Community

December 27, 2015 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Nell Newton, Sermons, Video available

Rev. Chris Jimmerson and Rev. Nell Newton
December 27, 2015
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

“Community: To connect with joy, sorrow, and service with those whose lives we touch.” In this second in our sermons series on our church’s religious values, former First UU member Rev. Nell Newton joins Rev. Chris in exploring the foundations for building religious community.

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.

Sermon

Rev. Nell Newton

“We Gather In Community”

When people chose those words – and it was a collaborative effort – this congregation was at a terribly beautiful moment. It was terrible because many people were still mad and hurt and angry and sitting far out on the edges. And beautiful because other people were crowding in close to see what they could do to be of help, how they could make things better. But let’s back up to what was going on before these words were chosen. Let’s start with a story….

Once upon a time there was a congregation that went looking for a minister. But not just any minister – no, they wanted a wonderful minister. They wanted a minister who would be bold and preach the paint off the walls. They wanted someone who would stick around and not just use them as a lower rung on his or her career ladder. They wanted someone who would challenge them! And that is exactly the kind of minister they got. It was wonderful and terrible. It was wonderful because the minster could preach the paint off the walls, but then terrible because it was hard to keep the walls painted. It was wonderful because the minister settled in and showed no inclination to leave them to better his or her own self-interests. But it was terrible because the minister didn’t show any inclination to leave for the congregation’s best interests either. It was wonderful because the minister challenged them. And it was terrible because, well, sometimes people need to be comforted too.

Ministers! But there was something else that was happening that the congregation had not experienced in a while. The minister drew people in – lots of people. Standing room only crowds of people who came to hear the minister. It was very exciting! But after the services, many of those people just got back in their cars and left. They were happy enough to hear the great sermons and watch the paint peel off the walls. They didn’t stay around afterwards to help repaint the walls or read stories to the kids or wash dishes after potlucks.

Now, in all fairness, those people were probably feeling pretty good about everything. They probably were feeling happy that they’d finally found a minister to listen to, so they could say that they had found a church. But what they hadn’t yet figured out is that sermons are not church.

Really. Church – if you do it right – is a verb, not a noun. And the folks who were just showing up for the sermons were missing the really hard, challenging, transformative part of church.

So, when things finally went “kaboom”, which happens if church is a verb, all of a sudden, the minister was gone! And the people who were there to watch the minister’s show, well, a lot of them just left. And that’s probably okay. It was a little sad to see the empty spaces where they had been sitting.

But, some of them didn’t leave. As the dust swirled and settled, they blinked, and as if waking from a magic spell, an illusion, and they began to notice that even though there was no minister, CHURCH continued.

And some of them began to recognize that the underlying, the foundational ministry in the church was the congregation. Those people they’d been sitting next to? They were all ministers. And good ones too.

It was during this time that the congregation – everyone who was still showing up – got to really see church as a verb – a process of creating and becoming together. It was pretty cool.

And when they set out to identify their mission, the reason for doing this church stuff, they all agreed that the most important part of what they were doing was simply coming together, gathering in community. Because while individuals are amazing and powerful, there are some things that you can only build where two or more are gathered.

I used to think of church as a wonderful banquet with welcoming tables, deeply satisfying food, and genial company. In this analogy the minister helps people find their place and points out good things to eat while the congregants take turns serving, eating and washing the dishes. The covenant serves as the house rules and there is a place for everyone at the table.

That’s a pleasant image, but it doesn’t include all of what really happens at church. It doesn’t include that radical bit about change.

These days I think of church more as a laboratory – a place where people can come and learn new ways of seeing and being. We’re building a new way and as we work sometimes there is a flash of light and a puff of smoke!

In this vision of church I see us conducting experiments with such titles as “Being Well Together” and “Walking and Talking”. Higher level experiments are also being conducted in “Not Walking and Not Talking”, and “Letting Go”. Church then becomes the place where we work at becoming a people so bold — a place where we change ourselves in order to change the world!

This version of church is explicitly a challenge to the people who identify as “SBNR” –“spiritual but not religious”. That’s how a lot of folks will explain why they don’t do church. They are just fine with their spirituality, no need to complicate things with institutions, or really, other people. Not even other SBNR people. Because, well, people. They can be so people-y. They can be so challenging.

And, there’s the problem with trying to do spiritual but not religious: if you’re off doing it all alone, there’s no one around to call you on your nonsense or useless abstractions, or self-indulgences that don’t ask you to look closer, work a little harder and become the best version of yourself. And there’s no one around to point out other versions of the holy, or new ways of giving thanks. Sometimes you need a near perfect stranger to point out the gaps in your theology.

So, come into this community of love and learning and falling down and getting up and starting over. It’s how we are doing our theology. Gathered in community.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson

Community – to connect with joy, sorrow and service with those whose lives we touch.

That’s our topic for today’s second in a series of sermons on this church’s religious values. Values that are at the core of this religious community and out of which our mission that we say together every Sunday arose.

I’d like to start by talking about what we mean by community – how we create and sustain religious community within the church, because I think sometimes when we talk about community we kind of have this Hallmark view of community where we’re all going to love each other all the time, and we’re only going to have joy and hugs and fun together, sipping coffee, munching on delicious bonbons and singing Kumbaya together.

And, no, we are not singing that today. Or ever; at least when I am leading worship.

Anyway, I think all of that is part of it. One of the things that I love about serving this church is that we do have fun – that we do demonstrate physical affection with one another – that we share a great sense of humor and joy.

Like, with a lasting marriage though, I think there’s more to it than that. I think that we also have to be aware that there will be struggles – that we will disagree – that we will have conflict from time to time, and in fact I would be wary of a religious community that never had conflict because it could signal that perhaps what we had actually created is a club of like minds, not a true religious community.

We have to be committed to and willing to do the work of maintaining relationship – of sustaining an ever-evolving, ever-changing religious community.

In fact there is a theology that says that God or the divine emerges out of the messiness of creating community. Now leaving aside for a moment that this theology envisions a supernatural version of the divine, which I don’t, I will say that I was fortunate enough to see exactly the process this theology tries to capture occur here in this very church after, what Meg refers to as the time of trouble had occurred. At a specially called congregational meeting, the congregation had voted by a fairly narrow margin to dismiss the person who was then senior minister.

It was messy. We had disagreements. We had hurt feelings. And yet leadership emerged that was wise enough to bring in outside help and to provide opportunities for members of the community to begin to speak with each other, both on and intellectual and an emotional level.

This community began the long process of forming a covenant of healthy relations that describes how we will be with each other – what promises we make to each other within the religious community. This community began to discern our values and to create our mission that gives us common purpose.

Out of the messiness and disagreement and hurt feelings, because some folks this religious community stayed in the struggle with each other and did the work of building and rebuilding relationship, this became a church even stronger than it had been before – a church that is providing a religious and spiritual home for more and more people -a church that is making real differences in our larger community and in our world – a church that I am so proud to serve.

Now, that’s an example from an extraordinarily challenging and thankfully rare situation. However, I think this willingness to stay in the struggle with each other – this willingness to embrace that true community will sometimes involve messiness – is necessary even during times such as the one that this church is undergoing right now, when things are going well, when there is joy and goodwill within our membership.

Because smaller but potentially destructive disagreements and conflicts will still happen that if left unattended and unspoken can fester and grow into larger problems. Because we are all human, and we will sometimes unintentionally fail one another.

And so, even during times such as this, religious community demands of us that we abide by our covenant with one another – that we ask for help when we need it -that we speak with one another directly and from the heart even over our smaller hurts and disagreements. Here at first UU church of Austin, we are fortunate enough to have a healthy relations ministry team that can help when doing so seems difficult.

It can be difficult. It can feel very vulnerable.

And perhaps that’s the key point. Without vulnerability, there can be no real religious community.

Only through being vulnerable with each other, can we create that true sense of religious community – can the divine emerge from among us.

Earlier, I talked a little about Community within our church walls. Now I’d like to talk about living this value Beyond them.

As many of you know this past summer, our church provided sanctuary to Sulma Franco, who had sought asylum in the U.S. because she feared persecution for having spoken out and organized on behalf of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights in her home country of Guatamala. Due largely to her immigration lawyer making a mistake and the systemic injustice of our immigration system, she had been held 9 months in a detention center and was facing an imminent order of removal or deportation.

Working with a coalition of local immigration and human rights groups, other churches and faith leaders, we engaged in a campaign to pressure Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) to do grant Sulma a stay of removal so that she could remain in the U.S. while her immigration legal case could proceed. In August, the ICE office in San Antonio told Sulma’s new lawyer that they would grant the stay, but that Sulma would have to accompany her lawyer inside the ICE offices to sign the required paperwork. Not surprisingly, Sulma was afraid that if she went in the ICE offices, they might put her back into detention and deport her instead.

After much planning with our allies, and after our Senior Minister, Meg, received assurances from the officer in Charge of the ICE Office that Sulma would not be detained, we made plans for a whole entourage of folks to go to the San Antonio, where were joined by more folks from San Antonio outside the ICE building and several members of the press, whom we had invited.

We hit a snag when the ICE officer told us over the phone that by ICE policy he could not come outside and state in front of the press, that they would not detain her, so Sulma had to decide if she would still go in, with only the private assurances he had made to Meg. She decided that if Meg and I would lock arms with her, one of us on each side of her like this, and go in with her and her lawyer, then she would do it.

The ICE officer met us as we entered the building. Sulma was trembling. I could actually feel her shaking with fear. I only hope that if I ever had to, I could summon the courage it took her to walk in that building.

She was too terrified to let go of either Meg or me for any reason. To go any further, there was one of those metal detectors and X-ray belts you have to put your cell phones and bags and such on. The ICE officer took mercy on us as we fumbled around trying to figure out how to get things out of pockets and onto the conveyor belt while still locked arm and arm. He told us we could just go around but the space between the screening area and the wall though was very narrow so to get through still connected with Sulma, we had to kind of do this sideways shuffle.

I looked around, and there were these long lines of folks, almost all of whom where people of color, waiting and waiting to see someone about their immigration status. I thought, they must wonder who this woman is being escorted right past the lines and into a private office area, locked arm in arm with two white people one of them wearing some strange, bright yellow scarf. I thought, many of them must be terrified too.

After what felt like hours, ICE provided Sulma with the paperwork legally stating they would not deport her, and we left the office, Sulma holding her documents of freedom high in the air as her supporters cheered and celebrated her.

I think that on that day what Martin Luther King called “Beloved Community” had arisen. Now, I think that’s a term that gets overused, but as King used it, it involves a community of radical love, justice, compassion and interdependence. And to make the beloved community, we needed others. Our individual efforts to do justice are wonderful and needed AND our mission says that we gather in community to do justice. We have so much more power to do justice when we act together. We have so much more power to create the beloved community when we act with our interfaith partners and our larger denomination and a broad coalition of folks, some of them religious and some not, like we did that day in San Antonio.

Because we do these things not just to save one person, though that is vital and important, but to shine a light on our broken and inherently racist and LGBT oppressive immigration system, so that one day, if can build larger and larger coalitions, we might bring the change that will free all of those other terrified folks we passed by in that ICE office that day.

Building the beloved community requires, in the words of our great UU theologian James Luther Adams, the organization of power and power of organization. That’s why we gather in community to do justice.

That’s how we create the conditions for the divine to emerge in this world – in this time – here and now.

Benediction

As you go back out into the world now, know that there is a love that you carry with you beyond these church walls.

Know that our interconnectedness contains seeds of hope for justice and compassion to be made manifest.

Know that together, with one another and the many others who would join us to create a world wherein each is truly beloved, together, almost unlimited possibilities are still ours to create.

Go in peace. Go in love. Go knowing that this religious community awaits you and holds you until we are together 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 15 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Transcendence

October 25, 2015 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
October 25, 2015

Transcendence: to connect with wonder and awe of the unity of life. In this first of a series of sermons on the religious values that are the foundation of our religious community, we will explore the meaning and experience of transcendence.

Call to worship

Come into this place of worship, where we live our values and mission together:

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

Come into this place that, through our values, we make sacred together.

Reading

Paradox
by Chris Jimmerson

I am in the leaves glowing green from backlit sun. I am in the freshly mown grass, and I flow throughout all in drops of water.
I expand through distant galaxies and rise upon stormy winds.

And yet, I am not.

I am one and many.
Here, where time has no meaning, or perhaps, all times exist at once.
Here, where place has no meaning and yet it is possible to exist in all places at once.

And yet, I am not.

I cease, melting into nothingness and yet into everything.
I know the heart of the raven and the swift reflexes of the dolphin,
even as these, too, blend into the whole.

Light. Darkness. Movement. Stillness. Glowing fires. Freezing snow. Hurricane. Blizzard. Stones. Mountains. Sand. Oceans.

Unity.

I am.

Sermon

Several years ago, I was serving on the board here at First Unitarian Universalist – this was before I went to seminary – and we were in the middle of a series of sessions with the congregation to discern what are now our values and our mission.

The folks on the board had gone through one of the sessions first. Our job after that was to listen deeply at other sessions, as other church members participated in the process.

I’ll never forget the first session where I was there to listen. I walked into Howson hall on a Saturday morning to find a group of folks who I knew were almost all self-identified atheists.

Now, I also knew from having already been through the process, that a major part of it involved people sharing their “experiences of the holy”, so I was thinking to myself, “I wonder how this is going to work?” Twenty minutes later, we were passing around boxes of tissue, as people told of times when they had felt connected to something larger than themselves, when they had experienced awe and wonder, when their hearts had expanded. So, there our group of atheists sat, in a church fellowship hall, dabbing tears from their eyes over sharing stories of experiencing the holy.

It was beautiful and moving and, well, holy.

What this exercise did was help us determine what values we had in common, as revealed through these experiences, as well as to reclaim that word “holy” for ourselves. Then, combining these values with the results from some other exercises we did, the board was to suggest what the congregation held as its key purpose or mission. That’s how we got the statement we still have on our wall and say together every Sunday.

I start with that story because we do not talk about our values as often as our mission, nor about how both came to be determined – that the values came first – the mission emerged out of our values. It will be important to remember this process as we live out and continue to assess our values and mission, as we grow into our future.

So, this morning, I am beginning a series of sermons on each our five religious values, starting with the one we list first, because you know, “Transcendence in Twenty Minutes or Less”, easy, no problem.

I actually do think it is important that we start with our religious value of transcendence, because I think there are good reasons we ended up citing it first.

Here is one of them. After those sessions I just told you about, we compiled the number of times each value was expressed by folks in the congregation and created one of those Word Art graphics that shows those that were mentioned the most often in a larger font size. Perhaps partially as a result of the way the sessions were structured, this is what we got.

Transcendence (and related words people had used to describe their experiences of it) were clearly the largest in the graphic.

It is important here to describe what folks meant by transcendence because one meaning of the word can be to overcome, to rise above, and certainly, we do, for instance, try to transcend oppression through our social justice efforts. What people were talking about here though was more of an experience of transcendence, an experience outside of their day-to-day experience of life, an awe and wonder of the unity of life.

Science has begun to examine these types of experiences and has found that what people label as transcendent experiences vary as to what seems to cause them, the exact nature of the experience and the degree of intensity. However, there does seem to be a common set of characteristics to them that includes:
– a sense of belonging and connectedness with others and with all of creation
– Closely related to this, a sense of both dissolution of self and a flowing or expansion outward toward a sense of unity with all that is
– An altering of one’s normal sense of space and time
– An acceptance of paradox
– A perception of beneficial changes in perspective and behavior afterwards.

These characteristics are remarkably similar to the way our folks described their experiences on that Saturday morning in Howson Hall.

Here is another reason why I don’t think it is all that surprising that transcendence as a value emerged so strongly here at the church. While as Unitarian Universalists, we come out of a tradition that has certainly always had a strong element of rationality and reason, so too has our tradition always contained a strain of finding truth and beauty through personal experience. And these two can sometimes be at odds.

Our Transcendentalist forbearers provide the obvious example. In the 1800s, people like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker got themselves into trouble with, not just the conservatives of their time, but also their fellow Unitarians, by saying things like the miracles ascribed to Jesus in the bible didn’t literally happen. Reason says that doesn’t make any sense. Parker even went on to say that true Christianity would exist even if it were to turn out that Jesus had never lived.

Tell that to a fundamentalist even today. Then run away very, very quickly. And yet, the Transcendentalists were also reacting against the overly rational, dry worship and preaching styles of the Unitarians of their time. They found it devoid of personal spiritual experience. Emerson left his ministry and found what he clearly described as transcendental experiences through self-reflection and nature. He wrote:

“Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”

I have always thought that is a beautiful passage. Well, except for the transparent eyeball part. That’s just kind of Éweird. But then when he went on to explain it as “I am nothing; I see all” it sounds very similar to “the sense of both dissolution of self and a flowing or expansion outward toward a sense of unity with all” that I mentioned earlier.

This influence is with us even today. Our Unitarian Universalist association of congregations lists six sources from which we draw wisdom and spirituality. The very first source is stated like this: “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.”

I think Emerson has also handed down to us a tradition of pushing back against the idea of hierarchical or vertical transcendence wherein our experience of it can only occur through a God that is “up there”, and they can only be mediated by the institution of the church and its religious authorities.

That’s how the little Southern Baptist church we went to when I was a child was. God existed in some elevated, holy realm, while we sinners wallowed down in the physical realm. The preacher and the deacons at the front of the church were holier than the rest of us, so we were not allowed to go up there except to get saved (or if we were part of the cleaning crew). The communion was brought to us lowly ones there in our pews.

