpse of thinking like a mountain.

And this stepping back to try to get a broader, longer-term view of our actions and their potential consequences is certainly vital to our struggle to prevent the most devastating consequences to our environment from global climate change and other risks from human activities.

It is a crying shame then that our president and his top advisors are thinking like a molehill when it comes to environmental policy. Their shortsightedness and greed for immediate gain are imperiling our future and that of generations to come. It is but one area in which we must resist.

But, this trying at least from time to time to take a broader, longer-term view — this thinking like a mountain — I think is important not just in how we approach our environment, but is also an essential element of our overall personal, public and spiritual and religious lives.

In our personal lives, such a perspective shift can so often change the very course of our lives for the better. The examples are many — the person with a substance addiction who finally sees its broader impact on their life and the lives of their loved ones and seeks help; the sudden realization that a career choice has become misery-making and the subsequent investigation of possibilities that leads to a more life fulfilling choice; an experience of interconnectedness in nature, though meditation, religion or other sources that leads to a shift in values from those centered around individualism to those more centered on relationship with other people and our world.

These perspective shifts have happened many times in my own life. One was when my grandmother was dying slowly from congestive heart failure. My mother was taking care of her at my mom’s house. My grandmother had been in and out of the hospital and had said she did not want to go back to one anymore.

My grandmother was unhappy and perhaps even miserable. She was often confused and would wake in the middle of the night, sometimes walking around, weakly, and in danger of falling, often only partially clothed. My mom was on the verge of emotional and physical collapse from all of this.

I called my mom often, and one day when she picked up the phone I could tell she was crying. She said she was exhausted and had been in bed most of the day, except to check on my grandmother a few times.

As we talked, we began to see a larger perspective. We began to realize that we had been valuing length of life over quality of life. We saw that being in a place that was not her own, lacking in the familiar, was part of the confusion and unhappiness my grandmother had been experiencing. We reached a broader understanding that this was not what my grandmother wanted.

We stopped all but palliative treatment, brought in hospice to my grandmother’s own house and allowed her to live there, in dignity, for the rest of her life, which only lasted a few weeks. She was comfortable and even seemed happy in those last weeks. I visited with her several times, and though weak sometimes, she was once again, in those last weeks, the happy, loving person she had been her whole life.

I can honestly say that it was the gentlest death I have experienced, and I am so glad she did not have to spend her last days unhappy and confused. I am so glad we did not rob her or ourselves of those peaceful, loving final days.

In our metaphor, the mountain already knew all of this, of course. We had to climb it first to get the higher view. Life is like that sometimes, but if we can make the climb and think like a mountain, it can sometimes change our lives and even the lives of those we love for the better.

Now, this is important in our public life also. Taking the time to step back and try to gain a broader, longer-term perspective is more important than ever now, as we attempt to live out our values in the public and political arena. Faced, as we are with such a barrage of distortions and outright lies (or what the Trump administration calls “alternative facts”), it can be easy to get bogged down arguing with one individual Tweet or statement. With an onslaught of executive orders and proposed legislation, we can fall into being overwhelmed by battle after battle and lose sight of the dangerous, common ideological core that all of these these proposals represent.

The mountain sees the falsehoods as the distractions and attempts to misdirect they are intended to be. Them mountain sees the rooms filled with men making decisions about women’s health and rights. It sees the massive tax cuts for the wealthy that would be made possible by proposed legislation that would take healthcare away from millions and millions of people that just won’t seem to die. It sees profit being prioritized over sustaining life on our planet.

The mountain sees an administration full of white people taking aim at the rights of immigrants and people of color. It sees anti-LGBTQ bigot after anti-LGBTQ bigot in positions of power at the highest levels of our government.

The mountain sees these things and more. Because it sees this broader view, the mountain understands that we are up against an ideology of patriarchy, white supremacy and unbridled capitalist oligarchy, and that any of us who do not fit within that power structure are under threat if we refuse to stay in our proper place.

And because of this, the mountain knows we need each other.

The mountain sees that this is what we are up against, and we have to see it too if we are to have any hope of avoiding the fulfillment of such a dangerous, unjust ideology.

And then, once we see this, we also have to think like a mountain about how we might successfully resist it.

Fortunately, social science researchers such as Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan have done some of this wider, longer range thinking for us by studying which social movements in the past several decades have been the most successful.

They found that non-violent resistance is more effective than violence.

They also found that the most disparate movements have been the most successful movements.

I know we have sometimes wondered about this even in this church. Are we better to focus in on just a few social issues and target just them in order to concentrate our limited resources? Or, would we be better off with our folks working on a broad range of social justice issues, as long as enough folks have energy around anyone of them? Should we focus on tactics such as visiting, writing and calling governmental officials, donating to others already doing the work or on more grassroots protests and rallies?

Chenoweth and Stephan’s research make very clear that we are more likely to have success the more disparate our efforts, both in terms of topics and tactics. For instance, our immigration rights activism can inform and support our work for LGBTQ rights, or Women’s reproductive rights and visa versa. Each of these can combine and thereby amplify their efforts when needed. Likewise, we need tactics of both civil, political engagement and protests in the streets.

It is encouraging then that we are seeing exactly these disparate and wide ranging efforts develop in our church and in our larger society these days.

And here’s something cool — having these disparate social justice efforts can in fact help us to see more broadly, to think more like a mountain, and thereby become even more effective at doing justice, as well as live richer more fulfilling lives. They do so by engaging us with folks who may have very different perspectives than our own.

Many of us who are progressive but a part of the dominant culture in our society tend to reach a stage of development regarding how we interact with other races, ethnicities and cultures that is called minimization. We can see and value the many similarities that exist among human beings, but we cannot see or perhaps even resist or minimize the real differences that also exist among us.

And this limits our perspective. It keeps us from ever being able to see past our own life experiences.

Those of us who are white cannot know the life experiences of people of color living within a white dominated culture.

Straight folks cannot know the life experiences of lesbian, gay bisexual and queer people in a hetero-normative society.

Those of us who are male cannot know the life experiences of women living within a still patriarchal system.

Folks assigned a gender at birth that is congruent with how they see themselves cannot know the life experiences of transgender folks in a system that vastly favors gender conformity, which, by the way supports the patriarchy and serves as at least part of the support structure holding up racism and other forms of oppression.

Despite these and other differences though, we can value the perspectives these experiences bring, if we are willing to listen and do the work. We start by interacting with and valuing equally the people and their perspectives whose life experiences are different than our own. We start by refusing to give our own cultural perspective supremacy over another.

By learning to value difference, we can widen our own worldview and thereby become more effective at dismantling these very systems of racism and oppression. We can enrich our own lives and the lives of those with whom we interact.

I want to close by talking a little bit about the spiritual and religious dimensions of this thinking like a mountain.

Sometimes when we have our time of centering and breathing together here at the church or during other parts of our worship together, sometimes when I am out with a group of our folks working for justice, I will close my eyes and have this deep experience of interconnectedness with this religious community that I love and somehow through that with all of the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

Within religious and spiritual contexts, these experiences may be called experiences of the holy, of transcendence or of God or the divine.

Some Buddhists and Hindus might call them nirvana, though they would ascribe different meanings to it.

Humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow had a similar concept he called peak experiences. Other psychologists describe flow experIences.

Extreme sports enthusiasts will tell you that such altered mental states can be brought on by engaging in such sports.

Neurologists, psychologists and others have begun studying these altered states of consciousness more and more. They are discovering what is going within our brains and physiologically when we have such experIences.

They are also discovering that during these experiences we are actually thinking in a different way. We are making connections we do not ordinarily understand. We are experiencing transformations within our core values at a very deep level. We are grasping our universe and our place within it in ways that are much broader than our normal, day-to-day understanding.

Organizations ranging from Google to the Navy Seals are working on ways to help their people have such experiences more easily and more often, because these experiences, this wider, longer-term form of mental processing, seems to enhance creativity, increase productivity and strengthen team cohesion.

It seems that our deep, spiritual experiences, however we might label them, are helping us to gain a more timeless perspective from a much higher elevation, so the speak.

Perhaps this is one of the great purposes of church and religious community.

Together, we help one another cultivate and move into these types of experiences.

Together, we climb the mountain and our view, our perspective, expands.

And from the mountaintop, we glimpse the ancient truths the mountain has learned. We see a glimmer of the vistas the mountain looks out upon.

And knowing something of what the mountain knows, together, we are then better able to go out and change our lives and our world for the better.

This is our great purpose together. We gather in community together, we go up on the mountain together, so that we, together, are better able to nourish souls, transform lives and do justice.

Amen.

Benediction

As we go out into our world today, I wish you the blessing of that far-ranging vision — of vistas overseeing love and justice made real in your lives and in our world.

May the Congregation say, “Amen” and “Blessed be.”

Go in peace.

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 16 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.

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
March 19, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Our great 20th Century Unitarian Universalist minister and theologian, James Luther Adams wrote of five underlying principles of liberal religion. This principles seem eerily relevant still.

Reading
exerpt from Being Human Religiously by James Luther Adams

Whatever the destiny of the planet or of the individual life, a sustaining meaning is discernable and commanding in the here and now. Anyone who denies this denies that there is anything worth taking seriously or even worth talking about. Every blade of grass, every work of art, every scientific endeavor, every striving for righteousness bears witness to this meaning. Indeed, every frustration or perversion of truth, beauty, or goodness also bears this witness, as the shadow points round to the sun.

Sermon

When I was a child attending a little Southern Baptist church in the S.E. Texas town of Groves, one of the stories they used to tell us was the one about David and Goliath from the Hebrew Bible. You may be familiar with it.

Goliath is a giant, philistine soldier who has been taunting King Saul and the Israelites, daring anyone of them to come do battle with him. Saul and the Israelites are terrified

This goes on for 40 days until, David, somewhere between boyhood and young man, arrives on the scene and tells King Saul that he will battle Goliath. Eventually, Saul reluctantly agrees, fearing David is too young, too small and too inexperienced. He loans David his coat of armor, helmet and sword, but they are too big and heavy for David.

Instead, David goes out to challenge the giant with nothing but a wooden staff, his slingshot and 5 smooth stones he gathers from a stream and places in his pouch.

As soon as Goliath sees David, he bellows, basically, “Look at you, ya little pipsqueak. I’ma killya dead.”

And then David drones on for a while about the Lord God Almighty being on his side, until finally, they charge at each other, the giant with his sword raised overhead. David takes a stone out of his pouch, loads it in his slingshot and strikes Goliath right in the center of the forehead. Goliath falls face down upon the ground, at which point David runs over and cuts the giant’s head off using Goliath’s own sword.