Now, even then I didn’t like this, so, one Sunday when I was six years old, the time came in the service where you could go up front and say that you had been saved that day, so up I went and got saved. I don’t really remember having some transcendent experience of Jesus washing my soul clean or anything. I was six. I think I just wanted to be up their with the holier than thou people, the cool kids. And, please, no cracks in receiving line about me later becoming a minister.

Emerson believed in a very this worldly God that, to oversimplify a bit, was both the unity of all things and that also existed within all things. There was a spark of the divine in every person, so one did not necessarily need a church to experience transcendence.

Jerome A. Stone, a current day Unitarian Universalist theologian take this a step further by removing God from the experience altogether. Citing a perspective called religious naturalism, Stone speaks of these experiences as horizontal rather than vertical transcendence. He gives two examples.

In the first, he tells of the time that he got a call letting him know that his father had died. His daughter, who was eight years old at the time, came into the room where he had slumped into a chair. She asked what was wrong. When he told her, she said, “Oh daddy”, got in the chair with him, and wrapped her arms around him. Stone says he had the experience of transcendence as is typically described, only its source was the gift of love and comfort offered by his daughter, rather than by the grace of some God.

Similarly, he tells of having another of these experiences during the late 1960s. He was participating in weekly marches to demand a housing ordinance regarding racial equality in the city where he was busily attending graduate school. He says that he was pulled to do so by a moral demand coming, again, not from some God, but from a sense of ethics and compassion.

Interestingly, the theology that appeals greatly to me personally maintains this idea of horizontal transcendence but also includes a concept of the divine. Process relational theology, to oversimplify a bit again, conceptualizes the divine, as an ever-evolving process that is itself the sum total of every process of becoming (or evolution and change) throughout the entire universe. These processes of becoming include me, you, the rocks, the plants – all that is – we are all ever-changing and interconnected in ways that are beyond our normal, every day understanding.

The divine, whether seen as a metaphor or an actual presence, also holds all of the creative possibilities that are available to us in each moment. In this worldview then, we experience transcendence when we get a glimpse of the true depth and complexity of that interconnectedness – a sense of deep belonging that drives in us a love for all of creation and that lures us toward creativity, justice and beauty.

Hey, it’s a pretty theology, whether you agree with it or not! So that’s just a few of the ways some Unitarian Universalists have thought about these experiences. There are many, many other ways of viewing them throughout the world’s religions and, more recently, through various psychological and neurological theories about them.

So, as I thought about this first of our values, I struggled, not so much with their source nor what may be going inside with them, but instead with why they seemed to be of such value to us. What do they do for us? I was reading shame and vulnerability researcher Dr. Brene Brown’s latest book when I had a realization about these experiences that I really did not want to accept at first. That happens to me a lot with Dr. Brown’s work, so she pisses me off. And bless her for doing so.

I think at least one of the things we draw from these experiences is a greater capacity and willingness to allow our hearts to break wide open – an ability to love wholeheartedly, even though doing so will inevitably involve loss and heartbreak.

A while back, it was a very cold night, so we had the fireplace going. At the time, my spouse, Wayne, was suffering the worst of some very serious, potentially life-threatening health issues. He was lying on the couch across from the fireplace, covered with a blanket, sleeping. Our two ridiculously spoiled Basenji dogs had curled up on the couch beside him. It’s funny how our animal friends know when we are not doing well. They were 13 and 14, about as far as their expected lifespans go.

I sat in a chair looking at them, thinking about the thousands of years dogs and humans have been gathering together next to a fire and how many times a similar scene must have been occurring across our hemisphere in that very moment.

And I had that transcendent experience – that sense of deeper connection and belonging – that sense of self both dissolving and expanding outward toward an ultimate love and a beautiful unity.

And yet, it was achingly beautiful, because my heart was breaking over the potential for loss in my immediate, very real, every day world.

And my heart grew larger – large enough to withstand such loss – filled up with a deep understanding that I would not give up one single moment of the pleasure and joy and love they have brought into my life.

Now, I want you to know that Wayne is doing much, much better and that so far the pups are still going, still spoiled and still misbehaving.

If we think back to all of the examples of these experiences I have talked about just in this sermon, they all involved this sense of our hearts breaking wide open: our folks in Howson Hall moved to tears by one another’s stories; Jerome Stone’s story of being offered grace by his young daughter over the loss of his own father; his story of participating in marches because the world as it was what not the world he longed for; even Emerson’s description of our experiences of transcendence through being in nature, I think involve a sense of loss, because we know it is all temporary – all of the life around us will also end and be replaced – and even the very rocks in the hillsides will eventually dissolve away and be transformed into something new.

Abraham Maslow, who founded humanistic psychology, called these experiences “peak experiences”, and he thought that they generate within us a set of values that are more life-giving and life-fulfilling – values that have to do with connection and belonging.

I think he was right. And if I am correct that these experiences help us to break our hearts wide open so that they grow and can love more fully even though we will know loss, then perhaps the biggest reason we put transcendence first on our list is because the rest of our values emerge out of it. It takes courage to love wholeheartedly, knowing our hearts will be broken and yet also knowing that it is still worth it.

Loving whole-heartedly is the very essence of compassion. It is at the heart of the empathy required to create community.

Together, these make possible the ultimate reason I think we gather in community, transformation – the growth that changes our lives and heals our world.

Throughout time, ritual, prayer, music, poetry, meditation, art, singing, working together for a just cause, intentional silence, the things we practice here at this church, have all been known to be capable of generating this state of transcendence.

It’s pretty fantastic then, that we have chosen to value it so much.

Hallelujah and amen.

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

Black Lives Matter

August 15, 2015 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons, Video available

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Chris Jimmerson
August 15, 2015

Stories matter. Remembering matters. Black Lives Matter. “We Gather: Another kind of worship” service at which we experience a few of the stories that have become a rallying cry for a new civil rights movement.

This is a “We Gather” Alternative Service

Welcome to First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin. We are an intentionally hospitable religious community. All are welcome to join us in our free search for spiritual truth, meaning and beauty. If you are a visitor with us today, I want to especially welcome you and invite you to join us after the service, when I am happy to answer any questions you might have about this church and/or Unitarian Universalism.

Last Sunday marked one year since a police officer shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Today, we will pause to remember just a small part of the stories of just a few unarmed African Americans who police have killed since then. We will close out each story with the speaker saying the name three times and asking you to respond after each time by saying, “Black Live Matter.”

Because stories matter. Remembering matters. Black Lives Matter.

In between some of the stories, we will have music, reflection and prayer. We cannot possibly tell all of the stories today because there have been over 100 unarmed African Americans killed by police that we know of in the past year. So we will close by projecting each of their names, while our wonderful musical artist, Annabeth, sings a song originally written by a Jewish man in New York to stand in solidarity with black Americans and made iconic by the singer Billy Holiday. Called “Strange Fruit”, it is a powerful reminder that the lynching of Black Americans has not really ever ended. Instead, it has taken on a systemic form within our criminal justice system.

These are extremely difficult stories – I know. As a white male who tries to stand in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter Movement, I find them terribly painful. I can only begin to imagine the pain of those with whom I stand in solidarity. But the stories are real, and remember we must, if we are ever to end this staggering, enraging and heartbreaking institutionalized racism.

We will gather after the service for food, further conversation and reflection, and I will be available to anyone who might want to talk with me. Let us begin by lighting our chalice as is our tradition within Unitarian Universalism and saying together the words projected on our screen, “In the light of truth and the warmth of love, we gather to seek, to find and to share.

Please also join with me in saying together our mission statement, so relevant to today’s service: “We gather in community to nourish souls, transform lives and do justice.”

Michael Brown. Son. Grandson. Stepson. Brother. Cousin. Nephew. He was 18 years old and had recently graduated from high school. He planned to start college soon.

A police officer in Ferguson, Missouri shot him and killed him on August 9, 2014. Michael Brown was unarmed at the time.

The police claimed that he had attacked the officer. Some eye- witness accounts claimed this was untrue.

The police left his body bleeding on the ground for four and one half hours. A grand jury failed to indict the officer who shot him.

Call and response 3 times:
Michael Brown
Black Lives Matter.

John Crawford III. An only son. A father of two. He was thinking about going to college to study something in the sciences. His dad thought he might have become a meteorologist.

On August 5, 2014, he was shopping in a Walmart near Dayton, Ohio. A white mail customer called 911 to say that he had a gun and was pointing it at other customers. The gun turned out to be a toy. The caller later retracted his claim that John had pointed it at other people.

Two police officers shot and killed him inside the store, claiming that he had failed to obey their commands to drop his weapon and that he made a sudden move. Video that appeared later contradicts their claims, and it appears they may have shot him with little or no warning.

He was on the phone with the mother of his two children when he was shot. His father, who happened to be visiting at the time, heard his son’s last gasps of breath through her cell phone.

He was 22 years old. Ohio is an open carry state, so it would have been legal for him to have a gun, even if it had been real, rather than a toy. A grand jury failed to indict the officers involved

Call and response 3 times:
John Crawford III
Black Lives Matter

Tamir Rice. Son. Grandson. Brother.

On November 12, 2014, 12 year old Tamir Rice was playing with a toy pistol in a city park in Cleveland, Ohio. Someone reported him pointing a pistol at other people but also said that it was “probably fake” and that he was “probably a juvenile.

Two police officers shot and killed him, stating that they had warned him and that it looked as if he was reaching for a pistol in his waistband. In video footage released later, it appears that the office who shot him began firing immediately. It was later revealed that the officer who shot Tamir had been dismissed from a prior policing job for emotional instability.

The officers failed to provide first aide to Tamir. When his 14 year old sister ran up to the scene, they tackled her, handcuffed her and put her in the back of a patrol car. They also threatened his mother.

The Chief of Police later repeatedly referred to 12-yeard-old, 5′,7″ Tamir Rice as “that young man.” No decision about the fate of the officers has been made yet.

Call and response 3 times:
Tamir Rice.
Black Lives Matter.

Akai Gurley. Father. Partner. Brother. Son.

Akai entered the stairwell of the building where he lived with his girlfriend and their two-year-old daughter. Two New York Police Department officers were patrolling the stairwell of the building from top to bottom, even though they had been ordered not to do so. One of the officers while fumbling with his gun and a flashlight accidently fired a shot. The shot ricocheted off a wall and struck Akai Gurley in the chest. He later died from the wound.

In the critical moments after the shooting, instead of calling for help for the dying young man, the officers left the scene and began texting their police union representative.

The officer who fired the fatal shot was indicted by a grand jury on charges of second-degree manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, second-degree assault, reckless endangerment, and two counts of official misconduct. He was freed without paying a bond and his trial has yet to commence. Akai Gurley was 28 years old.

Call and response 3 times:
Akai Gurley.
Black Lives Matter.

Rumain Brisbon. Husband. Son. of four. On December 2, 2014, police officers responded to calls regarding loud music and a potential drug deal at an apartment complex in Phoenix, Arizona. What then transpired was a subject of disagreement between police and differing eyewitnesses. Police claimed that Rumain Brisbon took something out of the back of his SUV, yelled at them and ran into the apartment complex. The officer who pursued him claimed that they got into a physical scuffle and that he thought an object in Rumain’s pocket was a gun. It turned out to be a pill bottle only after the officer had shot and killed him.

The other person who had been in the SUV later said that Rumain had been bringing fast food to his children in the apartment complex, and later, strewn french fries still littered the front porch of the site of the incident. No charges were brought against the officer who shot and killed Rumain Brisbon. He was 34 years old.

Call and response 3 times:
Romaine Brisbon.
Black Lives Matter

Matthew Ajibade. Son. Brother. College Student.

Originally from Nigeria, Matt was a 22-year-old college student in Savannah Georgia. He suffered from bipolar disorder. He scuffled with police who had responded to a call about a domestic disturbance. As they handcuffed and took him to jail, his girlfriend, who did appear to have bruises on her face told them that he suffered from a mental disorder and needed to be taken to a hospital. She gave them a bottle of pills for treating his bipolarism.

On January 1, 2015, Matt was found dead, strapped to a restraining chair in an isolation cell in the jail. Police and jail staff said that he had been “combative” and injured an officer during booking. A corner ruled his death a homicide caused by blunt force trauma to his head.

Nine people from the jail were fired and three face criminal indictments in his death.

Matt was an artist who owned a print design company and was working with his brother to start a new company called “Made in Africa”

Call and response 3 times:
Matthew Ajibade.
Black Lives Matter

Natasha McKenna, Daughter, Sister

Natasha suffered from schizophrenia, and was being held in the Fairfax Virginia jail for reportedly having assaulted an officer. She was 5′ 3 inches tall and very thin.

While in the jail, an officer claimed she refused an order and physically resisted them. They used a taser on her four times for being non-compliant with deputies. She later went into cardiac arrest due to a combination of the tasering, psychoactive medications and what the medical examiner controversially termed ‘excited delirium’. She died on February 8, 2015

Several experts on the use of tasers testified about the inappropriateness of the use of tasers on the mentally ill and about the danger of cardiac arrest from such a large number of uses in a short time period No charges where filed and her death was ruled an accident, though the jail did ban the use of tasers on mentally ill people. Natasha McKenna was 37 years old.

Call and response 3 times:
Natasha McKenna.
Black Lives Matter

Calvin Reid. Son. Sometimes homeless. Also possibly mentally ill. On February 22, 2015, in Coconut Creek, Florida, police fired tasers at Calvin Reid multiple times. Witnesses say that they fired tasers at him even after handcuffing him. They reported up two volleys of four taser firings each occurred, and that Calvin cried out, “They are trying to kill me. I can’t breathe!” as police jumped on top of him.

Reid was 39 and had been working as a meat salesman. He had been discovered in the parking lot of a retirement community, bleeding, clothing torn, likely having some sort of psychological episode. He had refused treatment from paramedics and behaved aggressively.

Police tried to cover up the incident until reports by eye-witnesses through local news media began to appear. The coroner ruled his death homicide by electrocution.

The police chief resigned but no charges against any officers have yet been brought, though investigations continue.

Call and response 3 times:
Calvin Reid.
Black Lives Matter

Time for Centering and Lighting Candles

I invite you now to join together in a time of centering and reflection. Breathing together, breathing in and breathing out, together we each find that spark of the divine within us, that vulnerable place that paradoxically gives us strength and sustains against the forces of sorrow and injustice. Breathing together, breathing in and out, in and out, we enter a time of silence together. When the music begins, feel free to light candles in our window. Candles of sorrow and joy, hope and remembrance.

Bernard Moore. Father. Grandfather. Beloved community member.

On March 6, 2015, 62 year-old Atlanta resident Bernard Moore began to cross a street he had crossed as a pedestrian many times before. As soon as he started across, however, a police car hit him, knocking him into the air. He died shortly thereafter.

Video from a surveillance camera contradicts the account of what had happened given by the Atlanta Police Department, which claimed Bernard had walked out in front of the car. The video shows that he stopped before crossing, looking both ways and watching several cars go by. It shows that the officer driving the car was going much faster than the other traffic, seeming to come out of nowhere. Eye witnesses testified that the car was going up to twice the posted speed limit and that its lights and siren were not on.

No action against the officer has yet been taken. The county district attorney says an investigation is still ongoing, and the family has filed a law suit.

Call and response three times:
Bernard Moore
Black Lives Matter

Walter Scott. Father. Son. Brother.

North Charleston police officer Michael Slager pulled 50-year-old-Walter Scott over for a minor traffic infraction. During the stop, Walter Scott fled on foot. It is not known why he did so, and he was unarmed.

Slager pursued him on foot, eventually firing 8 shots, five of which struck Walter Scott, killing him. Slager reported that he had feared for his life because Walter Scott had taken his taser.

However, video taken by a witness and released later shows that Walter was at least 15 to 20 feet and running away when Slager fired at him 8 times. Walter did not have the taser. After Walter fell, Slager handcuffed his hand behind his back. Slager then appeared to have dropped something near Walter’s body.

A grand jury brought a murder indictment against Slager for the killing. The trial has not yet begun.

Call and response three times:
Walter Scott.
Black Lives Matter.

Freddie Gray. Son and brother.

On April 12, 2015, Baltimore, Maryland police officers reported arresting Freddie Gray after he had seen them and begun running away. They reported arresting him “without the use of fore or incidence”. Witnesses and video released later contradicted this, claiming that officers beat Freddie with batons and pinned him down using a “folding technique” wherein one officer bended his legs backward while another hhel him down by pressing a knee against his neck.

In the video, Freddie appears to already be injured when police put him the back of a police van, handcuffed and shackled. They did not secure him inside the van, and he could not control his motion because of being handcuffed and shackled.

Sometime during the van ride, which included four stops, Freddie spinal cord injuries that resulted in his death several days later.

Six officers have been indicted in the case. Their trials have not yet begun. Freddie was 25 years old.

Call and response three times:
Freddie Gray.
Black Lives Matter.

Brendon Glenn. Son, father, called “an adventurous soul” by his many friends.

Brendon got into a scuffle with a bouncer outside of a Venice Beach, California nightclub on May 6, 2015. Two police officers got involved. One of the officers shot and killed Brandon during the scuffle. He was unarmed.

The Los Angeles police officer who fatally shot him was a seven-year department veteran who was the subject of a criminal investigation for omitting witness statements in police reports.

A security camera on a nearby building recorded the shooting. After reviewing it, the Los Angeles Chief of police stated that the situation did not seem to justify the use of deadly force. An investigation is ongoing.

Brendon Glenn was 29 years old. He had sometimes been homeless but had been working part-time for the city as a lifeguard and seasonal helper.

Call and response three times:
Brendon Glenn.
Black Lives Matter

Spencer McCain, Father, Brother, Son

Forty one year old, Spencer McCain had threatened violence at a home where he was not supposed to be due to a protective order that had been issued against him. Police responding to a domestic violence call shot and killed him, even though he was unarmed and made no move toward them or to run away from them. After breaking into the Owen Mills Maryland apartment on June 25, 2015, Police claimed that they found him standing in a “defensive position” and began firing at him. They did not go on to describe exactly what that might mean. Nineteen shell casings were found on the floor in the area where the officers shot him. The case is still under investigation, but no charges have yet been brought against the officers.

Spencer’s children, ages 2 and five were present in the apartment when the police shot and killed their father.

Call and response three times:
Spencer McCain
Black Lives Matter

Jonathan Sanders. Father. Husband. Son.

Jonathan Sanders was exercising his horse using a street legal horse and buggy in Stonewall, Mississippi on July 8, 2015. Police officer, Kevin Herrington pulled up behind him, startling the horse. According to witnesses, when Jonathan, not knowing what was happening, chased after his horse, Herrington pursued him on foot. Another witness heard Herrington say that he was “going to get that N***er” before pulling up behind him.

Herrington caught Jonathan Sanders and grabbed him in a chokehold. Jonathan repeatedly cried out, “I can’t breathe”. When one of the witnesses, who was an in-law of Jonathan Sanders and a correctional officer himself, approached Herrington and asked him to release the chokehold, this witness says that Herrington pulled his gun and tightened his grip.

Jonathan Sanders died from being held in chokehold for over 20 minutes. He was thirty-nine years old. The officer is still under investigation.

Call and response three times:
Jonathan Sanders.
Black Lives Matter

Samuel Dubose. Father, Husband. Son. Brother.

Samuel Dubose was shot and killed by a white police office on July 19, 2015 after the officer had pulled him over for a minor traffic violation.

The officer, Ray Tensing, originally claimed that there had been an altercation and that he shot and killed Samuel only after Samuel began to drag him with his car. A video that was released later showed that this never happened, that Samuel appeared to be compliant with the officers orders and that Tensing shot Samuel without warning as he set non-violently in his car.

The officer has been charged with murder; however, no charges have been brought against two other officers who were present at the scene and that backed up the false story that Tensing had originally reported.

Samuel Dubose was 43 years old and well loved in his community.

Call and response three times:
Samuel Dubose
Black Lives Matter

Christian Taylor. Son. Brother. Grandson. Nephew. College student. Football Player.

On August 7, 2015, Brad Miller, a recent graduate of the police academy and new to the Arlington, Texas police department shot and killed Christian, who was unarmed.

Police have claimed that Christian had broken into a car dealership to steal a car and that the shooting occurred during an altercation with him.

Family members have questioned this claim, stating that Christian had no need to steal a vehicle and that he was looking forward to the new college year and playing football.

Just a little over a week before he was killed by them, Christian had tweeted about his fear of the police, saying in one of his postings, “I don’t want to die too young.”

Christian was 19 years old and about to enter his sophomore year of college.

Call and response three times:
Christian Taylor.
Black Lives Matter.

Prayer

Please join me in a spirit of prayer. Spirit of love and life, great holder of all stories, power of remembrance, breathe into us the courage and fortitude to rise together in solidarity and demand justice. Sustain us for the long and difficult arc that we must sometimes travel to do justice, and yet fill us with the courage and the urgency that the horrendous and continuous extinguishing of black lives demands.

Remind those of us who would be allies that most often our best way to offer solidarity is to follow.

Comfort the many who are feeling great anguish. Direct our rage toward dismantling murderous systems of oppression.

Fill us with a love and compassion that will never allow us to stop until justice and beloved community have been fully realized.

We ask these things in the name of all that is good, all that is holy.

Amen

Extinguishing the chalice

Please join with me in saying our words for extinguishing our chalice. We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we hold in our hearts until we are together again.

Now as we close our service, I again invite you to stay for further conversation, as we share a meal together afterwards. Know that you, each of you, have the power to make a difference. Know that I am available to you, today, now after the service and in the future. Know that love really is more powerful than greed and hatred.

Know that here at First UU Austin, we host both a Unitarian Universalist People of Color group and a white allies group, and we partner with many others doing the work of racial justice, including our local Black Lives Matter group. If you have not already, I invite you to get involved.

As we remember the names, I invite you to rise up and demand: Not. One. More.

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

Sanctuary

July 19, 2015 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
July 19, 2015

First UU has become a sanctuary church for an immigrant facing deportation to a country where her life would be in danger should she be returned to it. We will explore the tradition and the current state of the sanctuary movement. How might it transform her and our religious community?

Call to Worship

Rev. Marilyn Chilcote from “The Public Sanctuary Movement, An Historic Basis of Hope: Oral Histories”

Sanctuary was a loving and mutual relationship. It’s much more than us giving to them. They gave to us a sense of what it means to be a people of faith. Everybody predicted our churches were going to lose members over this. Our churches grew because people started coming back, looking for a place where faithfulness meant something.

Reading

Rev. Robert McKenzie from “The Public Sanctuary Movement, An Historic Basis of Hope: Oral Histories”

It was in every way a conversion experience. I mean, awakening me to the true issues of the gospel.

I read the bible very differently than I used to. I see the world very differently. I read the bible, and I see God’s concern for the poor…

That was the same purpose for which we were struggling in EI Salvador, for justice and a better world, an equitable distribution of the world’s goods and equitable opportunities for life in this world. And those are the controlling ideas as I read a scripture. I used to read other stuff. Now I read this stuff. And I get impatient with speculation, with non concrete flirtation of ideas. I just don’t have any time for that. It used to be very big in my agenda, you know, sort of the abstract theological reflection.

Now, all of that means nothing much to me, and the concrete, hands on, dealing with people, entering their anguish, dealing with their poverty, with their hopes and their expectations, all of that now means everything as I read scripture, as I deal with the community of faith, as I engage myself with the world ….

Then also the whole business of listening to people whose life experience are so deep. It’s just come to me that people who are struggling with life and death issues are people to be listened to, are people who have an uncommon wisdom, are people who ought to be setting the agenda. It’s that kind of solidarity with the poor. I’m not there to minister to them. They minister to me.

Sermon

Ingrid and Omar, a young couple from EI Salvador, came to the United States right out of college. They decided to make the treacherous journey after witnessing several of their fellow students being shot down in an attack on their campus due to student protests in which they had also participated. Omar remembers lying on the ground as the shots whizzed by overhead and the bodies of his friends fell all around him.

Ingrid was pregnant.

They knew they had to escape. Omar came first, traveling much of the way strapped to the bottom of a pick up truck. Ingrid came later, seven months pregnant and hiding in the trunk of car. They came with only a few pieces of clothing and Omar’s violin. They came because their lives and the new life Ingrid carried with her were at stake.

And despite the threat of persecution and even death in their country of origin, our government refused to grant them asylum and would have deported them, had not St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, California offered them sanctuary.

That was in 1982. A small number of churches were beginning to form what would become a much larger church sanctuary movement for Central America refugees fleeing human rights violations, even death squads, in their home countries.

And today, over 30 years later, we find ourselves in a situation that is eerily reminiscent of that time. And, once again, a handful of churches, including this one, are offering sanctuary to refugees from many of these same countries.

As most of you know, last month, we began providing sanctuary for Sulma Franco, a woman from Guatemala who had been a leader in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and transgender rights activism. She fled her country and fears going back because LGBT persons in Guatemala are routinely murdered or physically abused. The Guatemalan government does nothing to protect them, implicitly supporting these abuses. Any yet, like with Ingrid and Omar in the 1980s, our own government has refused Sulma’s request for asylum. It has failed to offer her refuge, so First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin has.

In doing so, we assumed the mantle of “prophetic church”, along with a tradition and set of responsibilities that go with it.

Now, we’ve been using that term, “prophetic” a lot lately, and a number of folks have come up to me and asked some version of, “What does that mean?”

I think we can get hung up with the word “prophetic” because many of us learned that it has to do with predicting the future. And indeed, the biblical prophets in our Judeo-Christian tradition were described as conveying messages they had received from God about what the future would be like – and it was pretty often a terribly bleak future because the people and their leaders had been behaving quite badly and their God was preparing to throw a rather ill-tempered fit about it.

The ancient prophets though were also offering a critique of the injustices they were witnessing – a vision of how their world could be made better. It is this meaning of prophetic that we use today to describe a church that is bold enough to confront the injustices of its time, creating beloved community both in its midst and out in its world.

Likewise, the church providing sanctuary as both a safe-haven for victims of injustice and as prophetic witness against larger systemic injustices also goes all the way back to those ancient times. We stand in a long history and tradition regarding this meaning of prophetic church.

In the ancient Israelite culture of the Hebrew Bible, their tabernacles, and later the temples and even entire towns could serve as refuge for a person accused of a crime, particularly if what they had done had been an accident.

You see, the laws of the time contained a system of retributive justice – what we often hear described as, “a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, an arm for an arm, etc.” Now, this system of retribution applied whether the offense was intentional or not. So, if you accidently poked your neighbor’s eye out while wagging your finger in their face for forgetting to recycle, they could turn around and poke your eye out for being overly sanctimonious.

A bigger problem though was that the ancient Israelites were even more tribal and cliquish than we are now, so if my brother dropped his axe and accidently cut off your third cousin’s left foot, then someone from your tribe could cut off my brothers foot, but then I could take retribution by cutting off their foot and pretty soon our tribes would be at battle, hacking off body parts right and left, like some Monte Python sketch.

That didn’t seem very just in the long run and was a real impediment to passing on the gene pool, so the availability of sanctuary served to help interrupt this chain of events.

It also provided those wrongfully accused of a crime a means to escape immediate and harsh retribution and a refuge from which injustices could be critiqued.

During the early decades of Christianity, house churches sometimes offered a safe haven from oppression under the Roman Empire. In the middle ages, churches in England were legally recognized as temporary sanctuaries, where persons accused of wrongdoing could gain time to allow for their case to be made.

During the Protestant Reformation, reform churches and the cities in which they were located, such as John Calvin’s Geneva, sometimes provided refuge for protestant exiles from the Catholic church – though not always, as our Unitarian forbearer Michael Servetus found out when John Calvin arranged for him to be burnt at the stake, greatly irritating the Catholics, who wanted to do it themselves.

In the U.S., churches provided sanctuary along the Underground Railroad for slaves fleeing the South to seek freedom. Later, churches sometimes provided shelter for women’s and civil rights leaders.

It was in the early 1970’s though, that our sanctuary movement in its current form really took root. Responding to the prolonged, casualty heavy Vietnam War, peace activists and clergy in San Diego and Berkeley, CA, offered church sanctuary to soldiers agonizing over whether to return to the war. This combination of providing safe haven to people in desperate need and at the same time issuing a public declaration against unjust governmental policy and actions became the foundation upon which the immigration sanctuary movement would arise.

As Eileen Purcell, an early activist in the sanctuary movement puts it, “What distinguished sanctuary … was the educational and decision-making process that engaged entire faith communities and led to a corporate and public declaration of sanctuary.”

In the mid-1970s, religious organizations like Church World Services, Catholic Charities and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, with the support of the U.S. government, began assisting refuges escaping abuse in Chile and Argentina, but then in the 1980s and 90s, civil war and political turmoil broke out in Nicaragua, EI Salvador and Guatemala. Our government was often involved in supporting, sometimes covertly, the forces that were inflecting wide-scale human rights abuses in these countries. Because of this, the government refused to establish the legal framework regarding human rights conditions in these countries that would have allowed refugees pouring out of them to receive asylum and argued instead that they were coming for economic reasons. Sound familiar?

The church sanctuary movement arose to again both provide much needed support for folks like Ingrid and Omar and to shine a light on the injustices being perpetrated both here in the U.S. and in these Central American countries.

People from across different denominations, classes, political parties and races came together in this fight often both working in the sanctuary movement in the U.S. and traveling to Central America at their own personal risk to bear witness.

Our own Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (or UUSC), our congregations and our religious movement as a whole were intensely involved in these efforts, and we sent delegations to Central America. The UUSC provided education and advocacy, as well as a study guide on how to become a sanctuary church.

The government responded by infiltrating sanctuary churches with paid informants. One pastor recalls answering the door one morning to find someone who said they said they were there to repair the phone lines. A few minutes later, he answered another knock at the door, only to find another uniformed man, who also claimed to be from the phone company.

Both of them were government informants in disguise, who had somehow gotten their wires crossed. Awkward. And pardon the terrible pun.

Eventually the government charged a group of clergy and lay leaders in Texas and Tucson, AZ with a number of counts, including harboring and transporting illegal aliens. In the Tucson trial though, the government blocked the defense from making any mention of conditions in Central America, refugee stories, applicable international treaties, the U.S. Refugee Act of 1980, religious convictions or U.S. Foreign Policy. The resultant “kangaroo court”, while obtaining some convictions, backfired against the government in the court of public opinion. Those convicted received suspended sentence or a very short period of house arrest.

Eventually, in a negotiated settlement of a legal case called American Baptist Churches versus Thornburgh, the government agreed to reopen previously denied asylum cases and to accept new applications from those who had been afraid to apply before. Later, Congress passed legislation providing temporary protected status, allowing many more refugees from these countries to avoid deportation and to obtain work permits.

Today, a new sanctuary movement has arisen out of this history and tradition – responding to the needs of people fleeing these same countries and calling attention once again to our government’s mistreatment of these refugees. It is a movement that is again pointing out the U.S. role in creating such terrible conditions in their countries of origin in the first place – this time due at least in part to our failed war on drugs and the activities of our multinational corporations.

This sanctuary movement is the prophetic legacy into which First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin has stepped.

It’s important that you know this about legacy, because your board of Trustees will soon be engaging the congregation in a discussion about whether we want to become a sanctuary church for the longer term.

Under our system of governance, called policy-based governance, the board works with the congregation to establish the church’s values, mission and ends. The ends are kind of the goals we will pursue in order to live out our values and mission. Our senior minister, Meg, then determines the means, or the things that we will do and the ways in which we will pursue those goals. The board also sets limitations for the senior minister, specifying what she may not do in trying to achieve our ends, mainly things that are illegal, unethical or just plain mean and un-ministerial-like.

So when the question of offering sanctuary in this one case came up, doing so was a means for pursuing our ends. Likewise it didn’t seem to involve going up against any of those limitations. So Meg, after consultation with the board, decided to seize the prophetic moment and offer sanctuary to Sulma.

By contrast, the larger decision about whether to become a sanctuary beyond this individual case, potentially involves a redefinition of our ends or at least a redistribution of our priorities within them. As such, Meg and the board believe that it deserves a larger, congregational discussion.

In that discussion, you will have to consider the costs and risks associated with becoming a sanctuary church longer-term. You have heard something of the potential risks today. We have already experienced something of the potential costs in terms of resources and ministerial, staff and volunteer time needed to support providing sanctuary.

So too though, will you consider the potential for transformation. Certainly, we hope that providing sanctuary will be transformative for those who come among us. Sulma has told me that she feels a sense of safety and protection here, as well as a renewed sense of hope, knowing that there is an entire community behind her. Our wish is also that publicly declaring ourselves a sanctuary church will contribute to changes for the better in our immigration system and in our role in the world.

I hope though, you will also consider the potential for transformation within the church itself. I have already sensed in the church a more tangible sense of common purpose, a renewed commitment and passion for our mission.

I’ll close by letting you know that your response to welcoming Sulma among us has already made a big difference for me personally. Just before Sulma moved on campus, I was having a pretty tough time of it. As many of you know, my stepdad had died only a few months before. In the time since, my spouse Wayne had been battling some pretty serious health challenges, and his insurance company was refusing to pay for a procedure he badly needed: the evils of our still for profit healthcare system – but that’s another sermon.

Then, I got a call that my mom was also in the hospital. Both Wayne and Mom are doing much better now, but that was a real low point.

I’m a humanist to the extent that I have an overall faith in the ultimate goodness of humanity.

I’m a theist to the extent that I normally have a sense of connection to something much larger than myself and yet that I am a part of and hold a part of within me.

I have to admit though, at that point, I was loosing that faith in humanity. That connection to something larger than myself seemed far away and in danger of slipping completely out of reach.

And then we put out an email announcement with a list of items we needed folks to donate in order to make a welcoming home for Sulma. That evening, I went to bed exhausted, without checking to see who might have responded.

I got up the next morning to an email inbox full of new messages from church members offering to help. We had several offers for every single item we had listed. We had offers of things that we hadn’t even thought about. People wrote me to say, “I don’t have any of that stuff, but let me know what you need and I’ll go out and buy it.”

Then, we put out another message saying that we needed a bed for Sulma. Almost immediately, two email messages appeared in my inbox at the same time. One of them said, “I have a very nice queen-sized mattress but I don’t have box springs to go with it. The other said, “I have queen sized box springs but no mattress.”

Now, I’m a dyed in the wool Unitarian, but I could have sworn something I’m not allowed to call the Holy Spirit was moving through my email inbox about then.