This is followed by much celebration, David having what seems suspiciously like a gay love affair with Saul’s son, Jonathan, and David becoming a great warrior who would eventually become the king himself.

They didn’t really talk about the whole David and Jonathan thing at my little Southern Baptist church. They did tell us that the meaning of this story was about how even the small and weak can prevail against their adversaries with the power of the “Lord God Almighty” on their side.

Even as a small child, that explanation didn’t ring true for me. For me, it seemed like David had prevailed because he had been quite ingenious by coming up with one of the first documented examples of insurgent, asymmetrical warfare.

Yes, I was a budding liberal religious geek even back then.

I tell you this whole David and Goliath story because it is also the genesis of another reinterpretation of it by our preeminent, 20th Century, Unitarian Universalist theologian, minister and scholar, James Luther Adams. Much of Adams thinking was greatly informed by what he witnessed while he was in Germany during the rise of Nazism.

It is amazing (and a little scary too) then, that so many of his ideas are still relevant today. I think even those who are not familiar with James Luther Adams or his works, will recognize the influence his ideas still have within Unitarian Universalist thought and theology.

As a liberal religion, and a small one at that, it can certainly feel sometimes like we are up against one or even many Goliaths.

Specifically, Adam’s ideas that I want to explore today, and that I think are still extremely relevant for our faith, are his ideas around, if liberal religion where to pick up five smooth stones as David did, what would be the tenants those stones might represent?

I will briefly go through all five of them in his words, which can be academic and a little dense, and then we’ll break each one down a little further. James Luther Adam’s five stones of liberal religion are:

1. – “revelation is continuous”,
2. – “all relations between persons ought ideally to rest on mutual, free consent and not on coercion”,
3. – we affirm “the moral obligation to direct one’s effort toward the establishment of a just and loving community,”
4. – “we deny the immaculate conception of virtue and affirm the necessity of social incarnation”,
5. – “the resources (divine and human) that are available for the achievement of meaningful change justify an attitude of ultimate optimism.”

Now Adams used the terms “God” and “Divine” pretty freely, so let me take a small diversion here to read for you his words about such terms.

He writes, “To be sure, the word “God” is so heavily laden with unacceptable connotations that it is for many people scarcely usable without confusion… Indeed, the word “God” may in the present context be replaced by the phrase “that which ultimately concerns humanity” or “that in which we should place our confidence.”

“God (or that in which we may have faith) is the inescapable, commanding reality that sustains and transforms all meaningful existence.”

So, let’s go through each smooth stone in more detail now.

The first stone is that “revelation is continuous”. Unlike some fundamentalist religions, which believe that once God laid down the sacred scriptures, he said, “Well that’s it. Revelation is now sealed for all eternity. Move along now, nothing else to see here,” we believe that we are always still learning. We must continue to question what we think we know to be the truth. As our island of knowledge expands, so does the shoreline of unknowing and mystery.

We do not provide creeds or easy answers but do support one another in a free and responsible search for truth meaning and beauty. We are responsible for seeking out meaning and new revelations because they help us understand more and more what our creative possibilities are.

I think we see this in our church all the time, as people of all ages explore together the mysterious of living creative, meaningful and ethical lives. We do this in worship, in our faith development classes and throughout the life of this church.

The second stone is that “all relations between persons ought ideally to rest on mutual, free consent and not on coercion” . Now. Of course, Adams recognizes that this cannot be absolute. We require children to attend school, for example. He is warning us though that both religion and the state can easily become coercive – that even persuasion if it is based on fear can easily “be perverted into a camouflage for duress.” It becomes coercive.

Sound familiar?

Adams reminds us that liberal religion grew out of an aversion to overly hierarchical “ecclesiastical pecking orders” – church denominational structures that were extremely top down and coercive in nature.

We see this rejection of extreme hierarchy even today in the way that Unitarian Universalism is organized through a system called congregational polity – each church owns its own property, elects its own board of trustees and calls its senior minister. We are an association of churches, but our Unitarian Universalist Association bureaucracy has no legal authority over any individual church.

We also see this stone reflected in our covenant of healthy relations at this church, which describes how we will be in right relationship with one another.

As ministers, Meg and I don’t get to use the promise of heaven and the threat of hell to grant ourselves authority or as coercion to try to get people to up their stewardship pledge!

Ours is a beloved community based upon on mutual, free consent and not on coercion.

Adams third smooth stone involves “the moral obligation to direct one’s effort toward the establishment of a just and loving community.” We must build the beloved community, that community of love and justice, both within our church walls and, perhaps more importantly, beyond them.

Adams wrote, “A faith that is not the sister of justice is bound to bring us to grief.” It becomes stale and thwarts the inherent creative potential of its people.

He continued, “Freedom, justice, and love require a body as well as a spirit. We do not live by spirit alone. A purely spiritual religion is a purely spurious religion; it is one that exempts its believer from surrender to the sustaining, transforming reality that demands the community of justice and love.”

For the church to be alive and fulfilling its promise, we must be a prophetic church – a church that is participating in the processes that give body and form to love and justice in our world and making a moral demand for such love and justice from our societal and political leaders.

We see this in First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin through the call to do justice in our mission, through our many social justice and interfaith efforts, our people of color group, our alphabet soup group and our white allies for racial equity group, just as a few examples.

We see it through so many of our church members also being involved in non-profit and human rights organizations. Our church members are out in what Adams called the “conflicts and turmoils of the world,” making love and justice real, answering that moral obligation to grow the beloved community.

The fourth smooth stone is that “we deny the immaculate conception of virtue and affirm the necessity of social incarnation”. This one is saying that good does not happen by itself – that we must make it happen by our actions and that the good requires social and institutional forms.

Freedom, love and justice can only be built through organizations — educational, economic, social and political organizations. Freedom, love and justice require, in Adam’s words, “The organization of power and the power of organization”. Our church and our faith must inspire our members to participate in such organizations and, when necessary, build them if they do not yet exist.

Given the authoritarianism and white supremacy that we are witnessing in our world, Adam’s call to organize power seems all the more prophetic now.

A strong example of this in this congregation was when we offered sanctuary to Sulma Franco, an asylum seeker from Guatemala who feared deportation back to a country where her life had been threatened because of her activism on behalf of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer rights. In the three months that Sulma lived on our campus, as many of you will remember, we organized a coalition of local churches, religious leaders and immigrant and human right organizations. That coalition worked with Sulma on a successful campaign to pressure Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to grant Sulma a stay of removal. The stay would allow her the time to stay in the U.S. while the government processed a visa application she had submitted that would give her legal residency status if approved.

A little over two years ago, ICE granted Sulma that stay of removal. AND, that network I mentioned has continued to expand and grow, forming the Austin Sanctuary Network, consisting of well over a dozen local churches and many, many local non-profits and human rights groups. The network has since helped our sister sanctuary church, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian offer sanctuary to another immigrant and her young son.

I am thrilled to let you know also that a few months ago, I joined some members of the Austin Sanctuary Network to accompany Sulma to the ICE office in San Antonio, where they granted her stay of removal for a second year. Then, just a few days ago, Suln1a learned that the government has approved her visa application. She has won legal residency status in the U.S.!

The organization of power and the power of organization.

Adam’s fifth and final smooth stone asserts that “the resources (divine and human) that are available for the achievement of meaningful change justify an attitude of ultimate optimism.” Now this is not a blind or naive optimism, nor is it an immediate optimism. It is perhaps not even that the arc of the universe necessarily bends toward justice. For Adams, it is an optimism that we have all that we need to bend that arc toward justice ourselves, if with each new generation we choose to have the tenacity, courage, perseverance and strength to do so.

Adams recognized that we would experience setbacks. We would make mistakes. He saw that we humans also have a tragic side to our nature – that we can fall prey to the evils of greed, hatred, tribalism nihilism, war and violence, requiring that we adapt a willing humility.

And yet, he also wrote of the great progressive visionaries, who he said, “all sense that at the depths of human nature and at the boundaries of what we are, there are potential resources that can prevent a retreat to nihilism … The affirmative answer of prophetic religion, which may be heard in the very midst of the doom that threatens like thunder, is that history is a struggle in dead earnest between justice and injustice, looking towards the ultimate victory in the promise and fulfillment of grace.”

We have the resources we need. Grace is when we see them and utilize them.

In this church, we have our values: Transcendence, Community, Compassion, Courage and Transformation.

We have our covenant and through it, we have our healthy relations with one another.

I first came to this church over twelve years ago, and since that time I have seen it go through many a challenge and triumph. I think one of this congregation’s great strengths has been and continues to be a willingness to reach for “the resources (divine and human) that are available for the achievement of meaningful change.”

This congregation is filled with love, kindness, humor, joy and willingness to forgive, as well as to see difference and disagreement as potential assets. These resources give us reason for that “attitude of ultimate optimism” of which John Luther Adams wrote.

I would like to leave you with a formulation of the five smooth stones that I saw Connie Goodbread, one of Our Unitarian Universalist Association Southern Region staff members present a while back. I just loved it, and Connie was kind enough to send me her slide.

She took each of the five stones and associated a concept or value word with it. Here they are:

• Because revelation is continuous, nearly endless discoveries and possibilities lie before us, so we may have great HOPE.
• When our relationships are consensual, not coerced, we can know the true depth of a healthy and life giving LOVE held in sacred covenant with one another.
• Fulfilling our obligation to work toward a just and loving community allows us to also know JUSTICE in our own lives.
• When we deny the immaculate conception of virtue and work to create good in the world through organizing with others, we build up our own COURAGE.
• Because we have those resources, human and divine, to achieve meaningful change, we may rejoice and know JOY.

Hope. Love. Justice. Courage. Joy.

May we carry these five smooth stones with us throughout our days and throughout the life of this church and our beloved Unitarian Unversalism.

Amen.

Benediction

Go now, with hearts overflowing with hope.

Go now, knowing that the love in this community goes with you until we are together again.

Go now and create justice in our world, filled with the courage to do so and the joy of knowing that nearly endless possibilities still stretch before us.

Maybe the congregation say, “Amen” and “Blessed be.”

Go in peace.

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 16 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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
February 5, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

We are surrounded by beauty, so why do we so often fail to notice it?

Our Unitarian Universalist 4th principle says that we “affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. I add beauty to that search. I add beauty, because I think sometimes to find or make meaning, we need it. Sometimes the truth is a hard truth, it is a difficult reality, and so we also need to be able to still experience beauty in order to make meaning in our lives, to be able to continue to see the divine within ourselves and all around us.