This church’s outpouring of generosity and compassion renewed my faith and reconnected me with that wonderful and sustaining sense of being a part of something so much larger than myself.

I think that’s what truly living out a shared mission can do for a religious community. I think that’s the transformative potential of putting on that ancient mantle of prophetic church.

Not that I have much of an opinion about which way I hope our discussions may go.

Benediction

May you go forth today carrying with you a sense of awe and wonder that makes transcendence in our world seem possible.

May you carry with you the sense of beloved community we share here, so that you may create more of it in your world.

May you freely give and receive compassion.

May you know the courage to live honestly and vulnerably, seeing all of life’s beauty.

May possibilities for transformation be ever present before you.

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.

Independence and Interdependence

July 6, 2015 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
July 5, 2015

The beginning of our Declaration of Independence lays out a set of values to which we aspire but have not always fulfilled. As our “Standing on the Side of Love” campaign and the recent Supreme Court decision establishing marriage equality demonstrate, our Unitarian and Universalist religious traditions have always been and continue to be intertwined with our social mores and our political system. Celebrate equality and contemplate our nation’s progress with Rev. Chris Jimmerson in “Independence and Interdependence.”

So, all three of your ministers here at First UU Austin were in Portland, Oregon week before last, including last Sunday, to attend the annual Unitarian Universalist General Assembly.

As the first of us to be back in the pulpit, I thought I should start by asking, “Anything very significant happen while we were out?”

Oh yeah, the whole Supreme Court legalizing same sex marriage across the country thing happened.

And let me tell you, there was some celebrating going on in Portland (and that was in addition to their annual nude bicycling festival).

When the news came out, it electrified the atmosphere where thousands of Unitarian Universalists from across the country had gathered for our assembly, and I think rightly so. I think we can rightly claim that, though small in number, we have long been strong advocates for LGBT persons, culminating in our Standing on the Side of Love advocacy campaign, which has publicly and vocally supported marriage equality.

Love won, we were a part of making it happen, and that is certainly worth celebrating.

Once again this year, a theme that emerged repeatedly at general Assembly was how storytelling can both help us work for social change and nourish our own spirits. Telling our own stories and hearing those of others, sharing our stories, can be such a powerful way of reaching across borders and lines of otherness, raising social consciousness and creating religious experence.

So, in the light of all this, 1’d like to shift a little from what had planned for this Sunday and share with you a part of my own marriage equality story. I call it, “The New X-Files: Chris and Wayne Got Married.”

Wayne and I have been together 24 years now, and several years back, we decided to get legally married. Back then, only a small handful of states in the U.S. recognized same sex marriage. We decided to go to Vancouver, Canada instead because, well, it’s a fun place.

I was fairly new to lay leadership here at First UU Church of Austin, and my call to ministry was then a very faint voice only beginning to emerge (or actually reemerge, but more on that later). Having left the Southern Baptist religion of my childhood far behind and embraced a very rationalistic, science-based worldview, I was, at the time, struggling with how or even whether I could find a way to redefine and re-embrace terms like God, even metaphorically.

On the Friday we were supposed to start our trip to Canada, Wayne got a call that his sister, who we have since lost, was in the hospital with heart failure. We decided to go ahead and go to the airport not knowing whether we would get on the plane or have to cancel our flights. Wayne was on and off his cell phone the whole time we were making our way their. As we got to the airport, he got a call. She had stabilized.

We boarded our plane and started on our journey to get married. Surely, nothing could stop us now.

We made a connecting flight in Denver, but shortly after taking off for Vancouver, the smell of something electrical burning filled the plane and it started getting very hot in the cabin.

The pilot came over the P.A. system and told us that the plane was going to return to the Denver airport due to an electrical malfunction in the air-conditioning and heating system.

In other words, it was on fire or at least about to be.

A young woman named Tiffany, who was sitting in the seat between us, gave me a very worried look, and downed the vodka-seven she had just ordered.

And then, the pilot came back on and announced that we were going to make an emergency landing in Cheyenne, Wyoming instead. By now, it had gotten so hot in the cabin that a woman near the front of the plane had passed out and fallen into the aisle way.

I thought, “So, I was right along. There is no God, and we’re never going to get married. Instead, we’re about to die in a fiery crash in some cornfield in Wyoming.”

I’m not even sure there are cornfields in Wyoming but that was the vivid image that sprang into my mind.

We started a very bumpy and very scary descent. Tiffany asked if I would hold her hand. I did. She gripped my hand so hard that the pain at least temporarily knocked me out of my existential crisis.

As we neared the ground, Tiffany noticed that her cell phone had a signal, so she let go of my hand and dialed her fiance.

“We’re making an emergency landing. I think the plane is on fire and I’m not sure if we are going to make it. I’m living a nightmare! This is Tiffany, call me later.”

We landed. The plane was bigger than the hangar at the airport. They pulled up some metal stairs to the exit door and hurried us off of it, asking us to please pick up any rolling bags as we went past the woman still sprawled across the aisle way. She was OK – they got her out safely too.

There was a bar in the little tiny airport hangar. It was still open.

“There is a great and merciful God, and she provides comfort in our times of great difficulty.” I thought.

Eventually, they gave us our luggage, loaded us in buses and took us back to Denver, where we would board a new flight to Vancouver very early the next morning.

Now, we were faced with a new challenge. The marriage-licensing agents in Canada closed at noon on Saturdays, so we were going to have to rush to make it to one on time to get our license, so that the person who would marry us on Sunday could sign it and make it legal.

Our flight to Vancouver was uneventful, and we rushed through the airport, trying to make it through customs, get our luggage and pick up a rental car in time to get to the closest licensing agent.

We hit customs, only to find that there was a large group of rather heavy-set men with grey hair and full grey beards wearing a variety of red and white outfits or tee shirts with Christmas themes. Apparently, we had arrived in Vancouver just in time for the people who play Santa Clause each Christmas annual convention. Most of them were accompanied by plump, rosy cheeked, Mrs. Clauses, one of whom was wearing a tee-shirt with red lettering that said, “biker chick,” while her Santa’s shirt asked, “Naughty or Nice?”

Wayne gave me a look that said, “If there is a God or some kind of divine presence in the universe, it has a sick sense of humor.”

We made it through customs, grabbed our luggage and a rental car and made it to a licensing location with just barely enough time left. I parked the car, threw a coin in the meter, and we practically sprinted to the place.

We both signed where required on the paperwork, and then all that was left was to fill out the rest of the required information and pay the fee. We agreed that Wayne would do that part; while I would make sure there was enough time on the meter for us to have lunch nearby. I went back outside and walked over to the car.

And then unexpectedly, as I was glancing at my watch to see how much time I would need to add to the meter, my eyes suddenly filled with tears. I couldn’t stop it. I was so overwhelmed with joy.

As we were having lunch later, Wayne started telling me about how he had looked up at the clock as they were finishing the paperwork. “We’re really going to get married,” he had said out loud, his eyes filling with tears.

I asked him what time that had been.

It was the exact same moment as when I had experienced the exact same thing.

Perhaps the divine exists in an interconnectedness that is so much more complex and vast and powerful than we can fully understand. Maybe the divine is what happens when we love each other beyond our ability to express it in words.

The next day, in a beautiful historic home on the Vancouver bay, a wonderful woman conducted our wedding service for us. An adorable dog named Marley broke into the room and sat right beside us, our little best man with a squeaky toy in his mouth, which he occasionally chomped down on, causing it to punctuate key elements of the ceremony with a loud squeak followed by lots of laughter.

It was perfect, and beautiful and it still fills my soul with an indescribable joy to remember it.

I think that like our struggle to go get married, in the larger struggle for marriage equality, and indeed, any social justice movement, we have to keep at the journey. We have to know that the struggle for justice itself has inherit value. It is worth it, even though sometimes we will lose people who were on the journey with us. We have to keep going, even when it seems like this world upon which we travel in life is burning, and we are not sure we will ever get to the destination.

And sometimes the absurdities in life will throw Santa Clause conventions in our path that will slow us down. So too though, will we find comfort in our connections with each other. We will cry together, and we will laugh together when angels like Marley bring joy into our lives.

Yesterday was Independence Day, and it feels like the words in that Declaration of Independence, the values expressed all those years ago have come one step closer to actually being realized – that all of us are created equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights.

Wayne and I, as well as married, same sex couples across the country, are now legally protected in the same way that any other married couple would be. We can’t be thrown out of the hospital room if one of us gets sick. We now have the same inheritance rights as other married couples. We have the same benefits, such as access to one another’s social security after the loss of one of the spouses.

Perhaps more importantly, for me, it feels like we have made a giant step forward toward being recognized as full citizens, as full human beings.

And yet, my friends, there is still much to be done. In 28 states, it is still legal to fire someone simply for being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered. Trans-lives and their rights and dignity are still under assault, both figuratively and literally.

If Wayne and I were to drive less than hour in most any direction from here, stop at a restaurant and, while there, publicly display the same affection toward one another any married, heterosexual couple might, we would likely be placing ourselves in danger.

While we have been celebrating the Supreme Court decision on marriage equality, eight African American churches in the South have been burned down, police have assaulted and killed more unarmed African Americans, including two children run over during a high speed chase through a residential African American neighborhood.

So our work is not done. We have to find ways to sustain it, and I think our successes with marriage equality contain the seeds of how we may do so.

When I was only five years old, I told my mother I was going to be a minister when I grew up. I used to record sermons on the little cassette tape recorder my parents had given me. Later though, after rejecting the religion of my childhood, I no longer had a context within which to imagine a call to the ministry. I have since realized that the non-profit and theatre work I did most of my adult life was a way of trying to construct a secular ministry of sorts.

It wasn’t until I found this church, and this religion, that I was able to rediscover that call. A church and a religion that, unlike the one I had left those many years ago, recognizes the inherent worth and dignity of all people. A church and a religion where a gay man can offer what gifts he may have to its ministry, and those gifts will be accepted in a spirit of love.

This church and this religion gave me back my calling in life. Reimagined, this church and this religion gave me God back.

And in doing so, it transformed my life.

And I want ours to be a faith that is transformative for so many other people, especially those who still suffer oppressions and need a church that will welcome them with open arms and a great love for all of humanity. Folks like a young African American woman that I met at General Assembly.

Our wonderful youth group had put together an Action of Immediate Witness – a call for Unitarian Universalist support of the Black Lives Matter movement. Such actions require debate and a vote by the delegates attending the assembly.

We had a long and at times painful debate with a group of us standing in solidarity with the youth and representatives from the Black Lives Matter movement to pass the action of immediate witness worded as they had presented it. A number of amendments to the wording had been offered that in our view would have watered it down to make it more comfortable for white people.

In the end, it passed overwhelming with only minor amendments.

As we stood together, chanting, “black lives matter,” I noticed that the young woman was crying.

I hadn’t really met her, though we had been standing together in a group of folks throughout the debate, but I put my hand on her shoulder to try to provide some comfort. She threw both of her arms around me, pulled me into a hug, and holding onto me started really weeping. I placed an arm around her.

She said, “I was so scared they weren’t going to pass it.” And suddenly, I found myself placing my other arm around her and crying now myself, saying, “I was scared too.”

And though I had not known it until that moment, I had been afraid – afraid because had it had not passed, my religion would have so greatly disappointed, so greatly hurt our youth, our allies from Black Lives Matter. It would have so greatly fallen short of the religion I believe we can be.

It would have hurt and disappointed me.

I had reached out to minster to her, and instead, by being so authentic with a total stranger, by opening a space where I could get in touch with my own vulnerability, she had ministered to me.

And I think maybe it starts there – two strangers, standing in that great big assembly hall, holding each other and telling each other our truths, our fears, being fully human with each other.

I think this is the love that we can cultivate in this church and this religion by sharing our fears, our stories, our fragilities that make us human and let us see each other as human. I think this is the love that we then carry outward into our world and that transforms itself into justice – just as it did with marriage equality and the standing on the side of love campaign.

So, may our well-deserved and much-needed celebration also renew our commitment to standing on the side of love for all people. May it rekindle and refuel a burning fire for doing justice.

Amen

Benediction

Transcendence – To connect with wonder and awe at 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

These are the religious values this church has expressed and that underlie our mission that we say together every Sunday.

May you carry these values with you into your daily lives and live them out in a world that so badly needs you right now.

Many, many blessings upon you.

May the congregation say, “Amen” and “Blessed Be.”

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

Inhospitality to Strangers

May 10, 2015 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
May 10, 2015

On this Mother’s Day, not far from here, hundreds of immigrant mothers are being held in a detention facility, separated from their children and loved ones. Just a little farther away, immigrant women and their children — some as young as three — are also being held in detention, many of them for months at a time. How do we view this ethically and religiously, especially through the lens of our religious values and our mission? Join Rev. Chris Jimmerson as we examine “Inhospitality to Strangers.”

Sermon

“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” Hebrews Chapter 13, Verse 2.

This morning, I want to recall a story some of you may have heard me tell before – a story from several years ago when I was working for a non-profit that provides immigration legal services called American Gateways. It’s the story of an asylum seeker who I will call Mykel, though that is not his real name. Mykel fled his home country with a family member because they were being persecuted, even receiving death threats, due to their religious beliefs.

When they arrived in the US, they immediately contacted immigration officials and asked for asylum.

Immigration officials immediately locked them up in an immigrant detention center.

That’s where we first Mykel, at the T. Don Hutto immigrant detention facility in Taylor, Texas.

He was two years old at the time. He turned three during the 7 months he and his mother were held in this facility, which at the time was used to imprison entire immigrant families.

Just after Mykel turned three, we represented them before the San Antonio immigration court, and the judge granted them asylum.

We did not get to celebrate though. The attorney for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) promptly appealed the judge’s decision.

They locked shackles on Mykel’s mother’s wrists and ankles, as he sobbed in terror, not understanding what they were doing to his mom, and took them back to the prison for immigrants.

Mykel’s mom refused to give up and accept being deported, so we decided to try something different.

A few days later, we had a conference call with that ICE attorney, and all of the sudden, he decided to withdraw the appeal and admitted that their request for asylum was likely valid.

We think part of his change of heart might have had something to do with the call he had gotten from a national reporter earlier that day.

How that reporter found about Mykel’s story, and how she got that attorney’s direct office phone number remains shrouded in mystery.

Several years later, Mykel was living in a large city on the east coast, where his mother had gotten a good job. He had become very proficient with English and was doing well in school.

We know this, because Mykel’ s mom sent American Gateways a letter with an update on how they were doing. “

Enclosed with the letter was a photograph of a bright, smiling Mykel. Paper clipped to the photograph was a check for a thousand dollars, a contribution to, as Mykel’ s mom put it, help the organization help others like her Mykel.

“Thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”

Today is Mother’s Day. And while we celebrate the many terrific moms in this congregation and beyond it, as the reading you heard earlier describes, there are folks who are also hurting for a variety of reasons on this Mother’s Day.

I am painfully aware of my own mom and how she must be hurting because it is the first Mother’s Day since we lost my step dad, Ty.

I wanted to start with Mykel’ s story today, because it was one that was a part of a public relations and legal battle that a broad coalition of human rights advocates fought several years ago to force ICE to discontinue family detention at T. Don Hutto.

And they did. We won that one.

On this Mother’s Day though, the victory has turned out to be short lived. We have not only come full circle, it has gotten much worse now.

Today, hundreds of immigrant women and their children, some of them infants, are spending Mother’s Day imprisoned in a detention facility in Karnes City, about an hour southeast of San Antonio. Many of these women and children have been held there for eight months or more. Many of them, like Mykel and his mom, fled persecution and death threats in their home country, only to be re-traumatized when they came to the U.S. seeking asylum, asking for our help.

As if that’s not enough, a little over an hour to the southwest of San Antonio in Dilley, Texas, ICE has just opened another detention facility, which will eventually imprison up to 2,400 immigrants, most of whom will also be women and children. Just last Saturday, several members of this church participated in a rally to protest this facility and call for and end to all immigrant family detention.

The T. Don Hutto Center now houses up to 400 immigrant women, again many of them asylum seekers, who will be spending this Mother’s Day separated from their children and families. It’s hard for me to even imagine which would be worse – being separated from your children or knowing that they will be locked up with you for some unknown period of time.

People who come to the U.S. and ask for asylum have done nothing illegal- in fact, what is illegal according to U.S. law and international human rights treaties is this prolonged detention of asylum seekers while their cases are processed.

And even in the vast majority of instances where immigrants have come for other reasons, such as harsh economic conditions in their countries of origin, they have at most committed an immigration law misdemeanor, the equivalent of getting a traffic ticket. I wonder what would happen if they started holding white people in prison for eight months while their speeding ticket cases got processed.

Excellent research shows that supervised, community-based alternatives to immigrant detention work extremely well. Immigrants comply with the law, showing up for their immigration court and other appointments. These alternatives are also far less expensive than the over 2 billion in U.S. tax dollars we are spending each year on immigration detention.

Yet, for-profit prison companies, like the GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America, who run Karnes City and Dilley respectively, have discovered that the millions they spend on lobbying at the local, state and federal level to make sure the United States remains the prison capital of the world has been a great investlnent in light of the billions in our tax dollars they rake in every year. Their efforts have resulted in a U.S. incarceration rate nearly 5 times greater than most other countries. They have successfully lobbied, for instance, for congress to require that over 34,000 immigrants Inust be imprisoned at any given time. They were also involved in ICE declaring that the women and children in Karnes and Dilley are national security threats.

Strange how often the people we label as dangerous felons and national security threats happen to have brown and black skin, isn’t it?

Felicia Kongable, one of several of our church members who visit immigrant women and children in local detention facilities, described the following to me about the Karnes City Facility:

– Women who have risked everything to follow their maternal instincts and get their children out of life-threatening situations only to find themselves locked up with up to three other women and all of their children in a room about the size of my office here at the church.

– Infants not being allowed to crawl past the doorway of such rooms.

– Water that tastes like salt and chlorine

– Food that the children do not like and that does not provide proper nutrition for them at this important developmental stage.

– Mothers having to spend the tiny amount they earn doing work for the prison to buy their kids other food from the commissary and bottled water at $1.75 per bottle.

– When many of the women went on a hunger strike to protest their prolonged confinement, they made sure their children still ate. Still, the guards told them, if you don’t eat, we’ll say that it proves you are an unfit mother and we’ll take your children away from you.

– Children depressed. Children distraught over seeing their mothers treated like criminals, subjected to numerous cell counts throughout the day.

– An interior courtyard surround on all four sides by two story building walls as the only outside area for children, where they cannot even see trees or the horizon.

– Children talking about committing suicide by jumping off the second story balcony.

And in fact, Felicia and the others I talked with for this sermon told me of so many horrors that these women and their children had experienced, first in their home countries and then at the hands of our government and these private prison contractors, that I cannot possibly fit them all in one sermon. Even worse, immigration official are denying most asylum cases and issuing deportation orders for entire families, despite the fact that these families are clearly facing severe threats and possible murder if returned to their home countries.

I wish I could let these immigrants speak for themselves today also. They have shown such great courage. I can share with you, with their permission, the words of one of them wrote down.

“My name is Bobbie (not his real name-I changed it) and I am eleven years old. I have been threatened and taunted because I have a language problem. Children at school have teased me, bullied me, hit me and taken my money.

At times I would come home from school with my clothes torn and dirty and I would be so depressed that I didn’t want to leave the house and never wanted to go back to school.

These schoolmates are part of a gang who were also extorting money from my mother. Even the neighbors (believed to be members of the same gang) threatened to harm me and my family. They have said they would kill me because they think I am a homosexual. When my sister tried to defend me, she too became the target of mistreatment and threats.

As children with a woman alone, there is no one to protect us. If I have to go back, we believe that the gangs will follow through on their threats and harm us – because they can. The police are either unwilling or unable to assist us and so we are defenseless in our country.”

When Bobbie’s mother brought him and his sister here to ask for asylum, we locked them up in the Karnes City detention center, despite the fact that they had been issued an initial finding of a credible fear of being harmed or killed if they return to their home country.

“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”

And yet we do the opposite. We bind the angels, and we clip their wings and far too often we toss them back into a torturous hell on earth.

When I was a kid in school, we were taught about episodes in U.S. history that had come to be thought of as stains on the soul of the nation.

– The slaughter and subjugation of natives.
– Slavery, of course.
– Jim Crowe.
– Lynching.
– Imperialism
– McCarthyism
– The Japanese internment camps.

And in our time, I fear that the polluting of our national soul is escalating, a cancer spreading through our very core. The disproportionate execution of black lives by law enforcement, a criminal justice and corrections system gone wild and these modern day internment camps imposed upon immigrant women and their children, these are all just different manifestations of that same cancer – a cancer rooted in racist and classist systems that in turn support an excessively unequal distribution of wealth and power.

But on this Mother’s Day, in this, our time, I think we have a choice. After all, we are still living in our time.

And we can rise up together, a chorus of voices crying out in harmony, “This is not the history we will allow to be written. This is not the story we will allow to be told about our time.”

This will not continue in our name. This will not be done with our taxes.

This makes a mockery of the values we were taught are at the core of our nation.

This violates the principals that we affirm and promote as Unitarian Universalists.

We have a different vision – a vision of beloved community wherein all people are enabled to live lives of dignity, where we act from a spirit that there is enough for each of us rather than out of a culture of scarcity.

We have a vision of offering hospitality to strangers, treating them as if they might well be angels among us.

Now, I know that challenges like these can seem so huge and overwhelming. It is easy to loose hope. It easy to feel that one person cannot possibly make a difference.

I will tell you there is hope. We have won against family detention before. A federal district judge has recently issued a preliminary ruling that immigrant family detention must stop. The final ruling is in less than 30 days, and no doubt the private prison contractors and the forces that fear the stranger will be working hard to appeal or find other ways around this ruling. So now is the time to make our voices heard.

At the social action table today after the service, you can meet a representative of Grassroots Leadership, one of our partners fighting against family detention, and get information about how you can get involved in their efforts, as well as those of many of our other partners. While you’re there, be sure to find out about the immigration action group “Inside Amigos” we are forming right here at the church.

From participating in campaigns to call for an end to family detention, to visiting these women and children, to supporting their legal costs, to providing backpacks with supplies for the kids if they do get released, our many al1d varying efforts all added together really can make a difference.

On this Mother’s Day, in this, our time, in the history that is yet to be written, we have never had a greater opportunity, never been called more to nourish souls, transform lives and do justice. May this be so. May this be the story that we write together. See you at the social action table.

Benediction

Now, as we go out into our world;
May the covenant that binds us together dwell in your heart and nourish your days,
May the mission that we share inspire your thoughts and light your way,
May the spirit of this beloved community go with you until next we are gathered again.

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

Concepts of the Divine

April 25, 2015 by tom Posted in Chris Jimmerson, Guest Speakers, Sermons

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
April 25, 2015

Rev. Chris Jimmerson joined by our First UU seminary students deliver homilies on the language of reverence in the first our “We Gather” alternative services. Chris asked each of our three seminarians to offer a short homily on this question: “What does the concept of the divine mean to you?”

Chris Jimmerson’s Homily

Several years ago, Unitarian Universalists began to have a discussion around what we called “a language of reverence”, a religious language that acknowledges our sense of awe and wonder over this spectacular world and universe in which find ourselves. And despite our differing beliefs, and though there is still some debate about the use of such language in our religious communities, this language of reverence has over time seeped into our vernacular.

If you’ve been hanging out with Unitarian Universalists for any time though, have you noticed what we do when we use such language? We go like this:
“God – whatever that means to you. Including nothing at all.”
“Holy – but if you really don’t like that term it’s OK, and we all understand why you might not and would prefer to think of it as, maybe, a sense of wholeness. Perhaps”

Now, the equivocations are understandable. Some of us come out of religious backgrounds that wounded us and within which such terms were wielded like weapons. Others may associate such terms with superstition and a belief in the supernatural they do not hold.

I got to wondering though, what if we could truly reclaim the language of reverence for ourselves? What if we could stop equivocating and just accept that each of us, humanist or theist, Buddhist or earth-centered naturalist – or any other of our many worldviews -just allow each of us to embrace such terms in ways that have meaning and power within our own ways of making sense of our world and our lives.

So, as an experiment, I asked each of our three seminarians to offer a short homily today on this question: “What does the concept of the divine mean to you?”

And yes, “absolutely nothing” was an allowable answer as long as they could follow it with something like, “This is what I think is ultimate – something I am a part of but that is larger than myself.”

Then, I realized that if I was going to ask them to answer such a question, I was going to have to do so also.

“Well, hells bells,” as my grandmother used to say when encountered with something perplexing or difficult.

I realized I can’t define or describe the divine. Rather, it’s an experience I have in this world and in this reality.

It is an experience I have sometimes had while hiking in nature and suddenly having a sense of my smallness in the vastness of things and yet also transcendence because of being a part of that life and creation.

It is an experience I have had when walking down the streets of a bustling city amidst throngs of humanity and suddenly feeling this overwhelming sense of oneness and connection with all of humanity.

And, hells bells, that brings me back to an experience that happened with grandma.

I go back to this story a lot because it is still the strongest of this type of experience that I have ever had.

I was very close with my maternal grandparents. They took care of me and helped raise me after my parents divorced when I was still very young. Later, they welcomed my spouse Wayne into our family with open, loving arms. They wanted him to be at all of our family gatherings and life events, including when the time came that we lost first my grandfather and then my grandmother.

Of course, they knew that we were in a loving, committed, romantic relationship. Grandma used to call us, “Her boys”. Still, we never explicitly discussed the true nature of relationship with them. Grandpa was a Deacon in the First Baptist Church of Groves, TX, after all, a small town in southeast Texas. We learned later that we could have.

Wayne and I were visiting my grandmother in the hospital for what we all knew could be one of the last times. She had congestive heart failure and told her doctors that she only wanted to be kept out of pain – no more treatments; no more resuscitations. We’d had a good long visit, and we went to her bedside to say our goodbyes, she took us both by the hand, looked me right in the eyes and said, “Take care of each other”.

That room filled with love. The love held us. It was like a loving presence was supporting us and comforting us within our connections with each other and all that was and ever will be.

For me, when we get a glimpse of the true depth and expansiveness, the wondrous beauty, of our shared existence, the love that’s possible within the complex, fragile, ever changing web of all existence of which we are part, as we did in that hospital room, the only words I have with enough symbolic power to point toward such experiences are words like “Divine”.

Still, as the Buddhists might say, even then, they are like a finger pointing at the moon, but they are not the moon.

And I’m OK with that. For me, leaving some mystery is a part of it, and so the language of reverence is what best helps me recapture at least something of that sense of awe and wonder – that power to be found within love and human connectedness, this spectacular world and universe within which we find ourselves.

Amen.

Nell Newton – Homily on understanding the divine

Here was the class exercise: turn to a partner and tell that person about your understanding of God. We’re in seminary, so this kind of thing is expected. I turned to my new friend Lyn and we looked at each other. “You go first” “No, you…” Politeness trying to buy time. Why is it that we balk at talking about something so essential?

Lyn jumped in “For me, God is Love. That’s all.” I nodded.

“For me, God is the way that the stars and grass and I are all becoming all at once. The air we are breathing together is God and the way that I’m coming to see how very little separation there is between us, and that all of us are co-creating the universe together. My holy scripture is DNA and I have no real words for what God is but I know it when I stop maintaining this sense of separate self and just breathe…” I paused, terrified that I would now be escorted out of the building for having spoken some heresy. It’s a liberal seminary, but still… I wasn’t quite sure that my sense of the divine was appropriate or safe.

We blinked at each other. Lyn finally said, “Wow… I wish I could talk about my god like that. Now my god feels a little simple.” I grunted “Well, I wish I could have as clear and succinct an understanding as your god. Then we laughed and hugged and agreed that our gods were good enough for who we are. And that is good. And both of our gods were present at that moment. And this moment. And this moment.

There are technical terms for the differences between our understandings of the divine: Kataphatic and Apophatic.

Lyn’s understanding is Kataphatic:
– is a positive way of describing what god is.
– Kataphatic theology and prayer can be summed up by the way it states how god is like something: “God is Love”, “God is relationship”, or “God is good.”
– God can be understood, known, described. That’s positive.

My babbling felt dangerous and useless because my understanding of the divine is Apophatic – which isn’t really negative, but it doesn’t fit into words.
– Apophatic prayer has no content.
– God cannot be known through any analogy or imagery.
– There is no noun or verb or adjective that works.
– So one simply rests with the unknowability, the uncertainty.
– In the Hebrew “Elohim”, a word for the holy, it is plural, but it’s not a noun for a thing- it’s a verb about process. It roughly translates to “We are becoming” or “that which is becoming”. That’s pretty close to my understanding of the divine.

A couple of weeks ago I told Lyn that I had found the correct terms for our theologies. We laughed at how we had both felt so self-conscious talking about our understanding of the holy.

How we each felt that we were inadequate or insufficient to the task. But we weren’t. And how we had found something truly holy in sharing.

Meditation – Drops of God
Tess Baumberger

God, God is water sleeping
in high-piled clouds.
She is gentle drink of rain,
pooling lake, rounding pond,
angry flooding river.
She is frothy horse-maned geyser.
She is glacier on mountains and polar ice cap,
and breath-taking crystalline ideas of snowflakes.
She is frost-dance on trees.
And we, we are drops of God,
her tears of joy or sorrow,
ice crystals
and raindrops
in the ocean of her.

God, God is air wallowing
all about us,
She is thin blue atmosphere embracing
our planet, gentle breeze.
She is wind and fearsome gale
centrifugal force of tornado and hurricane,
flurry of dust storm.
She is breath, spirit, life.
She is thought, intellect, vision and voice.
And we, we are breaths of God,
steady and soft,
changeable and destructive.
We are her laughter and her sighs,
atomic movements,
(sardines schooling)
in the firmament of her.

God, God is fire burning,
day and night.
She is sting of passion,
blinking candle,
heat that cooks our food.
She is fury forest fire
and flow of lava which destroys and creates, transforms.
She is home fire and house fire.
She is giving light of sun and
solemn mirror-face of moon,
and tiny hopes of stars.
And we, we are little licking flames
flickering in her heart,
in the conflagratory furnace of her.

God, God is power of earth,
in and under us.
She is steady, staying,
fertile loam, body, matter, tree.
She is crumbling limestone and shifting sand,
multi-colored marble.
She is rugged boulder and water-smoothed agate,
she is gold and diamond, gemstone.
She is tectonic plates and their motion,
mountains rising over us,
rumble-snap of earthquake,
tantrum of volcano.
She is turning of our day,
root of being.
And we, we are pebbles
and sand grains,
and tiny landmarks,
in the endless terrain of her.
God, God is journal of time marching
through eternity.
She is waking of seasons, phases of moon,
movements of stars.
She is grandmother, mother, daughter.
She is transcending spiral of ages
whose every turn encompasses the rest,
history a mere babe balanced on her hip.
She is spinning of universes
and ancestress of infinence.
She is memory, she is presence, she is dream.
And we, we are brief instants,
intersections, nanoseconds,
flashing gold-hoped moments in the eons of her.
God, God is.
And we, we are.

That Which Holds All
Nancy Shaffer

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

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

And then, tongue loosened, she fell to naming
superlatives as well: Most Creative One,
Greatest Source, Closest Hope –
even though superlatives for the Sacred seemed to her
probably redundant, but then she couldn’t stop:

One who Made the Stars, she said, although she knew
technically a number of those present didn’t believe
the stars had been made by anyone or thing
but just luckily happened.

One Who Is an Entire Ocean of Compassion,
she said, and no one laughed.
That Which Has Been Present Since Before the Beginning,
she said, and the room was silent.

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

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

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

Amen.

Note
Additional homilies delivered by Susan Yarbrough and Erin Walter will be added as they become available.

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

Sacred Vulnerability

March 15, 2015 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
March 15, 2015

We live in a culture that often values a kind of hyper-individualism and self-reliance, which can lead us to project an air of invincibility. Yet research by Brene Brown and others in the social sciences indicates that the opposite may be the key to living wholeheartedly. Being willing to embrace and express our vulnerability may be the source of authenticity, human connection, and empathy, as well as the ability to both love and accept being loved.

Call to Worship

Put Away the Pressures of the World
By Erika A. Hewitt

As we enter into worship, put away the pressures of the world
that ask us to perform, to take up masks, to put on brave fronts.

Silence the voices that ask you to be perfect.

This is a community of compassion and welcoming.
You do not have to do anything to earn the love contained within these walls.

You do not have to be braver, smarter, stronger, better
than you are in this moment to belong here, with us.

You only have to bring the gift of your body,
no matter how able;
your seeking mind, no matter how busy;
your animal heart, no matter how broken.

Bring all that you are, and all that you love, to this hour together.
Let us worship together.

Reading
From Brené Brown

No vulnerability, No empathy.

In a culture where people are afraid to vulnerable, you can’t have empathy.

If you share something with me something that’s difficult, in order for me to be truly empathetic, I have to step into what you’re feeling, and that’s vulnerable. So there can be no empathy without vulnerability…

You can’t access empathy if you’re not willing to be vulnerable…

Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.

Sermon

Here’s a quote that I really love, “Vulnerability is the core of all emotions and feelings. To feel is to be vulnerable. To believe vulnerability is weakness is to believe that feeling is weakness. To foreclose on our emotional life out of a fear that the costs will be too high is to walk away from the very thing that gives purpose and meaning to living.”

That’s from a series of online lectures by Dr. Brené Brown, a well know researcher, author and speaker from the University of Houston School of Social Work. She defines vulnerability as “exposure, uncertainty, and emotional risk”. I watched her lectures as a part of preparing for this sermon.

Dr. Brown says something else that I SO wish I had seen before I submitted the short description and title of this sermon for our newsletter.

While discussing people she has identified through her research that she calls the “wholehearted”, by which she means people who have embraced and can express their own vulnerability, and thereby are living more authentic, loving and connected lives, Dr. Brown says that embracing vulnerability doesn’t mean never complaining about the bad things that happen in life – the things that hurt. In fact, the wholehearted can complain as much as anyone else. They just do it in a specific and more life fulfilling way.

She says that they “piss and moan with perspective.” “Dang,” I thought, when I heard her say that, “Now that would have made a great sermon title”.

“Pissing and Moaning with Perspective” “A Unitarian Universalist take on the Problem of Suffering and Evil.” Actually, I think she’s Methodist or something.

Anyway, Dr. Brown goes on to say that while embracing our vulnerability is not weakness, neither does it mean we will never have problems, make mistakes or suffer. It is recognizing that we will, and loving ourselves and other people, not in spite of these things, but because of them.