Here is a video I would like to share with you.

VIDEO (Music and images with no dialog)

I made that video several years ago for a class in seminary from photos taken on several of our local nature trails and in one of our neighborhoods that at the time was what we might call, “transitional”. Now, I would call it, “unaffordable.”

Anyway, I wanted to transpose those images from that neighborhood and the images from the nature trails to show that the duality that we so often set up between nature and humans along our creations is a false duality – that we are within and a part of nature. Beauty can be found everywhere.

And I loved the delicious incongruity of the cross that appeared to be rising from out of the recycling trashcan, as well as the “Ready or not, Jesus is coming” sign that was in the same lot as the bright red fence with the “Moneyland” sign on it. It seems perhaps that our separation between the sacred and the secular is also a false duality.

Human rights and environmental activist, poet and scholar Carol Lee Sanchez is of Lakota native American heritage. In her article, “Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral: The Sacred Connection”, she writes of how most Native American tribes do not have a concept for these distinctions between humans and nature, the sacred and the material world. Instead, they understand humans and animals, plants and all of the elements of our universe to be related to and a part of each other. So, for traditional native Americans, to be spiritual, to be a good person, humans must extend good intentions and good behavior toward not just other people but toward creatures, plants and the elements. They call doing this, “to walk in Beauty” and it allows for seeing beauty in all.

Here is a sampling of how she describes walking in beauty, “When Native Americans refer to themselves as spiritual people, they are saying they believe that everything in the universe is imbued with spirit and they embrace, acknowledge, and respect the animating force within/surrounding/beyond all things-including humans. The idea of “the Sacred” held by traditional Indians is all-inclusive, and to be spiritual is to be ‘in communion’ with the Great Mystery.”

I wonder how our world might change for the betters if all people adopted this perspective.

I’ll share a couple of experiences that have helped move me at least a little closer toward it.

The first opened me to this idea that there is no separation between humans and nature and that therefore beauty may be found anywhere.

It was after my grandmother’s funeral. My family had gathered in the home where my grandparents had raised their children and then helped raise many of their grandchildren, including me. My grandfather had died a few years earlier.

Now, I loved my grandparents dearly, but I didn’t love so much the Beaumont-Port Arthur area where they lived and where I grew up. It is flat, swampy, hot, humid and filled with chemical refineries that from time to time fill the air with strange odors and light up the night sky with these giant torch towers where they bum off waste gases.

All of this just did not fit with my concept of beauty.

Later that evening though, I excused myself and walked out into the yard where I had played so often as a child. Lit by the flame of one of those torch towers, the night sky was glowing with an orange-red light much like an amazing sunrise. And suddenly, I found that I could see and experience this odd sort of beauty.

And dwelling in that beauty, I was also finally able to truly feel the loss – the loss over realizing that I would soon never again be connected with this place, this home where I had felt such warmth and safety and love.

The other experience was of that of “being in communion with the Great mystery” of which Carol Lee Sanchez writes. I was walking to a seminary class one cold morning in Chicago. To my left rose tall buildings of stone and glass. To my right, across Michigan Avenue, was a large park area and beyond it was a partially frozen over Lake Michigan. The sidewalk was filled with people. I was meditating as I made my way through the crowd, and I suddenly had this overwhelming sense that I was a part of all of that throng of humanity, as well as the buildings, the side walks, the lake and everything else and that all of it was a part of me. It was such a beautiful, transcendent yet overwhelming feeling, that I had to duck into a doorway for a moment before I could go on.

I truly had been “walking in beauty” – connected to the great mystery.

The challenge is, though, it can be particularly hard to walk in beauty during difficult times. And for many of us, these are proving to be very difficult times. Yet, these may be the very times we need to be able to see beauty the most.

I know that for me personally, it can sometimes be hard to see beauty at all- it feels oppressive when I see my deepest values and principles being threatened like never before by things like:

• A five year old being detained separate from his family for hours on his birthday and another young child handcuffed.
• People across the world being prevented from entering the U.S. and detained at our airports even when they have legal visas or are legal permanent residents.
• A white supremacist at the center of national security decision making.
• A very small group within the White House systematically dismantling or neutering our institutions that are supposed to serve as checks and balances.
• The groundwork being laid for what I fear will be even greater human rights abuses.

And the list could go on and on.

And yet, we are also seeing the largest protests in our history, activist groups that had formerly worked in silos joining together and more people engaging in III ore types of political activity and resistance than I can remember seeing in my lifetime.

This all reminds me of what the wonderful liberation theologian, James Cone calls “terrible beauty”. Terrible beauty is when that situation I mentioned earlier happens – truth, reality is difficult or even tragic and so we need beauty to make meaning. For Cone, it is when an oppressed people starkly acknowledge the reality of their hurt and loss and yet refuse to let it define them, claiming their own sense of humanity instead.

I want to let you hear him describe it himself, as he finds it in blues.

VIDEO

(Excerpt from James Cone on The Cross and the Lynching Tree

BILL MOYERS: In all of this, you turn your attention in the course of your long career, to this– to The Spirituals And The Blues, which is my favorite of your books. I mean, it’s not the most theological. But it is I think the most vivid in its description of how music was theology. Tell me about that.

JAMES CONE: Well, I grew up with the spirituals and the blues. I heard the spirituals every Sunday morning in Macedonia AME Church. And that’s where I received the sense that I was somebody. I was a child of God. But the blues was heard on Saturday night. Now, my mother wouldn’t let me go to the place where the blues was played. But you can hear it.

BILL MOYERS: From your house?

JAMES CONE: From my house. Yes. You can hear it in all the community, ’cause there were several juke joints.

JAMES CONE: And that’s where the people played the blues. That– now, the blues was for people who did not receive the same kind of– transcendence that people received on Sunday morning.

BILL MOYERS: What kind of transcendence did they receive?

JAMES CONE: And I– see, on Sunday morning, you could– you could know that your humanity was not defined by what happened to you during the week. Now, on Saturday night is when the blues people found that out.

BILL MOYERS: What’d they find out?

JAMES CONE: They found out that they had a humanity that nobody could take away from them.

My beloveds, I fear we are going to have to find terrible beauty in solidarity with our Muslim human family members; with immigrants; with people of color; with women and their allies who dare to demand equality.

And, yes, I fear that I and my fellow lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people are going to need our allies to find terrible beauty with us, as attempts get made to legalize discrimination against LGBTQ folks across the country. We are going to need that ironic tenacity that Dr. Cone mentions.

We are going to need each other.

And that’s where one more source of beauty I want to discuss with you comes in. This religious community is a thing of beauty. It is a place that sustains and nourishes so many folks. We have been experiencing high levels of wonderful visitors. Just last week, 28 new members joined the church, some of whom you got to meet earlier.

Friday before last, a terrific group of our church members put together a moving and healing “People’s Inauguration” worship service.

And it’s beautiful that this church is becoming a place of both comfort and challenge toward doing justice for more and more people.

During times like these though, we can easily become very stressed out. No matter what our political persuasion, there is so much coming at us right now. There is such a greater than usual sense of uncertainty in our world.

And when we are stressed out, at the very times when we need one another most, we can behave in ways we normally would not. I know I have found myself having to be careful to take a step back, take three or four deep breaths and check myself from responding to another’s words or actions that I would normally just let go. I have found myself having to take that step back to keep from assigning intentions that might or might not be true.

And all of that’s just with my spouse, Wayne, poor guy.

We need to know that these types of reactions under stress are normal. They are actually neurologically hardwired – our brains kind of shift into a different mode.

The great thing is though, we are capable of interrupting ourselves when this starts happening by recognizing these negative feelings and reactions when they are coming up in us, taking that step back, those four deep breaths. By doing so, we reengage our brain’s more rational mode.

So in this time where so many of us need this, our beautiful, beloved community, let’s try to move even beyond the promises we have made to one another in our covenant of healthy relations. Let’s not only try to interrupt stress-related reactions that may try to come up in us, let’s ask ourselves how we can offer each other more kindness, more humor, more fun, more compassion, more support.

We are in life’s struggle together, and there is much beauty to be found within the struggle itself – with and through each other.

If we walk in beauty together, and we invite more and more people to walk with us and we join in solidarity with more and more other groups of folks also walking in beauty together, I believe we can create something greater than resistance.

I think we can create a revolution that will move hearts and influence minds.

And wouldn’t that be terribly beautiful.

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 16 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.

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
January 1, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

We begin the year by thinking about elements in our lives which are doing us a disservice, write those things on paper and burn them together, scattering the ashes to the wind.

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

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 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.

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson & Carolyn Gremminger
November 20, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Studies have found that intentionally practicing gratitude can improve our daily lives in numerous ways. We’ll get grateful together as we discuss gratitude spiritual practices.

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

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 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.

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
October 16, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

After the last weekend of Austin City Limits Music Festival, in this church where music is such an integral part of our religious and spiritual experience, we look at the unique ways in which music moves our spirits.

Call to Worship

Come, Come
-adapted from Rumi by Leslie Takahashi Morris

Come, come, whoever you are
Come with your hurts, your imperfections,
your places that feel raw and exposed.
Come, come, whoever you are
Come with your strengths that the world shudders to hold
come with your wild imaginings of a better world,
come with your hopes that it seems no one wants to hear.

Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving
we will make a place for you,
we will build a home together.
Ours is no caravan of despair.
We walk together;
Come, yet again come.

Reading

Song of the Universe

For each child that is born
A morning star rises
And sings to the universe
who we are.

Listen carefully…
Can you hear the song
The one sung for you
When you were born.
The song sung by the cosmos
In motion
Rejoycing at your life.

You the result.
You the outcome.
You the celebration.

Listen carefully…
Can you hear it still?

A song of possibility.
A reminder that we still have time to be who
and what we need to be.

Listen carefully …
The vast expanse echoes a recognition
that it’s not always easy.
Possibilities
can be hard to pursue.

Roads not taken, wrong turns,
destinations that disappoint.
Through this,
the song persists.
The universe sings no less because time and space wear us thin.

The music calls us

Sermon

We live in a city that holds music as a central part of its identity. Likewise, music is a core ministry of this church and, for many of us, a vital component of our individual spirituality.

I think we are so blessed by the amazing talent of our music director, Brent Baldwin and the many wonderful musicians he gathers here. One of Brent’s many talents that stands out for me is his incredible ability to produce such high quality music across such a wide variety of styles and genres.

And that to me is such wonderful aspect of our music here at the church. We get to experience and learn about styles of music that may be challenging for us but deeply moving for other folks in the church and visa versa, and because of that we get to discover harmonies between these different styles that we might never have otherwise imagined.