To be alive is to be vulnerable. And yet our cultural norms favor extreme individualism and self-reliance that can strongly encourage us to attempt to a false sense of invincibility.

Paradoxically, cultivating this false sense of invincibility and certainty can drain our courage for loving and accepting being loved. It can lead to shaming and rob of us of the belonging and connection that are at the center of what it means to be fully human.

Now, I still struggle with all of this sometimes. A couple of Sundays ago, I had the pleasure of teaching one of our Sunday morning religious education classes for kindergarten and first grade children. After the lesson, it was too cold and rainy to let them go outside and play, so we had to come up with activities that they could do inside.

A few of them got bored and decided they would turn me into an indoor jungle gym. Soon, I found myself under siege by a group of five and six year olds demanding that I play with them by being their climbing, swinging and seesaw apparatus. I was outnumbered, out maneuvered and outlandishly on the verge of experiencing pure joy – if only I would let myself give in to it. And I resisted it.

Dr. Brown calls this resistance, “foreboding joy” – when we won’t let ourselves fully experience joyful moments because we start to project what can go wrong. We fear the joy because we know it will end. We start imagining all the sorrow that may come. It’s like we try to ward off the sorrow in our lives by stifling the joy. Yeah, that’ll work.

So, here’s all the foreboding and shaming thoughts I was having: “Oh my God, I have to keep them on the carpeted area or one of them will get hurt and it’ll all be my fault and the church will get sued and I’ll never get to work within Unitarian Universalism ever again.”

– and –

“What will their parents think if they come to pick them up and find that they’ve tackled their Sunday school teacher and taken over the classroom?”

– and –

“Good golly man, you have Reverend in front of your name now, you can’t be seen acting the fool with a bunch of first graders.”

Sometimes my shaming thoughts have a British accent. Luckily for me, the more I resisted, the more they upped the ante. Five and six year olds have a lot more energy and determination than me. So, I discovered that if I gave in and joined in the fun, they would actually more easily accept some parameters like staying on the carpeted area.

And it was pure joy.

Why do we adults so often experience shame around playfulness?

Here’s another Brené Brown quote, “Vulnerability is the core of shame and fear and our struggle for worthiness, but it is also the birthplace of joy and creativity, of belonging, and of love.”

I went through all of that in a matter of just a few minutes. Plus, luckily, my back had healed enough by the following weekend that I was able to attend the 50th anniversary commemorative march in Selma.

Research conducted after the 1966 mass shooting from the U.T. tower here in Austin, as well as other such research, has found that one of the things people who commit such crimes tend to have in common is that they were not allowed to engage in play as children.

Some of the other research I looked at said that for adults to engage in playful activity is one of the most vulnerable things we can do, because in our culture we are often taught a very strong work ethic that shames such activities. To play, we also give up a sense of control and propriety and allow ourselves to lose our sense of time and place.

And yet, the research also shows that play is one of the ways we get in touch with our deeper and more authentic selves and risk allowing others to see us more deeply. One of the many wise things I think our senior minister, Meg Barnhouse, has done for First UU Austin has been to infuse our spirituality and religious practice with a sense of fun and playfulness.

In addition to the foreboding joy I mentioned earlier, Dr. Brown outlines a number of other ways that we avoid vulnerability and that ultimately rob of us of living fully. I don’t have time to go through all of them today but here are a few of the major ones that I think you’ll probably recognize.

“Perpetual disappointment” – you know folks who do this – these are the Eeyores of our world. “Oh well, best not get too excited because something’s gonna go wrong eventually.” Always the life of the party.

“Numbing” – These are the ways that we avoid feeling at all or at least dull our emotions to the point of becoming unrecognizable. Numbing include the things we normally think of as addictions such as alcohol and drugs, but also includes things like excessive television, eating, video games, smart phone use; working too much; buying too much, etc. After 911, we were told to all go shopping, right? Brown notes that “we are the most obese, in debt, addicted and medicated adult cohort in known human history. We numb.”

“Perfectionism” – She calls this the “20-Ton shield” when it comes to avoiding vulnerability, and of course, it is a trap because we can never be perfect, and perfectionism can stifle our internal drive to strive for excellence because even excellent will not be perfect, so why take any real risks at all? For me, it has some times been a way of sort of super-numbing.

I was the oldest child in my family growing up. Now, you may have heard about the oldest sibling syndrome wherein under stress, we can become over-functioning, something very closely related to perfectionism. Especially in anxious situations, over-functioners tend to try take care of everyone else – and maybe even micromanage a little: know what best for everyone, which is usually some level of perfection that’s impossible. My parents divorced when I was twelve and so I got an especially strong case of oldest child syndrome. It is something I still have to watch out for.

The other thing that happened after the divorce is that my grandparents on my mother’s side became like a second set of parents to me. They helped raise us. We spent as much time at their house as at our own. My Grandfather became my father figure, and I pretty much idolized them both. They became role models for me.

So when I got the call one day, about 17 years ago now, that my grandfather was in the hospital and it did not look good, I went into sort of an overfunctioner’s perfect storm. I didn’t stop to cry or grieve or feel anything. I called Wayne and started making plans to make the drive over to take care of my family. I was going to do this grieving thing perfectly!

And when we got to the hospital, and he was no longer conscious so that I did not even get to say goodbye, I didn’t cry or grieve. I took care of everyone else.

And when I got the call the next morning that he had died, I didn’t cry. I got up, got dressed and started planning and taking care of things. And even when I gave the eulogy at his funeral, I still didn’t cry, nor at the reception afterwards, nor on the drive back home when it was all done, nor after we got back home. I was too busy “functioning”.

And then, I think it was maybe a day later, I couldn’t find my glasses, and so I went out to our car, thinking maybe they had fallen under a seat or something and started searching for them. I didn’t find them, but I did find a map my grandfather had given me – he was a traveler and big on maps – and he had written his name on it. My grandfather had this habit of writing his name on all his belongings. Someone gave him one of those noisy, obnoxious, electronic engraving pens one time. Big mistake.

And suddenly, sitting there alone on the floorboard of the car, with no one left to take care of anymore but me, I ran out of ways to avoid it.

I started crying. And for a while it felt as if I might never stop.

A friend of mine who’s a playwright once had one of his characters, after having just lost her family in a car wreck, say, “I don’t have to cry now. I can cry tomorrow, or next week or next month or next year, because it’s never going to stop. It’s never going to stop hurting.”

I guess that was kind of what I had been doing – trying to put off feeling the hurt. It doesn’t work eventually, but his character was right about one thing. It never really does completely stop hurting. We just learn to carry it with us. And I think maybe that’s as it should be because for me it is also carrying them with us.

My grandparents are the people who taught me to have a love of nature. To this day, even though they have both been gone over 15 years now, I will be on a nature hike and see something so beautiful that it fills me with joy, and I will think that I have to call them and tell them about it and their old phone number, 409-962-2010 will still come into my head, and then I will remember that I can’t and it stings.

The thing is, somehow because of this, the joy of the experience is also deeper, greater, more complex. I call it a joy so full that it is an aching joy, rather than that foreboding joy we talked about earlier.

Writer and poet Kahlil Gibran said it like this, “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”

And that’s why numbing robs us of living fully. That’s the reason to seek lives of vulnerability and authenticity. If we refuse to allow sorrow to carve into our being, we will also never experience the fullness of that aching joy. The thing is, living vulnerably is hard, especially when we live in culture that often values the opposite, so if you work for a high-powered law firm or in a cutthroat corporate office, I don’t recommend starting there with practicing vulnerability.

But I do think we can start in our personal lives – with our families and friends. And I think that we can create in this church a space where we can bring our vulnerabilities and our whole selves, and eventually maybe it does spread to those more tougher, more difficult environments.

To do this, I think we have to understand not only what expressing vulnerability is, as I’ve been discussing, but we also have to also know what it is not.

It is not sympathy seeking or sharing every thought that comes into our heads. It is not expressing our feelings in a way that is harmful or shaming to others. It is not monitoring every conversation or lurking on email lists, online groups or at the back of meetings just looking for something to be hurt or offended by. That’s not practicing vulnerability, it’s just drama trolling.

I think maybe we start by being willing to ask for the space to be vulnerable and by being willing risk it – to reach out and say, “My son is in the hospital and I could use some help”, or “I just got that promotion I have been wanting at work, and I am thrilled and at the same time terrified over whether I am really capable of it, and I don’t have any where else to share it.” Too often in our culture of self-reliance, we do not ask for help even from our church.

I think, though, that we are creating in this congregation, a place where we can practice living authentically.

A place where we are allowed to be vulnerable and imperfect and to make mistakes and be forgiven for them rather than shamed for them.

A place where we are courageous enough for empathy to thrive. A place where we sometimes play with the spontaneity and abandon of young children. A place where we love and accept love and radiate that love out into our larger world.

I think we can create a space where life’s hallowed sorrows and aching joys can be sung into the rafters and held by beloved community.

What if we make that church?

In our increasingly individualistic, disengaged and power-centered world, wouldn’t creating “the church of sacred vulnerability” be subversive?

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

Selma and UU

January 18, 2015 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons, Video available

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Chris Jimmerson
January 18, 2015

As we as UUs continue the struggle for racial justice, it is important that we know from whence we come.

Call to Worship
Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality. This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality.

Reading
Rev Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., from his Eulogy for Rev. James Reeb

So I can say to you this afternoon, my friends, that in spite of the tensions and uncertainties of this period, something profoundly meaningful is taking place. Old systems of exploitation and oppression are passing away. Out of the wombs of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. Doors of opportunity are gradually being opened. Those at the bottom of society, shirtless and barefoot people of the land, are developing a new sense of somebody-ness, carving a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of despair. “People who stand in darkness have seen a great light.” Here and there an individual or group dares to love and rises to the majestic heights of moral maturity.

Sermon

Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, Selma, Alabama. In reaction to the footage you just watched being broadcast on the evening news, people across America were horrified. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Junior dispatched a telegram calling on clergy of all faiths to join him in the struggle in Selma.

And religious people, both clergy and lay people, from all around the country responded. They went to Selma, and they stood in witness and solidarity, following the leadership of the African Americans in whose struggle they had joined. Eventually, 500 Unitarian Universalist lay people and 250 of our ministers would march with Dr. King.

And doing so changed them. It transformed them.

As Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed puts it in his new book, The Selma Awakening, they experienced in a visceral, emotional way the melding of their espoused religious values with their values in practice.

Rev. James Reeb was among the first Unitarian Universalist ministers to arrive in Selma, and he participated in the next March across that very same bridge you saw in the opening video. This time, Dr. King himself led the march. They started from the Selma African Methodist Episcopal Brown Chapel where they had gathered. When they reached the other side of the bridge, they kneeled to pray, and then Dr. King surprised everyone by leading them back to the chapel. He later explained that a judge had temporarily put a restraining order on the march, and that he feared for the lives of his followers if they continued the march without a court order to protect them. He pleaded with those gathered to stay a few days until the judge might rule in favor of allowing the march to go forward. Most of them did.

That evening, Reeb and two other UU ministers, Orloff Miller and Clark Olsen, had dined at Walker’s Cafe, an African American establishment because they had been told wouldn’t be safe at a whites only restaurant. As they left the cafe to walk back to Brown Chapel, they were attacked by a group of four or five white locals, at least one of whom was carrying a large club of some kind. He struck James Reeb on the head with it, knocking him to the ground. Eventually, they had all three ministers on the ground, kicking them and screaming, “You want to know what it’s like to be a nigger around here?”

Soon afterwards, James Reeb fell into an unconscious state from which he never awoke. Two days later, on March 11, 1965, Marie Reeb, his wife, made the painful and difficult decision to turn off the artificial support that was the only thing keeping his body alive.

The murder of this white minister galvanized white Americans and Unitarian Universalists even further. It did so in a way that the shooting of Jimmy Lee Jackson, the young black man who had been shot by an Alabama state trooper a few days earlier had not.

President Lyndon Johnson called Reeb’s widow. The Unitarian Universalist Association board adjourned a meeting it was holding so board members could journey to Selma to attend Reeb’s memorial service held at Brown Chapel on March 15. Dr. King delivered the eulogy.

That same evening, President Johnson appeared before a joint session of Congress and introduced the bill that would in a few months become the Voting Rights Act. In doing so, he spoke of the suffering endured by the peaceful protestors in Selma. He said, “Many were brutally assaulted, one good man, a man of God, was killed.”

A few days later, the judge ruled the march could go forward and ordered government protection for it. On March 21 the march began, protected by troops sent by President Johnson.

No doubt, Dr. King’s and his leadership’s organizing and rhetorical skills were the primary factors that brought about these changes. Still there is an irony in the fact that, as Rev. Bill Sinkford, former president of the Unitarian Universalist Association has written, ” …racism was at work even in the way the victory in Selma was achieved. The death of Jimmy Lee Jackson, a black man, did not receive widespread press attention. It did not result in hundreds of white clergy coming to stand in solidarity. It did not produce support from the federal government or the president. It took the death of James Reeb, a white man, to do that”.

In The Selma Awakening, Mark Morrison-Reed notes that the clergy and the lay folks who had been viscerally and emotionally awakened by their experiences in Selma returned to churches and a religious denomination ill prepared to move beyond an intellectual commitment to religious values such as equal opportunity, integration and facial justice, all rooted in a belief in universal brotherhood (such was the male-centered language of their time).

They returned to encounter fellow Unitarian Universalists who could not understand what those who had gone to Selma now did – that true integration could not entail assimilation – that what was needed was a melding among equals, and that this required black empowerment. A few years, what has become known as the “Black Empowerment Controversy” would erupt within Unitarian Universalism. And that could be and has been the topic for a whole other sermon.

Reed notes that for both the Universalists and the Unitarians before the merger, as well as after they merged in 1961, there was a disconnect between these espoused religious values and their values in practice. He cites the following as evidence of this dichotomy:

– Worship devoid of hymns and liturgy reflecting the African American experience and their desire for more emotive, embodied spirituality.

– Religious education materials that very rarely reflected African Americans at all.

– Resistance to training, fellowshipping and calling African American ministers.

– Congregations and fellowships that tended to be fervidly intellectual, individualistic, and humanistic. And that most often located themselves in suburban areas, away from black population centers – often at the end of dead end streets where it would be hard for anyone not specifically invited to find them.

– Very few African Americans serving on governing bodies, both at the denominational and individual church levels.

And, yes, some of these continue to be a struggle for us. Though we have made great strides, our march out of Selma continues even today.

Another Unitarian Universalist also did not come back from Selma. However, she was not honored or lionized in the way that James Reeb was. For many years her story was rarely if ever told, because (a) she was a woman and (b) she was a woman. That this is so is another example of values in practice failing to uphold our espoused values.

Viola Liuzzo was a member of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Detroit and worked with the NAACP. She was married and had five children. She answered the call to Selma by getting in her car and driving there against the objections of her family.

On the day that the march triumphantly entered Montgomery to end in a joyous rally at the Alabama state capital, she was helping by driving marchers back to Selma. On a return trip to Montgomery, a car full of Ku Klux Klansmen pulled up beside her and fired shots directly at her, hitting her twice in the head, killing her instantly. Her car careened into a ditch and came to a stop when it struck a fence.

One of her sons later spoke of how his fathers hair turned from black to gray seemingly overnight; of how, after her death, her family endured crosses being burnt in their front yard; of how he and his siblings were beaten up at school and told their mother deserved what she got because, as a white woman, she had no business being there in the first place.

I am pleased to say that today, she is honored in a memorial at our new Unitarian Universalist headquarters building, alongside the males who also died at Selma.

All white juries in Alabama acquitted the Klansmen who killed Viola Liuzzo of murder charges.

Likewise, all white juries acquitted the men who murdered James Reeb.

A grand jury failed to even indict the state trooper who murdered Jimmy Lee Jackson. In 2007, charges against the trooper, James Fowler, were revived. He pled guilty to manslaughter and spent a whole five months in jail.

And these failures within our criminal justice system seem a little too much like what we have seen across our country in the past months. I want to show you another video.

Not 1965 Alabama. 2014, the streets of cities across America. And though much HAS changed, still, we live in a time when the prosecutor in the Michael Brown shooting allows grand jury testimony from an eyewitness that’s key to backing up the story of the officer who shot him, even though the prosecutor knows that the witness has made racist statements and likely was not even at the site of the shooting when it occurred. And there was no indictment.

We live in a time when the coroner rules Eric Garner’s death a homicide, and yet a grand jury fails to indict the officer we have all seen holding Garner in a chokehold as he cries, “I can’t breathe”.

We live in a time when police shoot and kill a 12 year old African American boy for holding a pellet gun in a city park, and a 22 year old African American young man for holding a toy rifle in a Walmart, and yet white, open carry advocates can roam the aisles of our stores and parade through our streets carrying actual semi-automatic weapons and absolutely nothing happens to them.

We live in a time when even son1e peaceful protests have been met with military equipment, billy clubs and tear gas.

We live in a time where our criminal justice system is much more likely to search, arrest, charge, convict and sentence to prison people of color than white people who commit the very same crimes. Then, once convicted of a felony, we live in a system that often prevents these same people of color from being able to access federal benefits, find employment and housing, and, yes, often bars them from voting.

We live in a time when the Supreme Court has gutted a key element of that very same Voting Rights Act that people in Selma struggled, suffered and sometimes died for.

We live in a time when states across the country are passing laws clearly intended to disproportionately prevent people of color from voting.

We live in a time when lynching and Jim Crow have never completely left us. They’ve just morphed into new institutional forms.

I think that we Unitarian Universalists, we are receiving telegrams beckoning us to rejoin and redouble our efforts in the struggle again. And like those Unitarian Universalists that went to Selma, we are being called to show up, to put our espoused religious values into living practice. I believe this congregation has the means and a mission that requires us to do so.

On Sunday, March 8 of this year, Unitarian Universalists from around the country will cross that bridge in Selma again to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the original march. I hope a sizable contingent from this church will be able to be with them.

If you are not already participating, the church has a number of social action and interfaith activities related to combatting racism. I hope you’ll consider visiting the social action table today to find out how you can get involved.

Over the coming months, we will have several opportunities to participate in religious education and discussions about multiculturalism and working against racism and oppression. Please, join in!

I believe that ultimately we are called to do this because engaging together as allies in the struggle for racial equity is part of how we, all of us, can be transformed. Systems of oppression and silos of “otherness” prevent us all from realizing our full human potentiality. Breaking them down is how we can know fully the interconnectedness and love and unbridled community that are luring us toward a world that is more life giving and loving. It is how we reach for our greatest creative possibilities.

Benediction

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

Martin Luther King’s words still ring true and powerful today. And that means that even as we leave this sanctuary today, our work together as a beloved community goes on as we do justice that can transform both the lives of others and our own.

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

Go in peace. Go in love. Blessed be.

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

Burning Bowl Service

January 4, 2015 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons, Video available

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Chris Jimmerson
January 4, 2015

We greet the new year with our annual Burning Bowl service! It is good to begin the new year by clearing out old regrets and resentments. We toss those things into the fire and get a fresh start.

Call to Worship

by Sylvia L. Howe

We bid you welcome on this first Sunday of the new year.

Like Janus we gather with part of us looking backward
and part of us looking forward.

We gather on the edge of the new year
saddened by our losses,
cherishing our joys,
aware of our failures,
mindful of days gone by.

We gather on the cusp of this new year
eager to begin anew,
hopeful for what lies ahead,
promising to make changes,
anticipating tomorrows and tomorrows.

We invite you to join our celebration of life,
knowing that life includes good and bad,
endings and beginnings.

We bid you welcome!

Reading

For The New Year
by Barbara Rohde

We gather together at the beginning of a new time.
We stand on the edge of a wilderness that is a true wilderness.
No one has entered it before us.
Yet there is also that in us which causes us to face the unknown territory –cautiously and anxiously.
Now, in this place, we take time out of time, to look back,
to see where we have been and what we have been,
to reflect upon what we have learned thus far on our journey.
We gather together to remind each other to seek for our True North,
and to encourage — to place courage in – one another.
When we leave this place, we must each find our true path.
We must walk alone.
But now and then we may meet.
When we meet, may we offer each other the bread of our being.
And oh, my brothers, and oh, my sisters, if you hear me
plunging wildly, despairingly, through the thicket, call out to me.
Calm me.
And if you find me sleeping in the snow, awaken me,
lest my heart turn to ice.
And if you hear my music, praising the mornings of the world,
then in that other time, in the blackness of my night,
sing it back to me.

Sermon

In one of the first few classes I took in seminary, the instructors led us through this exercise called, “The Big Assumption”. “Big Assumptions” are beliefs we hold about ourselves that may be outside of our explicit awareness of them:

– Messages we got as kids

– Unconscious expectations or evaluations of ourselves that we absorb through our culture

– Internalized judgments we can get from friends, family and others in our lives.

The exercise we went through to discover our big assumptions involved identifying a key life goal that was a struggle for us. Then, they led us through a process that helped us to determine:

1. What we were doing or not doing that was undermining our goal,

2. What hidden, competing commitments were causing us to behave in this way,

3. What underlying, big assumption was leading to these hidden commitments

To get started, they gave as an example involving someone who says, “I am committed to stand up for myself more often when people make unreasonable demands of me, but instead I say ‘yes’ to people even when I know I am too busy, and I take on projects when others are really responsible for doing them”. That’s the goal and what they are doing that undermines it.

The hidden, competing commitments in this case might be, “I try to avoid conflict. I try to get others to think well of me”. The big assumption might be something like, “If I didn’t do these things, no one would like me”. It might simply be, “I don’t deserve respect”.

After we did the exercise ourselves, we went around the room, and those who were willing to do so shared the assumptions they had unearthed. It was a revealing and powerful experience. People, sometimes near tears, said things like:

“I don’t deserve to be loved.”

“I’ll never be attractive enough.”

“I’ll never be a good enough parent to my daughter”

Our instructors told us that they had done this same exercise in a number of our churches with both religious leaders and lay people, and the results were always very similar. The assumptions almost always involved some version of “not enough” and “don’t deserve”.

“I’ll never be successful enough. I don’t deserve to be”.

“I’ll never do well enough to satisfy my parents”.

“I’ll never have enough house, the right car, the expensive stuff my television keeps telling me I am supposed to acquire”.

If we consider some of the messages we are all constantly receiving, it’s easy to see how such assumptions could develop.

For me, it was simply, “I’m not good enough.”

Looking back on it now, it’s not surprising that I might have had that assumption. Growing up as a gay kid in a small, conservative town, I got a lot of that message.

As a minister in formation, the value for me in identifying it was that this assumption could lead to a kind of perfectionism: reluctance to admitting to vulnerability. I had to do the work of letting the assumption go, because a big part of doing ministry is to accept and even embrace vulnerability – to model appropriately expressing vulnerability – to create a sacred space where others may feel more comfortable doing so too.

Brene Brown, a researcher in the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work, has studied people who have a strong sense of purpose and meaning in life, who feel worthy of being loved and have a sense of belonging. What she has found is that one of the things they share in common is that they not only accept their vulnerability, they believe that their vulnerability is part of what makes them beautiful.

The real problem with the big assumption is, it’s a lie.

You are enough. You are worthy – you are deserving – just as you are, imperfections and vulnerabilities included.

That doesn’t mean we stop working to more fully become our best selves. It just helps us be in a place where we already know a deep sense our own inherent worth and dignity.

In a moment, we are going to light our burning bowl to begin our annual ritual about letting go of the things that hold us back, so I invite you now to think about about something you would like to let go. Is there a big assumption you have discovered today that you would like to release?

If not, maybe there a habit or something you’ve been doing that works against you, or a competing commitment you’d like to let go. Maybe letting these go will reveal an assumption underneath them.

Here are some examples of what you might want to let go: – What other people think of you.

– Hoping to finally win an argument with Mom, Dad, a spouse, partner, brother, sister.

– The need to win arguments at all.

– Fixing other people.

– Trying to control things that can’t be controlled.

– Needing to be the perfect spouse, parent, son, daughter, partner, friend or whatever occupational role you fill.

– Any sound file that keeps running in your head saying, “not enough”, “don’t deserve”

One of the values of ritual is that it allows us to embody our thoughts and intentions, to make them concrete. It allows us to hold them in a much deeper place inside – or to release something from that same deep place.

What will you release during our burning bowl ritual this year? We begin with a poem.

“Burning the Old Year”
Naomi Shihab Nye

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

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.
Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.

I begin again with the smallest numbers.
Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies”.

We will now light our burning bowl.

(— We ritually burn our slips of paper —)

May your life, your spirit be unburdened of that which you have burned here today. May you experience a lightness and a joy from having released it from a place deep within. May you move into the New Year with a deep and an abiding sense that you are enough. Inherently, you have worth.

Benediction

Now that you have let go of the things that needed releasing, hold on to the knowledge that you carry a spark of the divine within you.

Carry with you the love and sense of community we share in this sacred place.

Carry with you a mind open to continuous revelation, a heart strong enough to break wide open and a peace that passes all understanding.

All blessings go with you until we gather here again. Amen.

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

Ch-ch-ch-Changes

December 28, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons, Video available

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Chris Jimmerson
December 28, 2014

Each time we approach the coming of a new year, we tend to be more open to new possibilities. We are more likely to embrace change and even make resolutions about what we would like to change. What if we were to view life this way all year? What if we thought of everything as continuous change – as ever-unfolding possibilities? We explore limitless “Ch-ch-ch-changes.”

Is it just me or is this a very strange time of the year? To me, it always feels like the year should have ended with Christmas, and yet here we are with several days of the year left before New Years Day, and even at that, the New Year will not really get started until everyone gets back to daily life somewhere around January fifth.

It is an in between time – a liminal time. A time when it is still darker for more hours, and we are reminded that like it or not, change, it will come – a year closes out and a new one springs forth, and sometimes, in this liminal space each year, perhaps we are more open to change, more willing, even, to initiate it.

How many of you plan to make New Year’s resolutions or have made them in the past? That wasn’t a rhetorical question. Raise your hand if you have. Now, how many of us have made such a resolution and broken it within a few weeks or months? It’s OK to raise your hand. There’ll be no shaming here this morning. See, my hand is way up.

Change can be difficult. Old habits can be cantankerous. And this is true not just for us as individuals, but also for families, groups and institutions.

And churches.

Sometimes, we just don’t like change, and we don’t always even know why or even realize that we’re resisting it. Haven’t you ever heard someone, when someone else was trying to change something, even if it might be for the better, haven’t you heard someone say, “but that’s the way we’ve always done it”? Have you ever said it yourself (or at least caught yourself thinking it)? (Hand up) My hand goes way up again.

And yet, as I said, change will come. This morning, there are likely many folks here who are going through some sort of change in their lives. Others may be thinking about initiating some sort of a change. Our world around us is both changing rapidly and in need of changes that would bring about more justice, more love and compassion.

Often, our church is one of the resources we look to help motivate and sustain us in such times, and yet the church too is ever changing. Our voting membership list this month included 621 people. That’s growth of about 200 in just 3 years. If we add to that folks who are who don’t meet all of the requirements for voting, which is more difficult to quantify, the rate of growth has probably been even greater.

On top of that, we just completed a highly successful three million dollar capital campaign. All of that is great – it means we’re living that mission we put on our wall and say together every Sunday, AND it also will mean that our building will change and some of the ways we do things will likely have to be adjusted along with it. At some point we’ll be coping with construction and the disruption that goes with it for a while.

And if that makes some of you feel a little nervous, a little queasy inside, that’s OK. It’s human. I feel that way sometimes too.

So this morning, since we are in that liminal space in so many ways, I thought I would share with you some ways of thinking about change – even of finding spirituality within uncertainty – which I have found particularly helpful.

It turns out that there may be some truth to the old adage that we can experience greater difficulty adapting to change as we grow older. Until sometime in our thirties, our brains are highly malleable. We easily lay down new neural pathways that allow us to learn and to adjust to change. As we age, we can start to lose some of this “neuroplasticity” as it’s called. That’s why, for instance, as we get older we may experience more difficulty adjusting to moving to a new residence. Our brains want to keep looking for things where they were at our former residence.

Now, losing some neuroplasticity is not entirely a bad thing. Laying down new neural pathways uses a lot of energy that the body could otherwise use for other purposes. And, it doesn’t mean there’s no hope for those of us who may be a bit past our thirties; it just means we may find ourselves more challenged by new life situations sometimes.

And it turns out that challenging ourselves by intentionally experiencing difference through multicultural interactions, travel, and varied forms of music, for instance, can help. Some studies also found that meditation, ritual and other spiritual practices can help keep our brains remain more open to change as well.

And if you are in your thirties or younger, – these types of experience can also be advantageous for you because they allow you to build up a sort of plasticity reserve, so to speak, that will help you stay more neurologically flexible as you age.

Now, the neuroscience is a bit more complicated than my quick summary, and the research is ongoing, so our understandings of how the brain functions are changing at a rapid pace. We are offering a five session adult faith formation course on the subject beginning on the first Sunday in January. It’s fascinating stuff, so I encourage you to attend and learn more. Plus, then you can come back later and tell me what I didn’t get right!

The book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, borrows a metaphor for how our brain works from psychologist Jonathan Haidt and uses it to develop some really useful advice on how to deal with change.

In this metaphor, the rational part of our brain, the part that uses reason, is a small rider sitting atop a giant elephant. The elephant is the emotional part of our brain and the part that contains our innate desires and survival instincts. The problem when it comes to change is that we tend to rely too heavily on the rider. We think we can use our reason, our rider, much more so than is actually possible. The thing is – the elephant is so much larger and stronger than the rider, that when the elephant wants to go a different way, the rider can only keep it going in the reasonable direction for so long. The rider wears out. The elephant takes over.

The book says that to create change we can do three things: direct the rider; motivate the elephant; and shape the path. My favorite example they give is of “Clocky,” an invention by an MIT student. Clocky is an alarm clock with wheels designed to address the scenario wherein the alarm clock goes off but our elephant really wants to keep snoozing under our nice warm covers.

And our rider uses our reason to rationalize hitting the snooze button or just shutting the alarm off by thinking things like, “I can sleep a few more minutes if I just skip breakfast” or “It really makes more since to go to the gym before work tomorrow morning anyway.”

Clocky short-circuits this process by rolling off our nightstand when the alarm goes off and proceeding to scurry around the bedroom floor, alarm still blaring.

Clocky lets us direct the rider by providing a way to set up the whole scenario before snuggling underneath the covers and by leaving no other logical choice the next morning but to get out of bed, capture the thing and shut it off.

It motivates the elephant by being so annoying that it overrides the strong desire to keep snoozing.

It shapes the path because, well, now that you’ve gotten up to catch it and shut it off, you might as well stay up.

Now, I’ll admit that my elephant might be tempted to stomp Clocky into a gazillion pieces, so I’ll never own one, but hopefully you get the idea anyway!

Another book, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading, adds what I think is an important conceptual framework by distinguishing between technical change and adaptive change. Technical changes involve altering things like the technology we use or our policies and procedures. They usually can be solved using knowledge that already exists. Adaptive changes on the other hand involve changing how we do things at a more fundamental level. They require examining our values and purpose. They require experimenting and learning.

The problem is, we have a tendency to concentrate on the more tangible technical change when what is called for is really adaptive change. Adaptive change can be harder, and oftentimes, a little of both are required.

I think the relatively recent history of this church provides a great example of people working to make change on both levels. In the just over a couple of years before the church called Meg Barnhouse as Senior Minister, the interim ministers and church leadership worked with the congregation to begin a new form of governance and to create the policies and procedures that would support it. The church also wrote a covenant of healthy relations and went through a process of discerning its values and mission.

The establishing and writing of all of this involved a good deal of technical work; however, it also began the adaptive work of examining our values and purpose and how we wanted to be together as a religious community. And then, Meg and the church leadership expanded the adaptive work even more by making the mission central to all church decision making and activities, as well as by creating a culture of mutual accountability and covenantal relationship.

Leadership on the Line also points out something else important about change. We often talk about how people are resistant to change itself. We can gain more empathy and understanding, including for ourselves, if we understand that we are really resisting is loss. If you think about it, any transformative change, any creative act, involves the destruction of something existing in order to create something new.

And this is closely related to a way of viewing the world that, for me has fundamentally altered the way in which I view change – process-relational philosophy or process-relational theology when applied to religion.

Process theology grew out of the philosophical work of a British mathematician named Alfred North Whitehead. Later, others, including Charles Hartshorne, a professor at the University of Texas here in Austin and a longtime member of this church, developed this theology further. I am currently reading a book by Dr. Hartshorne titled, Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes. Don’t you just love that? Doesn’t it just sound like a Unitarian? “Omnipotence and other Theological Mistakes” He lists six of them, by the way.

Anyway, process theology views humans, and indeed everything in the world and universe, not as discrete, unchanging, static things, but as processes that are always becoming, experiences that are always unfolding and evolving, so to speak.

In this way of viewing the world, right now, in this moment, I am not a being or an object, but a series of events unfolding – my experiences of the past, the possibilities available to me in this moment and the choices I make of those possibilities.

But even as you have been listening to this, I made choices and became something new, and the Chris that spoke that prior sentence perished within the continual process of becoming, and so did the “you” who heard it! The physical world is like this also for process theory. The cells in our bodies, the molecules, atoms and particles in all things are themselves ever changing processes – mixing, dividing, perishing and being replaced.

Buddhism has a similar concept called “no-self” or “no thing” which says that what we think of as the self is really an unfolding series of conscious experiences and events. There is no actual object there, just as the flame in our chalice appears to be a thing but is in reality an ongoing process of fuel being burnt.

Likewise, some Hindus hold that Brahman, the ultimate, divine reality, is expressed through three Gods: Brahma, the Creator; Vishnu the Maintainer; and Shiva the Destroyer. Again, all is ever changing in this continuing cycle of creation, change over time, destruction and new creation. Birth, life, death, new birth.

In these world views, change is not something outside of ourselves or our reality; it is the essence of reality. Our task, then, becomes to choose wisely among the creative possibilities, the change that will come.

And for some process-relational thinkers, this is where we encounter the divine.

Several times each week, I go to a park or natural area and take a meditative hike. It’s a spiritual practice that I find particularly sustains me and reinvigorates me.

Sometimes, though certainly not every time, the meditation takes me into an experience that some psychologists would call a peak experience. It’s what the first of our six Unitarian Universalist sources calls the “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.”

They are extremely difficult to describe with words, but here’s a try.

A couple of summers ago, I went for a meditative hike at Mayfield Park. It is one of my favorite nature spots, and I had earphones on so I could listen to some music that I find particularly moving and beautiful.