OK, I think I have probably embarrassed Brent enough with all of this high praise.

Anyway, this all got me exploring why music can stir our emotions and move our spirits so deeply – what makes it such a central part of all known human cultures?

As I began that exploration, I quickly started to realize that the definition of ritual I talked about in a sermon last month exactly describes what is going on with music. Like other forms of ritual, music is structured and patterned. It is rhythmic and repetitive. Perhaps even more so than other forms of ritual, music can synchronize our feelings, thoughts and body movements to create a powerful unifying experience. And finally, when we experience and create music together, we synchronize with each other, which can create a very strong sense of bonding.

So, music is a form of ritual. And perhaps even more so than other forms of ritual, we are discovering the powerful ways music can benefit us.

Children who learn to play a musical instrument at an early age (or take singing lessons as the voice is an instrument also), develop greater motor and cognitive skills. Adults who learn to sing or play an instrument also reap benefits. Their brains tend to remain much more adaptable, and there is early evidence that they may be less likely to develop dementia.

Music therapy has psychological benefits, including improvements in depression and anxiety disorders. It has been used to steady the heart rates of premature infants and adult cardiac patients. Music can have powerful healing effects for people who have experienced trauma.

One of the most amazing ways that music is being used is to help people with Parkinson’s, as well as Alzheimer’s, other forms of dementia and stroke victims. I want to show you part of a video that I think demonstrates this so movingly.

Naomi Feil works with elderly dementia patients to help them reconnect and develop a feeling of safety. In this video, she sings hymns to Gladys Wilson, who has Alzheimer’s and has been non-verbal since also suffering a stroke.

[“Song Crosses Boundaries” video]

Later in the full version of that video, Gladys also speaks and says that she feels safe and taken care of.

You may have noticed that Naomi moving with and holding Gladys, matching her rhythm and tempo to Gladys’ movements was an important element of being able to break through to her.

That demonstrates yet another important aspect of music. While its effects on us can happen from simply listening to it, many of music’s benefits increase even more if we participate in it in some way and some only if we participate – if we sing, dance, sway, clap, play an instrument, drum on the back of a pew!

This seems to be related to the fact that the parts of our brains that process musical rhythm and tempo are strongly connected with the parts of our brains that control motor skills.

In the PBS documentary, “The Music Instinct”, neuroscientist Stan Levitin who has performed brain-imagining scans as people listen to or make music, says that we process pitch, tempo, rhythm, and so on, the various elements of music, in different parts of our brain. So, he says that looking at brain scans of people listening to music is like seeing a symphony going on in the brain, because so many areas, so many neural pathways are involved.

When we participate in the music in some way, even more of the brain lights up on those scans. Even better, when we do so with other people, we also activate the areas of the brain associated with social behavior.

This may help explain why many cultures have no concept of simply listening to music alone. It is necessary to see the movements and gestures of the musicians, to the feel the vibrations and to physically move with them. Some cultures do not even have separate words for music and dance.

This connection between music and our motor skills has profound implications for helping people with certain physical disabilities.

Here is another video that powerfully demonstrates this. It is from the trailer for a documentary about a man with cerebral palsy who learns to dance, and in doing so, transforms his life.

[“Enter the Faun” video]

So, music and its associated movement can have these amazing influences on us as individuals. Even folks who are unable to move some areas of their body still seem to benefit from participating in and moving to music in whatever ways they can.

But the benefits we derive also go beyond us as individuals. Music also can strengthen our relationships and group social bonding. When we participate in music together several things happen.

1. We engage with one another in coordinated, cooperative behavior, often evoking strong emotion, greatly increasing group cohesion.

2. Our bodies produce an oxytocin boost, a neuropeptide that results in increased affection and bonding between us.

3. Music activates the part of our brain that helps us comprehend what others are thinking and feeling, increasing empathy toward one another.

4. Music increases cultural cohesion. Perhaps more so than any other form of ritual, it communicates belonging and passes down cultural memory through the generations. There’s a reason folks say things like “these are the songs of my people.”

I want to show you part of one more video, that I think wonderfully demonstrates how music binds us together. Simon McDermott’s dad, Ted, has Alzheimer’s and is often non-verbal and cannot remember his family members. However, Simon singing an old, familiar song with him brings Ted’s memory back, and for those moments, they reconnect and Simon gets his dad back.

[“Quando Quando Quando” video]

That video just makes me feel happy.

So why is music this powerful to us? What makes it so intrinsic to all know human cultures?

Well, that is the subject of much research and great debate in several fields of study, and the answer is we just do not yet know.

There is much research on what the origin of music might be, how it is related to language and whether or not it is innate. If we are born with certain musical capacities, it would indicate that music played an evolutionary role in our development and survival as a species.

The earliest known musical instruments are flutes that date from about 42,000 years ago. However, it is possible our making of music goes back even further and that there is just no archeological record of it remaining to be found. Our musical origins remain a mystery.

Likewise, whether our propensity for music conveyed some evolutionary advantage or is just a by-product of other capacities we developed as humans is also a subject of debate.

I ran across a couple of theories as to what potential evolutionary roles it might have played. One is that like a peacock strutting his feathers, musical ability would have made the male human more attractive to females. I’m personally not buying that one, as tone deafness would have been evolutionarily selected out by now, which it hasn’t. Witness the campaign staff and surrogates for a certain Presidential candidate.

The other theory is that the group social bonding music creates that I outlined earlier might have allowed for the formation of larger and larger groups, which could well have conveyed survival advantages.

The evidence for the innateness of our musicality is mixed. One the one hand, musical forms vary greatly across cultures and many of our musical preferences seem to be learned. However, there is also evidence that we may be born with at least some of our musical proclivities and capacities.

Newborn infants can detect a downbeat, relative pitch changes, tempo changes, musical intervals that are harmonious and the like, making it possible we are born with these capabilities (though infants could have heard music in the womb also).

Likewise, certain commonalities in music seem to exist across all cultures, which might also indicate they are innate. Lullabies are remarkably similar in all cultures for instance. All cultures use the octave interval, though they divide it very differently.

Villagers in a remote area of Cameroon who had no prior exposure to Western music and who’s own music was very different than that of ours, listened to three different pieces of Western European music – one that we would associate with feeling sad; one with feeling happy; and one with feeling afraid. When asked to identify the emotion evoked by each musical piece, the villager’s responses were exactly the same as Western Europeans, indicating there is something innate about our emotional response to certain characteristics of music.

So, we just do not yet have all the answers for why music seems so central to our very nature as humans, so here’s how I like to think about music.

Scientists and mathematicians will tell you that math can describe and predict all known phenomenon in the universe. And it’s not that we came up with an abstraction and applied it to our universe, it is that math seems intrinsic to all that exists and we are discovering the math as we learn more and more. Math is in a way the language of the universe.

Music, at its most basic level can also be described with math – its pitches, chords, intervals, beats, rhythms, notes and harmonies are all simply math at their core.

So I like to think of music as the universe finding its voice. And we, we are its instruments.

So sing even if you think you might not be able to hit all the right notes. Learn to play an instrument even if it’s just for fun and even if you don’t think you’re all that good at it.

Dance the dance the best you can.

Make music with those you love and those you might someday. You got the music in you, and you always will.

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 16 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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
September 11, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Fifteen years after the attack of September 11, what are the ways we remember those whom we lost? How does ritual help us make sense of the events of our lives?

Call to Worship

We enter, now, into this place of renewal.
We join together, now, in this community that sustains and upholds.
We imagine, now, a world with more compassion, more justice, more love.
We worship, now, that which is greater than us,
and that holds our aspirations, our fortitude, our faith, our hope.
Now, we enter into this shared spirit of gratitude and community.
Now, we worship, together.

Sermon: Ritual and Remembrance: the 15th Anniversary of 9/11

On this day 15 years ago, it was a week day morning, and I was on my way to work when I turned on the radio in my car. I listened as a shell-shocked reporter described how apparent attackers had flown a jetliner first into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, and then about 15 minutes later had flown a second jet in to the South tower.

My initial response was disbelief. My mind went immediately to the 1938 radio drama called “War of the Worlds” that had presented a fictional alien invasion as a live news report, leading to some people panicking in areas throughout the country because they believed it was really happening.

I thought what I was hearing must be like that – a fiction being presented as reality. My brain just could not accept that it could really be happening.

And then I changed the radio station. And then I changed it again. It was on every station. It was real.

Instead of continuing on to work, I went back home and told Wayne that we needed to turn on the television news. The country was under attack.

We watched in horror and disbelief as the gaping holes in the towers burned, and they played endless repeats of the video of that plane turning and crashing into the South tower. We watched as the reports began to come in that hijackers had crashed another plane into the Pentagon. We witnessed first the South tower collapsing and then the North tower, learning in between that another plane, United Flight 93, had crashed into a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.

My memories of that morning are hazy and jumbled. I had to look up the sequence of events to make sure my memories of them were not distorted.

One clear and painful memory that stands out for me though, is that at some point before the towers fell, I had left the room. I don’t remember why. I just remember walking back into the living room and hearing Wayne say, “Oh my God, they’re jumping out of the windows to avoid being burned to death.” I looked at the television and saw images that fill me with horror and grief even today.

These are extraordinarily painful memories. It is so easy for me to want to avoid them. To lock them away in some distant room in the far reaches of my mind. And indeed, I suspect they are too powerful to carry with us in our consciousness all of the time. But I do think it is important that we remember sometimes – that we glance back into that room and retrieve some of what that day was like.

I think we must remember those whose who died, as well as those who grieve them each year, especially on this day – that we remember the horror and the grief and the anger and the confusion and the fear and the subsequent ways in which those feelings were sometimes used to manipulate us in the days that followed 9/11.

We remember because embedded in that day and in the ways we as a society, as a culture, reacted to it are lessons to be learned; illuminations of our values and ideals both healthy and good and some that are destructive; stories about who we are as a people that we continue to tell ourselves even today.

And to do so, that we commemorate. We engage in ritualized remembrances.

This morning, across our country in sanctuaries not so different than this one, n1any of our fellow citizens are also remembering 9/11 through whatever are the rites and rituals of their own faith traditions.

Today, in cites across our country and indeed the world, people are commemorating 9/11 by engaging in secular rituals. In Manhattan, two four mile high rectangular towers of light powered by 88 7,OOO-watt xenon light bulbs will recall the Twin Towers, as the names of those who died in the attacks are read aloud.

In Austin, City Firefighters are remembering the first responders who died on 911 by climbing the Pleasant Valley Drill Tower in full fire fighting gear enough times to equal to what had been the height of the world trade center towers. It is a ritual they do each year in complete silence.

Through these rites and rituals, we reach back into that room where we’ve stored the memories from that day 15 years ago and retrieve them, and it matters – it matters that we do so through such ritual.

When I dove into reading about what we know about ritual, I found quite a bit of scientific research and a number of theories about our propensity to engage in ritual. It has been studied across a wide range of disciplines from neurology to anthropology What I share today will be broad by necessity, getting at what seems to common among these theories about human rituals.

Here’s a definition of ritual developed by two neuroscientists that I really liked. “Ritual is a sequence of behavior that
1. is structured or patterned
2. is rhythmic and repetitive
3. acts to synchronize emotion, perception, cognitions and physical movement to potentially generate powerful unifying experiences and
4. synchronizes these processes among individual participants when in a group setting, creating a strong sense of group unity.”

Ritual has been observed across all known cultures and across both religious and secular institutions. We can see rituals play out in families, schools, workplaces, governments, sports and the military for example.

We find this patterned, repetitive, synchronization in storytelling, drama, music, dance and many of the other arts.

We engage in ritualistic behavior both on our own as individuals, as well as in group settings.

It seems to be embedded in our very genetic structure. Anthropologists have found evidence of ritualized behavior from even before language developed. It even may have been the source of more complex culture and communication.

Even very young children will automatically copy ritual. I’ve seen this several times at the “We Gather” Saturday services we do here at the church once a month. For those services, we put out a carpet and coloring materials so that children can stay with us for the whole service.

They will be coloring away, seemingly oblivious to the goings of the adults, until we start to chant or sing or do some other form of ritual. Then, they will look up and join in right away. We have had some pretty wonderful dance performances spontaneously added to our hymn singing a couple of times.

So ritual seems to be intrinsic to our nature as human beings, and we are developing greater understanding of how it may influence us both on the individual level and in groups.

On the individual level, studies mostly focusing on ritualistic meditation and prayer have found that these practices have a beneficial influence on human psychology, helping us create better coping strategies. They can reduce depression and anxiety and improve mood. They can also reduce blood pressure and heart rate, while improving the functioning of our immune systems.

Some rituals seem to turn off the part of the brain that gives us our sense of time and place, which can lead what our neuroscientists called the experience of “absolute unitary being” – that our deepest most true inner self is identical to the ultimate reality of the universe. Sounds a lot like “there is a spark of the divine within each of us,” doesn’t it?

This experience, in turn, seems to lead to greater valuing of peaceful cooperation and has even resulted in a reduction of implicit bias regarding race and age.

Ritual has also been shown to help with cognitive and memory improvements, and these all of findings are being put to use helping people.

Theresa Klein is an occupational therapist who works with people with dementia at an assisted living facility. Her own grandfather developed progressive dementia, He became disconnected and mute most of the time. He was a devout Catholic though, and she noticed that when she took him to church on Sunday, he happily joined in the familiar prayers and hymns AND that he was more able to connect with her during these rituals.

So, she brought the option to participate in rituals into the assisted living setting to powerful effect. One resident, an 82 year-old woman named Martha, had seemed so catatonic that her daughter who visited her every day had reluctantly agreed to allowing Martha to go on hospice care.

Then, they tried offering Martha the chance to participate in some rituals from her religious tradition. She suddenly sat up and joined in. As they did this more and more over the days and weeks that followed, she even looked at her daughter and said, “I love you” several times. Through ritual, a mother and her daughter were given more time to experience real connection with one another.

And that brings us to the role that rituals seem to play when we do them together in a group. First, they seem to create that sense of connection within the group. They bind people together. In smaller groups, rituals that involve fear or even pain can cause participants to very strongly fuse their personal identity with that of the group. This might have had a survival advantage in early tribal societies by creating strong cooperation and making them better able to wage war against competing tribes.

Conversely, regularly repeated rituals that have less negative emotional content can bond much larger groups together but less intensely and around a common doctrine or belief system. More recently, research has found that these differences between ritual settings are probably a matter of degree rather than absolutes.

At the group level, rituals are also a way we pass on social memory. Through ritual, we are embedding memories in a way that, for instance just reading about the events of 9/11 does not. We are getting at the essence of the story, creating and retrieving the common social values and norms, emotions and embodied experience, and we are creating a mechanism, a technology, that allows us to transmit these social memories to the next generations.

So, our 9/11 commemorations, our vigils and memorial services these are how people in a culture remember in a whole bodied, visceral way – a way of collectively saying “we remember you” to those we have lost. And even after all of us who experienced 9/11 are no longer living, these rites and rituals are ways that future generations may also say, “We remember you. We carry you with us.”

Almost all of our practices here on Sunday can be thought of as ritualistic. Our order of our service repeats itself in much the same way each week. We recite many of the same words together. We sing together. We listen to music together. We have a story for all ages together. We have a time of centering or prayer together. We light candles in our window together.

Particularly when I am leading worship, that is one of our most powerful rituals for me. I watch as people from this religious community that I serve and that I love light their candles in our window, and I imagine the powerful experiences and emotions they are holding up, and I can feel in a very visceral way that which binds this religious community together and moves out into our larger world to do justice. It is always powerful and moving.

Powerful too are our rites of passage that mark life’s transitions – our baby parades and coming of age ceremonies, weddings, memorial services and the like – our ceremonies that mark the changing of the seasons – the water communion, Christmas Eve, the burning bowl service, the flower communion.

And much of all of this has been passed down to us through social memory – from the Unitarians and Universalists who came before us.

It is important to note here that as vital as our ritual traditions are, the words that go with them, the stories that we tell ourselves, the theologies we express during our rituals matter greatly too. If these are directed inward, then the rituals by which they are expressed will create bonding within the group that is in opposition to any who are not a part of the group. We can see this with some of the more fundamentalist religions and certain highly white-nationalistic political rallies as of late.

Likewise, if the theologies we express within our rituals are directed toward all of humanity or even all of creation, the web of all existence, then the sense of interconnectedness they will generate also tends to occur both within the group and on a more universal scale.

So on this, the 15th anniversary of 9/11, I want to close by inviting you to join me in a ritual of commemoration. Please rise in body or spirit and extend your palms opened upward in a gesture of openness. I will say a few words of remembrance of several groups of folks, ending each time with the word, “today”. At which point, we will place our hands over our hearts and say together, “We remember” and return our hands to the palms held upward position.

To the Universalists and the Unitarians and then the Unitarian Universalists who have handed down to us this religious tradition that sustains and upholds us, particularly on days filled with difficult memories such as this one, today, we remember.

To our ancestors in this church, who created built, maintained and expanded it so that we are now able to continue this religious community that we love, today, we remember.

In this, our beloved church, we pause this day to look back into that sacred room at the edge of our consciousness, and today, We remember.

To the people who responded on 9/11 by going to the aide of those at the world trade center and the pentagon, some of whom lost their own lives and others who still suffer disabling health effects even now, today, we remember.

To those who attempted to retake flight 93 so that it could not reach whatever might have been the hijackers intended target, today, We remember.

To the families and loved ones of all who died in the attacks, today, we remember.

To all those who died when flight 93 crashed into that field in Pennsylvania, to those died at the Pentagon, to those who died at the world trade center, today, we remember.

For humankind, for future generations, for our world, always and today, we remember.

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 16 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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
July 17, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

As a religion without creed, one of the cornerstones of UU spirituality arises from the covenantal nature of how we gather our religious communities. The covenant, a set of promises we make with one another about how we will be together, comes out of an ancient tradition.

Sermon

Our preeminent Unitarian Universalist theologian of the 20th century, James Luther Adams said the following, “Human beings, individually and collectively, become human by making commitment, by making promises. The human being as such is the promise making, promise keeping, promise-renewing creature.

Another way to put that is that we are covenant-making creatures. A covenant is an ancient concept that described most simply contains a set of promises concerning how we will be together. For Unitarian Universalists, this ancient concept becomes particularly vital. Because we do not have a creed, a prescribed set of beliefs to which we must all adhere, our ecclesiology, the way in which we structure ourselves as a religious people, is rooted in the covenantal. Our theological perspectives are necessarily grounded in relationship.

I have great admiration for James Luther Adams and his work, but I think he left one important thing out.

As human beings, we are also promise breaking creatures. We are imperfect and we fail each other sometimes.

That does not make our covenants less important. It makes them more so. Our covenants, like this church’s covenant that we read together earlier, provide us with the ways in which we may get back into right relationship with one another when we have failed – they provide the standard we can call ourselves back to.

The concept of covenant goes back to even before the times described in the Hebrew Scriptures and was likely borrowed from ancient civilizations that predated that of the Israelites or even their ancestors. We humans have been making and breaking promises for a very, very long time.

And we have through the ages also been making covenants with our Gods, and they with us.

Early in the Hebrew Scriptures, in Genesis 9, God makes a covenant with Noah to never again flood the earth, killing everything on it, save that which was on the ark with Noah.

“Whoops. I may have overreacted a bit there. You know me. Temper. Temper. Here’s a lovely rainbow so that every time you see one, it will remind you that I promise never to flood the entire earth ever again. We good?”

Next comes God’s covenant with Abraham, which seems to have two versions, one in Genesis 15 and one in Genesis 17. God promises Abraham a grant of land upon which God will raise up a new nation from Abraham’s descendants.

Never mind that there are folks already living on said land – God will take care of everything, and all Abraham has to do is wander aimlessly on faith for an unspecified distance and time.

Never mind that Abraham’s wife is barren.

Never mind that Abraham does not know where exactly this land is or when exactly the new nation will get raised up. Oh, and also circumcise himself and all of his male descendants and them their descendants and so on and so on in perpetuity.

And also all of the male slaves in any of his family’s households.

Bummer.

And then, of course, there is the whole thing where God allows Abraham’s elderly wife, Sarah to bear a son, Isaac, only to later demand that Abraham sacrifice Isaac, which Abraham prepares to do until God sends an angel to say pretty much, “Dude, we didn’t think you would actually do it. Here’s a ram, sacrifice that instead. It’ll do.”

Continuing the fun in the book of Exodus, God next made a covenant with the entire ancient Israelite people, Abraham’s decedents. This is the famous story of Moses going up to the top ofMt. Sinai, where God gives him the ten commandments and binds the Israelites to obey them, as well as the other laws laid out in the Torah – the first five books of the Hebrew Bible.

Often called the Mosaic Covenant, it was similar to the treaties, contracts or oaths that sovereign rulers of the time made with their subjects, and it stipulated the really good things God would do for the chosen people if they were obedient to the oath and the really dreadful, horrible things God would do to them if they violated it.

Which they did and which God did. Temper. Temper.

Finally, in Samuel 2, God makes a covenant with David that he and his lineage will be the kings, the royal line of Israel. Unlike the Mosaic covenant, God made this covenant unconditional. Even if David and his descendants misbehaved, while God might punish them in other ways, he would never take their royalty away from them.

And once again, misbehave they did, and punish them severely God did.

David even had a very special “friend” named Jonathan, who upon meeting David, and I am quoting scripture here, “made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul. Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that he was wearing, and gave it to David … “

Later, when the two “friends” learned that they must be separated from each other to save David’s life, the scriptures say, “They kissed each other and wept with each other.”

And after Jonathan was killed in battle, David wrote a song in which he says of Jonathan, “Greatly beloved were you to me; your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.”

Apparently, some of those so called abominations God supposedly spelled out in Leviticus have been getting ignored for a very, very long time, and by some of God’s favorites.

I’m just sayin’.

Finally, I’d like to talk a bit about one more of the times the concept of covenant comes up in the Hebrew Scriptures. You may have heard the story of Job, a good and righteous man who fears God and shuns evil. Job is living the good life – he’s healthy, has a successful business, a wonderful wife and family.

One day God is bragging on his faithful servant Job, when one of his angels says, “Well, you know, maybe Job is only so righteous and pious because you have blessed him with so much cool stuff. Take it all away and let’s see how pious he is then.”

And so they kill Job’s children and destroy his business, and property. When that’s not enough, they also inflict his entire body with terrible, painful sores.

Long story short, Job clings to his righteousness and, after some arguing back and forth with some rather unhelpful friends, he basically brings a serious breach of covenant lawsuit against God. He sues God for God having failed to uphold his end of the contract even though Job has remained righteous even after all these terrible things God has allowed the angel to do to him.

So, God answers Job’s lawsuit out of a whirlwind, saying, “Who is this who darkens counsel, speaking without knowledge.”

Sounds a little testy and defensive already if you ask me.

Anyway, God continues, “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations? Speak if you have understanding. Do you know who fixed its dimensions … Have you ever commanded the day to break, Assigned the dawn its place, … Have you penetrated to the sources of the sea, Or walked in the recesses of the deep?”

In other words, basically saying, “I don’t have to adhere to any stinkin’ covenant, because, well, I’m God.”

To which Job pretty much replies, “Well, you do kind of have a point there,” which pleases God, so God restores Job to his old life but even better than before.

Now, I’ve been having a bit of fun with these ancient covenant stories by providing one possible interpretation of each of them that is far too literal. They have to be read as poetry or allegory, not as being literally true. For instance, a more poetic reading of the story of Job would get at the idea that the world does not operate on a system of retributive justice, wherein if we only live decent, ethical lives then we will somehow be rewarded with lives that are carefree and without tragedy.

It is much more complicated than that.

And, even though this ancient concept of covenant is an important one for us, I think these stories, especially the story of Job get at another potential warning about covenants. It can be problematic when the parties to a covenant have a highly unequal balance of power. Can the less powerful party truly consent? How does a human hold a God accountable to a covenant?

I think of our current struggles with our criminal justice system which promises “to protect and to serve” – a covenant by which in return we cede to that system many powers and resources. Now that we’re seeing that system disproportionately arresting, convicting, imprisoning and even taking the lives of people who are not white, we are witnessing a great struggle to hold the justice system accountable to its promises, its side of the covenant.

But the system has been militarized and monetized and has over time been granted almost God-like powers by law makers and court rulings, so we face a mighty struggle indeed to bring about such accountability.

But engage in this struggle we must because to be fully human we must become promise-fulfilling creatures.

Another potential problem with a belief that a God made a covenant with a select group of people is that it can foster a sense of what scholars have called “chosenness” within that people. And scholars have found that this sense of chosenness can become woven into the very symbols and language of a culture, so that, even as the culture may become more secular, that sense of chosenness can still remain deeply imbedded within it.

Some scholars have claimed that this was at least a part of the Zionist movement of the late 19th and early 20th century that was otherwise often progressive and secular.

Other scholars have pointed to the lineage of Jesus that is detailed in the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew, establishing Jesus as being in the linage of both David and Abraham, as providing Christians with a similar sense of chosenness. It creates a kind of ultimate fulfillment of the covenants from the Hebrew Scriptures – or a new covenant with Jesus as the ultimate savior and King, and Christians the chosen people. Such scholars attribute Western Europe’s and the U.S.’s historical tendencies toward imperialism at least partially to this sense of chosenness.

And I think we have to be careful not to fall prey to a similar way of thinking and being if we were to focus only on our internal church covenant that we read together earlier – if we were to forget that our principles that we also read together earlier are expressed in the form of a covenant with our fellow Unitarian Universalist congregations – a covenant to affirm and promote those principles together out in our wider world. And even our mission is in its own way a promise we make to each other to work together in shared purpose both within these walls and beyond them.

If we were to forget these things, our covenant, the promises that we make can become too narrow and internally focused, we could be in danger of becoming a social club of the self-chosen.

I am pleased to be able to say that currently I do not see that happening here at this church.

And I am thrilled that there is a movement afoot within our wider Unitarian Universalist denomination to live out a greater sense of covenant among and beyond Unitarian Universalists more widely.

We can trace the way that we organize our churches and the covenantal heritage of what would become Unitarian Universalism in the U.S. all the way back to the Cambridge Platform of 1648. The Cambridge Platform was an agreement among our Puritan ancestors that among other things said that independent churches should be organized among members who covenant to walk together in the ways of love. Each of these churches, like we still do today, would choose its own officials, call its own minister, govern itself and own its own property. And since it is a stewardship testimonial days, I should also mention that all this means we get to provide the contributions to pay our own bills also.

But, the Cambridge platform did not stop there. It also called for churches to work together for each other’s welfare and to promote the greater good.

What if we take that part of our heritage truly to heart?

What if we promised to walk together in the ways of love not just within our church, but also with our other local Unitarian Universalist churches?

What if we covenanted to walk together in the ways of love with our fellow Unitarian Universalists in our Southern region?

What if we did so even at the national and worldwide level?

And what if we expand this idea about promising to walk together in the ways of love beyond Unitarian Universalism, finding interfaith partnerships and secular friends that would join us in an ever-growing covenant of mutual love and support?

What more might become possible? How much more power might we all have to bring about beneficial change in our communities, our country and our world?

These are the questions that are being asked within Unitarian Universalism as a whole. These are the efforts in which our denomination will be engaging as we move into the future. I hope our church will be an active part of the discussions and the effort. I know I plan to do so, and I promise to keep you informed as I learn more. And, yes, you can take that as a covenant.

We humans are promise making, promise keeping, promise breaking and promise-renewing creatures, and if we expand this idea of covenant-making to a much broader level, further and further beyond our own tribe and maybe even to this entire planet on which live and depend, as well as all of the creatures upon it, almost anything becomes possible.

Suddenly, God’s rainbows become abundant.

As we move in that direction, I look forward to continuing to walk with you in the ways of love.

Benediction

As we go forth into our world now, we hold in our hearts our covenant.

We carry with us the sacred promises we have made among ourselves and with our larger world.

We walk together in the ways of love not just today but through all of our days.

Until next we gather again, be blessed.

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

Go in peace.

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 16 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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
April 10, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

The last of our church’s religious values, transformation is: “To pursue the growth that changes our lives and heals our world.” What is transformation and how does it occur?

Call to worship

Now let us worship together.

Now let us celebrate our highest values.

Transcendence

To connect with wonder and awe of the unity of life

Community

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

Compassion

To treat ourselves and others with love

Courage

To live lives of honesty, vulnerability, and beauty

Transformation

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

Now we raise up that which we hold as ultimate and larger than ourselves.

Now we worship, together.

Reading

In the night,

I dreamt of a world made better by our togetherness.

Of reaching toward never before imagined horizons,
Made knowable and possible only by living in mutuality.

I saw distant lands made out like visions of paradise,
Replenished and remade through a courage that embraced interdependence.

We dwelt in fields of green together,
Fertile valleys nurtured by trust.

We built visions of love and beauty and justice,
Nourished by partnership, cultivated through solidarity.

I dreamt of lush forests thriving with life,
Oceans teaming with vitality,
Mountains stretching toward majesty,

Our world made whole again.

These things we had done together.

These things we had brought to pass with each other.

These dream world imaginings seemed possible in the boundless creativity we only know through our unity.

I awoke,

And still, the dream continues.

Sermon

“Transformation – To pursue the growth that changes our lives and heals our world” – Today is the final of a series of worship service on our church’s five religious values. I think it is fitting that our value of transformation is listed last among our values. It is in many ways the culmination of living our other values.

Our mission arose out of our values, and I also think it is significant that two of our values ended up being restated in the mission – community (“we gather in community”) and transformation (“transform lives” – and really, to “nourish souls” and to “do justice” also require transformation). Here’s why I think that is significant. I believe that transformation, both in our own lives and in our world, is the reason for religious and spirituality communities to exist.

Joseph Campbell, a scholar of comparative mythology and religion wrote and spoke about the “hero’s journey”, mythological tales, which he found within all world religions. Such myths and religious stories, while, of course, not literally true, convey metaphorical truths about transforming ourselves and our world.

These myths contain a number of commonalities, not all of which we will go into today. Most often the central character is called from within a community where change is needed and must journey into a different environment – the wilderness, the desert, a mountaintop, the land of their enemies – where they are tested and challenged. In this process, the central character is spiritually transformed and returns to their community as an agent of continued transformation.

In these myths, transformation requires struggle – what the preacher at the little Baptist church we went to when I was a child used to describe in the temptations of Christ story as “trials and tribulations”. Transformation also always involves loss, as who the hero has been must cease to be in order for transformation to occur – something new to become.

It involves sacrifice and serving the needs of others, losing one’s self or giving of one’s self to something larger.

Campbell believed that we are all on a hero’s journey of sorts to find our deepest center – to transform ourselves into the person we were born to be. This, he said, is our “soul’s high adventure”.

Several summers ago, I spent three months as a student chaplain with the Seton hospital system. During that time, I was called upon to be with parents who had just lost young children, people in the throws of addiction, folks who had just been given a fatal diagnosis – people experiencing some of the most difficult situations we can go through in life.

People in that kind of circumstance are in a deep well of despair and grief. Being their chaplain required that I climb down in that well with them, that I dig deep down within myself and find some way to have at least an inkling of what they must have been feeling. It required that I feel with them and could truly say, “I’m here. I’m with you.”

And those experiences transformed me. Not only did they teach me a lot about what is and is not important in life, they put me back into touch with a range of emotions and ways of being that for many years of my life I had not allowed myself. They allowed me to reclaim the sensitive young boy I had been born, who had been told that such feelings were not appropriate for guys.

Now here is something significant about that story. Though I served many nights as a chaplain alone, I always had an intentionally constructed religious community I could call upon and go back to for support – my instructors and my fellow student chaplains – not to mention Wayne, my own church, friends and family.

That’s one of the paradoxes about transformation, growing into our true, most authentic selves more fully, ultimately happens through relationship with others and all that is.

We go out into the wilderness only to realize more greatly our interconnectedness, which then allows us a more profound sense of our place within that interconnectedness and our own expression of it. Thus transformed, we can go back into our community and more effectively be an agent for continued transformation.

This, I think, is the work of the church and of our own spiritual quests within it.

With our rituals, music, meditations, prayers, storytelling, faith development and other intentional ways of entering that deeper, more authentic place within, that spark of divinity in each of us, I think that religious community is particularly well”suited, in fact intended, to catalyze our souls’ high adventure.

Likewise, our rites of passage ceremonies and rituals, child dedications, coming of age ceremonies, weddings, memorial services and the like help us to mark and understand more intensely these transformations in our lives. Sometimes, we have intentionally sought out these transformative life events; sometimes they come unexpectedly. That’s the thing about transformation – it will come eventually whether we seek it or not. Our choices then are whether we use our agency in seeking it and how we respond to it when it comes to us spontaneously.

In 1991, I was the director of a non”profit organization doing clinical research studies to try and find new and more effective treatments for HIV disease and related infections. I worked with a network of similar non”profit research organizations to get some funding to send two representatives from each organization to the International Conference on AIDS being held in Florence, Italy that year. One of the funding sources stipulated that at least one of representative from each organization be a physician participating in the clinical research studies.

After talking with my board, we made the decision that I would ask one of our most active participating physicians to go with me.

And so it came to pass that I ended up inviting a certain Dr. Wayne Bockmon to go with me to Florence.

We flew into Rome, rented a car and drove the rest of the way to Florence. The entire way there we both talked about our miserable dating experiences, how we were both just done with the whole romance thing and would just be going it on our own in life.

The hospital back home where Wayne saw patients needing inpatient care had offered to obtain lodging for us in Florence. We get to Florence, and discover that the Hotel is called “The Grand” for a reason, marble staircases, Tiffany glass ceiling and all. Years later, we returned to it and could barely afford to have a glass of wine in the lobby.

They put us in one room together – a room that was clearly designed for a couple. At a reception that first evening, people kept asking us how long we had been together, and we would protest that we were just friends. But, after a week together in Florence, we had to start saying, “Well, now we’re more than just friends.”

When we got back home, I looked at Wayne and said, “Soooo, I took you to Florence for our first date, what’s next?”

It turns out that what was next was 25 years together in a relationship that has certainly transformed my life and made me a better person. Love and the transformation it brings come unexpectedly sometimes.

We found out later that the staff at the hospital and the folks at my organization had decided we should be together and conspired to try to make that happen. Joseph Campbell said that our transformations are the ones we are ready for. Maybe those folks knew something we didn’t!

So far, I have mainly been talking about individual growth and transformation. I’d like to talk now about growth within an institution, as a corporate body – transformation of the church as a religious community.

If the reason the church exists is to create a space within which seeds of transformation can be cultivated, then it makes sense that the church itself would also continually transform in order to be better and better able to fulfill our mission.

Our capital campaign is a giant and very tangible step this church has taken that will enable us to literally transform and enlarge our physical space. Doing so, will create a more welcoming space for the growing numbers of folks in Austin seeking a spiritual home that allows for that free and responsible search for their soul’s high adventure.

Doing so will also transform the religious community itself – who we are now will undergo a metamorphosis that I believe will move first UU Church of Austin into becoming even more fully the church it was born to become.

And yet, as I know our senior minster, Meg, has already talked about some, like with any of these journeys, it will not be without struggle – “trials and tribulations”.

I think it is worth reiterating that to get through the renovations, we will have to transform the ways in which we use the building and go about the activities of doing church for a while.

And all of these changes can stress us out. They can raise anxiety levels, so we will have to try help each other keep the level of anxiety in our community as a whole as low as we can.

It’s good to remember that sometimes anxiety expresses itself in ways that narrows the focus to something specific that may or may not be seem directly related to the larger, actual source of the anxiety.

So when someone leaves a stack of Styrofoam plates on a kitchen counter during the middle of the sanctuary remodeling and emails get sent, phone calls get made and Facebook posts get posted to try and ferret out the culprit, it might good for us all to try to take a step back and ask ourselves what might really be getting us all so wound up.

Might it be that what we’re truly stressed about is the fact that we’re temporarily not able to use our sanctuary? (And if we realize that, then we might have a better chance of avoiding all the drama before we find out that it was a construction crew who left them there anyway.)

Though, I have often thought, that if anyone asked Unitarian Universalists to articulate our theology of evil, all of our answers would somehow involve Styrofoam and invasive plants, me included.

So, how do we take that step back when we’re feeling anxious and before we find ourselves posting a screed on Facebook? Well, there are a number of methods, but it turns out there is one simple method that studies have shown can very often help.

It is just this. Breathe in on a count of four. Hold for a count of four. Breathe out on a count of four. Hold for a count of four. Repeat. Repeat until that anxiety driven older part of our brain let’s go of us and allows us to reengage the reason”centered parts of our brain.

That’s it.

And this works in lot’s of other situations too, including with the stress I bet a lot of us are feeling over the social and political discourse going on right now. I know Meg has also talked about this some also

I think it is worth continuing to discuss it though, because I think at least part the stress so many of us are feeling is due to the fact that:

– the racism and misogyny that have infected our current political campaign,
– the efforts to suppress voting rights,
– the laws legalizing discrimination against LGBT people being passed under a false claim of religious freedom,
– the efforts to take away women’s agency over their own bodies,

All of these are related. They are all in different ways efforts to maintain a system of straight white patriarchy.

Now, let me quickly add that I have a great deal of affection for many, many white straight guys, many of whom have helped fight for the rights of other folks. What we’re talking about here is a system of white straight patriarchy that got set up very early on and was the norm.

One characteristic of systems is that, once set up, they will struggle mightily to continue themselves, so it may be helpful to remember that the folks who are fighting to maintain the system have been taught that that is the way things are supposed to be by that very system itself. We can’t see the system sometimes when we are way down deep inside of it. That’s why people will support such a system even against there own interests sometimes.

In fact, I would argue that such a system harms even those who are at the top of its hierarchy by limiting the fullness of their humanity, like when I found that the definition of maleness I had been taught was keeping me from fully experiencing life. Knowing this, we might able to start from a place of greater empathy and curiosity when we engage those with whom we disagree.

And I do think we must engage them. As one of my professors at seminary said, “Like it or not, our religious values will be lived or not in the public and political arena.” The other voices will be there, so ours are needed for the transformation that heals our world and liberates all of us to have a chance. But our voices, again, are most effective when they are as non”anxious as possible – we self”differentiate, which means stating our values and convictions in a calm, non”personal way. By doing so, we may be able to lower the anxiety in the system itself, at least a little. And if, little by little, the anxiety in the system get lowered enough, more and more people will begin to be able to see the system itself.

And that’s when transformation becomes possible.

So, when that friend or family member you disagree with politically includes you on a mass email or a Facebook post that has your face turning red and steam coming out of your ears, try to remember our breathing trick so maybe you avoid sending back that scathing reply and then blocking them.

Breathe in on a count of four. Hold for a count of four. Breathe out on a count of four. Hold for a count of four. Repeat until the steam stops coming out of your ears.

Let’s practice that together. I invite you breathe with me.
Breathe in, 2, 3, 4. Hold, 2, 3, 4.
Breathe out, 2, 3, 4. Hold 2, 3, 4.
Breathe in, 2, 3, 4. Hold, 2, 3, 4.
Breathe out, 2, 3, 4. Hold 2, 3, 4.

Feels pretty good, doesn’t it?

Let’s trying remembering to do that a lot together over the next months, as together, we each continue our “soul’s high adventure”.

Benediction

Transcendence.
Community.
Compassion,
Courage.
Transformation.

May you carry these, our church’s religious values, with you today.

As you go back out into the world, may they nourish your soul and provide the foundation for fully living into the person you were born to be.

Go in peace. Go with love. Amen and blessed be.

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 16 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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
February 28, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

In this next in a series of sermons on our church’s religious values, Rev. Chris explores our religious value of courage. How do we live courageously and why would we want to do so?

Text of this sermon 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.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
January 17, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Next in this sermons series on our church’s religious values, Rev. Chris explores what our religious value of compassion looks like inside our church walls and beyond them.

Call to Worship Litany

Now let us worship together.
Now let us celebrate our highest values.

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

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

Compassion
To treat ourselves and others with love

Courage
To live lives of honesty, vulnerability, and beauty

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

Now we raise up that which we hold as ultimate and larger than ourselves.
Now we worship, together.

Reading

Rev. Dr Martin Luther King Jr. “Where do We Go From Here?,” Delivered at the 11th Annual SCLC Convention, Aug 1967, Atlanta, Ga.

I have also decided to stick with love, for I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind’s problems. And I’m going to talk about it everywhere I go. I know it isn’t popular to talk about it in some circles today. And I’m not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love; I’m talking about a strong, demanding love. For I have seen too much hate. I’ve seen too much hate on the faces of sheriffs in the South. I’ve seen hate on the faces of too many Klansmen and too many White Citizens Councilors in the South to want to hate, myself, because every time I see it, I know that it does something to their faces and their personalities, and I say to myself that hate is too great a burden to bear. I have decided to love. If you are seeking the highest good, I think you can find it through love.

Sermon

When I was in high school, we read a non-fiction story written by a guy who had fought in Vietnam. He told of being on patrol one night with a group of fellow soldiers, outside the perimeter and relative safety of their encampment. They were almost done with their patrol when suddenly gunfire and explosions erupted all around them, and they found themselves in a firefight. He describes the sound of the rapid gunfire and explosions as so loud and so deafening that it became almost like a form of silence – it was all there was.

In a flash of sudden bright light, he saw that one of his buddies, a friend he had known since their school days, had been hit. He ran to him, but there was nothing that could be done. The wounds were too great. He held his friend as the life flowed out of him. He describes holding his friend while the friend died as only the first sacred moment that evening.

He didn’t want to leave his friends body there. He wanted to try to get the body safely back to the encampment, so that his friend could be sent home for burial. He knew the family, and he could not bear the thought of leaving the body there in the jungle. So, he picked his friend up and began dragging him toward the camp, which he estimated couldn’t be more than a few hundred yards away.

And then he saw the North Vietnamese soldier staring straight at him, standing only a few feet to his side, rifle raised and pointed at him. They locked eyes. He realized that holding his friend’s body as he was, he was completely vulnerable. There was no way he could let go and get to his own weapon in time. He thought he was about to die too.

And then, the North Vietnamese soldier looked down and saw that he was holding the blood soaked body in his arms. The writer describes actually being able to see the North Vietnamese soldier figure out that he was trying to get his friend’s body out of there.

The North Vietnamese soldier looked him in the eyes again, but there was something different in the stare, and then slowly began backing away, rifle still pointed directly at them, until he disappeared into the darkness of the night.

The writer of that story describes this as the second sacred moment of that evening – the moment when two combatants suddenly recognized their shared fragility – that they both bled like the other, that they both grieved the death of those that they loved, that they both had friendships so strong that they would risk the ultimate sacrifice for them.

And for one brief moment, between two people in the middle of a firefight, a war was halted through embracing shared vulnerability – shared fragility – shared humanity and interconnectedness. These are the roots of empathy, and empathy acted upon becomes compassion.

So, at a time when there seems to be so much violence both here at home and throughout our world lately, perhaps it is appropriate that today we examine the third of our church’s religious values – compassion – to treat ourselves and others with love.

It is likely that empathy and compassion were necessary among early humans because our earliest ancestors needed cooperation to survive. After all, we were and still are relatively fragile creatures in comparison to say, oh, lions, wolves, bears or stampeding elephants. There is a theory that concepts like Gods and deities are how we capture such ancient and vital values that go so deep inside of us because we have no words that truly, adequately can express them.

It is important then, that we pay attention to what God or Gods we worship. If we worship, for instance Gods or deities that are angry and vengeful, then the values we will begin to live by can too easily become hatred, bigotry and violence.

So bear with me for just a bit then, as we examine how this value, compassion, is so integral to the very foundations of several of the world’s faith and wisdom traditions. We Unitarian Universalists after all are a religious people who draw from all of these sources.

In Islam, compassion is the most frequently occurring word in the Quran. It is rooted in the principle of the oneness or unity of all things – God, Allah, is in all and the God of all things. All but one of the chapters of the Quran begin with the invocation “In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful”. The Quran expresses a focus on acting with compassion toward those who suffer injustice and poverty, just as the bible does.

Confucianism bases its ethics on five virtues, the first of which is ren, which refers to altruism, compassion, human-heartedness.

Daoism speaks of the three treasures, the very first of which is compassion. Many if not most pagan and earth centered traditions derive compassion from a strong sense of interconnectedness – the sacredness of the natural world – and have developed an ethic of doing no harm.

Despite the punitive interpretations of Christianity that have sometimes been practiced, compassion has been at the core of Christianity since its earliest beginnings. Love your neighbor; love your enemies; judge not lest you be judged; the story of the Good Samaritan showing compassion to the stranger: these are all examples of teachings attributed to Jesus.

Hindus see the sacred mystery within all human beings. Hinduism and other Eastern religions embrace Ahimsa- love, genuine care, and compassion toward all living beings – as a cardinal virtue. Non-violence and doing no harm in thought, word or deed are central to Hinduism.

Compassion is also central within Judaism’s Talmud, including a story attributed the great sage, Hillel, thought to be an older contemporary of Jesus. A non-believer approached Hillel and promised to convert to Judaism if Hillel could recite the entirety of the Jewish Scriptures while standing on one leg. Hillel responded, “What is hateful to yourself, do not do to others” – a sort of reverse take on the golden rule.

Finally, Buddhism also holds compassion as an essential element. In the story of Buddha, he put off his own final state of nirvana out of compassion for others so that he could stay and help others also seek enlightenment. Buddhists teach compassion for the suffering of others. Their ideal of letting go of attachment to self can create a profound sense of interconnectedness. Scientific studies have shown that meditation like the loving kindness meditation we did together earlier can increase empathy and reduce racial prejudice.

So, compassion plays a fundamental role in all of these faith traditions. Now, to avoid oversimplification, I have to also mention that the sacred texts of many of these traditions describe some very bad, very mean and petty behavior by both humans and their deities. But that’s OK. As Unitarian Universalists who draw from many sources, we do not have hold up harmful values or worship any God who’s behaving like a jackass.

Empathy, then, arises out of recognizing both our common human fragility and the vastness and complexity of our interconnectedness. It allows us to engage in perspective taking – the ability to relate on a deep and emotional level with what our fellow humans are experiencing.

Empathy alone is not enough though. It is a feeling. Compassion is when the feeling is strong enough that we act on it. Compassion requires empathy in action – to treat ourselves and others with love.

That action can look very different, depending upon the circumstances:

• Sometimes it may mean just staying with someone through a really difficult time, not trying to fix anything and just feeling the rough stuff along with them
• Sometimes it may mean providing some type of much needed assistance.
• Other times, it may mean hearing someone who is hurting when they tell us they just need a little time alone.
• Sometimes, compassion means speaking difficult truths.

I think we struggle with this one in our churches. Too often, I hear about congregations where we tolerate unacceptable behavior because, “Well, that’s just how so-and-so is.” The things is, I think that is misplaced empathy. Compassion demands having a difficult conversation with that so and so, because not doing so harms everyone. Anxiety and resentments linger and build. In challenging situations, compassion may also require us to test the story we are telling ourselves in comparison with what other folks may be telling themselves.

Here are a couple of examples of that, taken from a composite of situations I have actually witnessed around the theistic – humanistic differences in what folks believe within our denomination.

If I am a theist, then compassion may mean saying, “Hey, after that adult spirituality class we both attended a few days ago, when I was describing my concept of the divine, and you went (clucks tongue and role eyes), the story I have been telling myself is that you think I have to be stupid to think such a thing.”

And then I have to listen and be willing to accept their story, which may be that they loved what I had said and had actually been irritated by another person who had been playing with their iPhone the whole time. Likewise, if I am a humanist, I may have to say, “Last Sunday, after that guest preacher talked all about Jesus the whole time, I overhead you asking some folks in the fellowship hall afterwards, ‘Wonder what our cranky old Humanists thought about that one?’ I’m a Humanist and that hurt my feelings.”

Because I am NOT cranky. Or old! OK, maybe not those last parts.

And again, then I have to listen and be willing to accept that their story may be, “Oh, I am so sorry. I actually consider myself a Humanist also. That’s an inside joke with my Humanist friends I was talking with – we overheard humanists referred to in that way at our Unitarian Universalist General Assembly one time.

Often, the compassionate act is to give ourselves the chance to discover the very different stories different people are telling themselves about the same situation.

And that brings me to this – tomorrow is Martin Luther King Day. I have been reading Dr. King’s last book, written shortly before he was assassinated. I was struck by how many of his themes related to just what we have been discussing today: empathy, interdependence, compassion, love.

But Dr. King also described how after the voting rights act was passed, many white folks in the U.S. began telling themselves a very different story than the lived reality of African Americans, who continued to struggle for true equality. Once the extreme cruelty perpetrated on civil rights activists was no longer being displayed on their televisions, many white folks returned to the comfort of their own lives – returned to the status quo, thinking the Voting Rights Act was enough.

So I want to close with how this inequality continues in our time. How compassion is calling us into action in our present day world. I was devastated when over the holidays, a grand jury failed to indict the Clevelend, Ohio police officers who shot and killed 12 year old Tamir Rice. This despite the fact that there is a video showing one of the officers firing upon him as soon as that officer opened the door of the police car – even though the gun Tamir was holding turned out to be a toy pellet gun – even though Ohio is an open carry state.

If Tamir had been white, I have to wonder if he would still be alive today. I have to wonder, at the very least, if the grand jury result might have been very different. Having followed the reports on it for several months, it seems to me that the prosecutor in the case gave the grand jury a story designed to get exactly this outcome – no indictment.

Like with Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO.
Like with John Crawford in Dayton, OH
Like with Eric Garner in Staten Island, NY.

Like with so many other unarmed African Americans killed by police in 2015. A recent study found that police in the U.S. killed at least 1,152 people in 2015, but that number is probably way too low because reporting is so shoddy. Fourteen of the largest U.S. police departments killed African American people exclusively. Police in the U.S. are 4 to 8 times more likely to kill black people than whites.

The contrast between what happens to young African Americans holding toy guns and a group of white people armed to the teeth with very real weapons who take over a federal facility in Oregon could not be more glaring.

And so once again, empathy alone is not enough. Compassion calls us to do more than, like me, sit at home and yell at the television news – to do more than fill our Facebook and twitter feeds with outrage – to do more than talk about it here at church, though doing that is important.

Compassion calls us into action, because we cannot allow the Gods of vengeance and oppression to rule; because our media may well lose interest in these police killings, and, if those of us who are white have had empathy but no action, we risk falling back into the status quo, just like the folks Dr. King described during his time.

And yet the killings will still continue.

And the racism that study after study shows is systemic within our educational structure, and our immigration system, our housing system, our economic systems, our voting systems, our banking system and on and on and on will still continue. Racism threatens to diminish the spark of the divine within all of us.

Compassion in action is how we kindle it and shine it brightly so that we may all know the ultimate richness of our humanity – a richness we can only know when we, all of us, are allowed to reach for our full human potential. Racial justice is the focus of Unitarian Universalist Standing on the Side of Love, 30 Days of Love Campaign that started yesterday.

Now that’s a mouthful, but in the gallery after the service today, you can visit a table where folks from our UU People of Color group and our White Allies for Racial Equity group will be happy to help you find out the many different ways you can learn more and get involved.

“Compassion – to treat ourselves and others with love.” It seems so simple, yet it can be surprisingly difficult to live out. Nurtured by the wisdom of so many ancient traditions, moved into action by an ever increasing understanding of our shared fragility and our immense interconnectedness, may compassion be the divine light we choose to spread into our world. Amen.

Benediction

Go out now with hearts filled with compassion: a compassion that nourishes your soul and moves you toward action for justice.

Go in peace. Go with love. May the spirit of this religious community and the bond we share be with you until next we gather again.

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 16 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.