At some point during the hike, I found myself simply standing in this lush valley with a creek running between two limestone hills. I had no idea how long I had been just standing there. Time seemed to have stood still, or perhaps to have somehow blended all times into one moment.

I felt somehow spread out, connected with and a part of all of the beautiful life and creation around me – paradoxically, standing there alone in the wilderness, the experience was as if I was interconnected, in ways that are normally beyond understanding, with all of humanity and all of creation’s continuous unfolding.

These experiences, these glimpses of the enormity of that continuous unfolding of our universe – the ever changing, always becoming nature of all creation – they can drive a sense of awe and humility that we are such a small part of it. And yet, they can also bring that sense of spreading out, of ever expanding connectedness, a sense that our own becoming is an integral part of the ultimate becoming.

For me, they are also a reminder that change is how we know we are living – that we are fully alive – both literally and metaphorically.

Benediction

May your heart sail on warming winds to new heights of exhilaration.
May your thoughts embrace all that is ever unfolding within and around you.
May your spirit discover new depths, new understandings, an ever-growing sense of peace and right place in the world.
May you know that this beloved community holds you and is with you not just today but throughout your days.

Blessed be. 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 14 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.

Building a new way

November 30, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons, Video available

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Chris Jimmerson
November 30, 2014

December first is World AIDS Day. As the world pauses each year to remember the losses and recommit to the struggle against HIV, it’s important to also remember what community responses to HIV can teach us about working for social change.

I have always been kind of a science and technology nerd. Knowing that, it may not surprise you to hear that many, many years ago, I found myself so excited to test out my new handheld digital organizer that you could plug this accessory into and turn it into a cell phone and wireless internet enabled device. It was sort of a prehistoric precursor to today’s smart phones. The whole thing assembled together was about the size of my head. I dutifully entered the contact information for my friends and coworkers from out of the paper address book I had previously been using.

In those days, I had been working for several years in HIV / AIDS research, treatment and advocacy. In those days, we only had a few approved treatments for the disease, and they didn’t work very well.

Fast-forward about five years, and thanks to the efforts of lots and lots of people, we were beginning to have drug combinations that were working and were keeping people alive.

I was synching my contacts onto a new device, by this point, an early actual smartphone, called a Treo, and I realized there were a bunch of them I needed to remove because the people they represented were no longer alive.

I deleted 37 names that day. Thirty-seven friends and coworkers for whom 5 years had been too long to wait – for whom the new drugs hadn’t come soon enough. Only one of them had been over 40 years old when he died.

In the years since, every so often I have looked back on that time and wondered how people in HIV -related work kept going. Amongst all the sickness and death, how did we sustain the fight and stay in the struggle, when at times it seemed it might never end, never get better?

Ultimately, I think it was because, even in the midst of all the dying, we chose life. We tried our best not to withdraw, not to look away from the suffering, not to sanitize the messiness or anesthetize the pain because to do so would not be living – not really, not fully.

We stayed in the struggle and let ourselves experience and remember the losses, even as they accumulated, because it was the only way to keep fully living; to keep the ability to love without limits; to wholly experience joy; to keep being able to see beauty.

Tomorrow is Word AIDS Day, a day when we are asked to stop and remember. We pause to recognize the real and often unspoken heroes who have stayed in the struggle and helped bring about vast improvements in our ability to prevent HIV infection and to offer treatment to those who are infected. We recommit to the ongoing, worldwide struggle against a disease that still affects far too many.

This morning I think, also, it is a moment to look back on those difficult earlier times of which I just spoke because they may contain lessons that can inform how we fulfill our mission, especially that part of it that compels us to do justice – to work for social change in so many different areas – certainly, given the events of the past week, to work against systemic racism and structural oppression.

Let us begin then by taking a moment now to pause and remember – a time of silent reflection – a time of meditation or prayer if you wish – or simply to focus on your breathing, as we join together in the silence.

___________________

Today, there are an estimated 35 million people living with HIV worldwide and 2.1 million new infections every year. And while we now have the ability to manage the disease and keep HIV -infected people healthy, there are still tens of millions of people worldwide without access to these life-saving treatments, and far too many we have not reached with HIV prevention education. Here in,Texas, the rate of new infections among young gay and bisexual men has more than doubled in recent years, due at least partially, I think, to a reduction in prevention messages resulting from our current political climate.

I think it is important always to remember though, that behind all of those statistics are actual, individual human lives. One of the lessons we learned in the early days of the struggle against HIV is the power of telling and remembering stories from those lives. Storytelling is an essential element of any social change effort. It is a powerful way to raise consciousness, especially in the face of ingrained prejudice and systemic oppression.

So I would like to share with you briefly part of the story of just a couple of those 37 folks I mentioned earlier.

Raul was a friend and co-worker who had moved to Houston from Puerto Rico as a young adult. He was a wiz at all things computer related; a relative rarity in the days when having a computer on every desk was still a fairly new part of office life.

I had hired Raul to work with me on maintaining the human ethics documentation the government required of us for the HIV -treatment studies we were conducting at a non-profit organization in Houston.

Raul was also a DJ, so in his off time, he was working with a vocal coach and English-language instructor because he wanted to be better understood when he got gigs as a DJ. A few blocks away from where Raul and I shared an office, we had a clinical space where our research nurses and volunteer physicians actually saw the people participating in the research studies. Our head research nurse’s name was James.

How shall I describe James for you?

James was in his early 30s. He somehow managed to get his hair to stand up to about here and then fold it back in a kind of semi tidal wave. He wore a ring on every finger of his right hand and had been known to show up for work in a full-length fur coat, even when it really wasn’t very cold out. James could be, oh, how can I say it nicely … flighty.

He was also the best research nurse we ever had, and our patients loved him.

One day, we had just gotten James a computer and printer for his office, and he was trying to get them set up. Raul and I were working on some particularly difficult and detailed ethics paperwork. Every few minutes, the phone would ring, and it would be James calling because he couldn’t get his printer to work. This went on for a good half of the day, until I finally asked Raul to go over and help James get the printer going.

A few minutes later, James called again, about something else this time, and as we were was talking, in the background, suddenly, I heard Raul say in perfect English, “You silly queen. You have to plug it in.”

This elicited a giggle from James who went on to acknowledge that indeed the printer did work much better when connected to a source of electricity.

Six months later, Raul started getting sick.

He fought until the very end. Even after he had been placed in a hospice, he never really accepted that he was dying. I guess very few 27 year olds would.

A couple of years later, James was gone too.

These are difficult and painful stories, and yet they are a part of much larger narrative – a story that while encompassing great loss and sorrow also reveals a defiant sense of hope among a growing community of people who refused to allow disease, discrimination and irrational fear to triumph – refused to accept the notion that it was somehow our own fault for being who we were – refused to accept that our lives didn’t matter. That people of color have had to raise their voices once again and proclaim very similar sentiments over the last weeks has seemed so eerily familiar.

Raul and James were a part of a community of folks who came together to struggle against what at the time seemed to be almost impossible odds. In those early days of the epidemic, it was primarily what we called the gay community – but it was broader than just the gay men being so devastated by the disease. I will always be go grateful to the gay women who joined in the fight and took care of their ailing brothers, even when they themselves were at relatively low risk for the disease. Likewise, I will always be grateful to the folks who were not gay but who joined in this community of hope and struggle out of compassion and a sense that we are all in this together, even though they risked being ostracized themselves when they did. In Houston, it was a bunch of folks from the Unitarian Universalist church who often volunteered with us at the research clinic. I remember one young woman was actually let go from her job because she did. It may seem hard to believe now, but then I just look at the hysteria and prejudice surrounding just a few Ebola cases in the U.S., and, again, it all seems so eerily familiar.

Recent scholarship on how successful social movements occur asserts that creating real social change requires us to do at least three things:

1. Provide services and support to help those harmed by social problems until the change can be made.

2. Raise our prophetic voices – speak truth to power and dismantle oppressive structures and institutions.

3. Realize that those first two things are necessary but not sufficient. That to bring about real and lasting change we have to build new institutions and social policies to replace those we have critiqued.

And we have to do all of this at all levels, from local community organizing to building powerful institutions at the national and worldwide level.

As we have seen in Ferguson, Missouri, and indeed across our nation in the past weeks, sometimes the very institutions meant to provide justice, to protect and serve, have themselves been permeated with racism and injustice, so we have to envision new institutional forms and policies. We have to build a new way.

That early community that joined together in the struggle against HIV disease did exactly that.

When the government was not providing adequate HIV prevention messages, they created them.

When there were far too few clinics for HIV testing, counseling and treatment, they built them. When the existing research institutions were too slow to test promising new therapies and get them to folks who had run out of treatment options, they created community-based research organizations.

When the disease spread to new populations, they were the first to adapt and to invite new people into leadership.

When there was no voice in the halls of power in Washington DC for those suffering from the disease, they stormed the barricades and built institutions with real political power. They built new ways, and I think that this idea of creating institutions, building new ways that may not yet exist, can inform how we do justice regarding a variety of social challenges, whether it is dismantling systemic racism or our struggle to save a severely threatened environment.

So let us now dwell for a moment in the spirit of this idea by rising in body or spirit and singing together hmn number 1017 in the teal hymnal, “Building a New Way”.

________________________

During the first Bush presidency, a group of us had gone to Washington DC to participate in a March on the Capital to demand greater support for HIV prevention, treatment and research. On the day before the march, we went to see a display of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, which had been laid out on the National Mall across from the capital. The quilt was built of rectangular panels sewn by the loved ones of persons who had died of AIDS. Often, they had sewn in photos and used fabric from something their loved one had worn to commemorate them.

The crowd that day was a patchwork of people much like the quilt itself – gay, straight; a variety of nationalities and ethnicities; men and women who had lost partners and spouses; parents who had lost children.

As we walked around the panels, above the noise of our murmured conversations, a group assembled on an outdoor stage that they had put up nearby, and one by one, they stood at a microphone and began reading names – the names of the dead represented by each of the panels of the quilt.

And after only a short moment, a quite fell over the crowd, we became very still, standing in silence and a sense of timelessness until only the sound of the names being read remained.

I did not consider myself religious at the time, but looking back on it now, I can sure understand where a concept like the Holy Spirit may have come from.

It was as if a spirit began moving among us during the reading of those names, and together we somehow all knew, each of us, that we had to keep going. We had to sustain the fight. We had to stay in the struggle until there were no more panels to be sewn – no more names to be read.

No more contacts to be deleted.

And even in our sorrow, maybe even because we were allowing ourselves to fully feel it, there was a beauty we could still see.

Looking back on it now, it was a moment of clarity that informs me even today. To do justice and to make community and nurture the spirit, far from being opposing dualities, these efforts, they need each other. Together, they form spiritual experience. They sustain us and help us stay fully engaged.

And though, as I outlined earlier, there is still much work to be done, people stayed in the struggle against HIV disease, many of them for 30 years now, and they have made huge differences throughout the world, even up against what at one time seemed impossible odds.

They built new ways, and so can we, whether we are doing justice in our world or facing the challenges of our daily lives. Even when the way forward seems long and difficult, as it has for many of us this past week, we must not give in to despair. In fact, these may be the times when it is most vital to:

Stay in the struggle. To live fully. To love without limits. To wholly experience joy. To keep finding ways to see beauty.

I think that is what religious community is for. We help each other live in these ways.

These are the ways that will move us toward creating institutions of compassion and justice. These are the ways through which we nurture our spirits. These are the foundations upon which we build.

Amen.

Benediction

Know that, as you go back out into the world now, there is a love that you carry with you beyond these church walls.

Know that the great mystery of our interconnectedness cultivates seeds of hope for justice and compassion.

Know that nearly boundless possibilities are still ours to create.

Go in peace. Go in love. Go knowing that this beloved community awaits you and holds you until we are together again.

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

When the method is the message

August 10, 2014 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons, Video available

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Chris Jimmerson
August 10, 2014

Unitarian Universalism is a religion without creed. We do not have a prescribed set of beliefs with which we must all express agreement. So how is it that we are bound together?

Reading: Grace

When she was a young girl, they told her that Grace was only available to her, the child of original sin, through the forgiveness and whim of a benevolent God. Then she sat with her Grandfather as he was dying. She held his hand, and she and the ones she loved stayed with him through his great passage, and she felt Grace arise among them.

Later, during her college years, she volunteered for the local refugee shelter. And one day she witnessed the counselor work with young children traumatized by war.

She heard the children begin to speak their truths with one another, in that language that is only fully understood by such children, and she watched the counselor put his plans aside and let the children heal one another, and she felt Grace radiate between them.

And as over and over again through her year, she witnessed this same emergence between and among people, she came to understand Grace as something we create, and, sometimes, something we allow to happen by simply getting out of the way.

Sermon:

I was standing on an outdoor train platform in Chicago, waiting for the train that would take me to my seminary class that morning. The platform was located under a street that ran across a bridge overhead, partially blocking the morning sun. Still, one, wide ray of sun was shining though, and it was snowing very, very lightly. Tiny, fragile snowflakes were being held aloft by a brisk wind, swirling in circles in the air. They danced through the bright ray of sunlight, reflecting it in dazzling patterns, as if thousands of miniature mirrors were whirling and casting their own small rays of light in almost infinite directions – tiny spirits dancing and floating and spreading light into their world.

Needless to say, I was captivated, standing transfixed until the sound of my train approaching drew my attention. I turned toward the sound of the train. As I did, I made eye contact with an elderly, a woman who was leaning on a carved wooden cane for support.

She smiled – a joyful glint in her eyes. I smiled back. Without even exchanging a word, we both knew that we had both been mesmerized by the beautiful ballet of sunlight and snowfall. We both knew that we had somehow been profoundly moved by and connected through the experience.

Riding in the train a few moments later, I could not help thinking that the potential for transformation exists within any moment, each encounter. In that small, fragmentary sliver of time on a cold train platform in Chicago, I understood that this person whose life experiences had no doubt been different than my own, this person I had never met and would likely never see again, was, none-the-less, like me, enmeshed in all the beauty and fragility and wonder and suffering and joy that life has to offer.

I had understood that we are connected in ways we only are rarely able to truly glimpse, and these experiences of the vastness and complexity of our interconnectedness are a source of empathy and compassion and love. And this idea, this experience of the possibility for transformation present within any moment, in each encounter, for me, is a key element of our Unitarian Universalist, covenantal tradition. It is part of what drew me to our faith and sustains me as I go about living it.

It is central to a worldview known as process-relational theology, from which I draw great meaning. Process-relational thought sees all of us as part of an interconnected web or matrix that is continually unfolding. It sees within that web of relationships the creative potential for transformation bursting forth in each new moment.

For me, this idea also grounds and sustains our anti-racism, anti-oppression and multi-cultural work, our work for justice, by insisting that to realize the greatest potential for us all, we must go beyond finding common ground to do the often more difficult and challenging work of embracing difference – encountering, experiencing and respecting difference.

For a religious movement without creed, without a statement of prescribed beliefs to which we all must agree – for such a religious movement, covenantal relationship forms the core for practicing our faith. The way that we are together becomes paramount. The how we interact takes precedence. The method is the message, as our great Unitarian Universalist forbearer in religious education, Angus McLean, so famously put it. And I think this idea can continuously inform the ways in which we think about and go about doing congregational and denominational life.

If there is transformative potential in every fragment of time, busting forth in every encounter – and if we also take the work of the church to be at least in part about spiritual or maturational growth for our members, then everything we do in our churches can be seen as faith development. Faith formation, spiritual transformation, is occurring not just in worship, not just in our religious education classrooms, but also throughout the life of the church. Every community or small group gathering, every committee meeting, every conversation during the fellowship hour has the potential to transform us, as well as to provide comfort in times of need and to sustain us through life’s difficult and challenging times.

I wonder, if we take this view, how might we approach each other differently? How much more bound by our covenants of right relations, the promises we make to one another, might we feel? In what ways might we become even more connected with our fellow Unitarian Universalist churches and our larger Unitarian Universalist movement?

I wonder if we might even more passionately strive for a pluralistic, multi-cultural faith – a people in deep relationship, a people emerging out of a full and vibrant matrix of cultures and identities, bound together in promises to both hold each other accountable to our greater ideals and at the same time hold each other in compassion, love, shared vulnerability and deep respect. The method is the message.

The very way we do church life begins to burst forth with new creative possibilities. Worshipped can be transformed when there are more and more styles and perspectives to be included. Congregational meetings and gatherings spend more and more time reflecting with each other on the world we dream about and how as a religious community we can work together to bring it into being! The method is the message.

Maybe our interfaith and social justice activities become a vital part of our spiritual practices throughout the religious community as a whole. Perhaps we stop during board meetings for a reflective period or to sing a hymn together that captures a vision for creating that better world. How about some time for liturgical dancing during that finance committee meeting! OK, maybe not. I got a little carried away.

Anyway, as another example, I think that the capital campaign in which we are currently engaged here at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin is likewise deeply rooted in this idea that positive change is possible through each encounter. Our building is part of our method, and it sends a message about our values and our desire to create a welcoming table and transformative experience for all who enter this holy place.

I’m told that members of this congregation have already pledged over two point one million dollars toward the campaign, and that demonstrates that this congregation walks in the ways of generosity and stewardship and commitment to the future of this beloved religious community.

Likewise, the fact that First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin is a covenantal and mission-focused congregation greatly moves us into living out that vital religious faith I have been describing. The beautiful covenant we read together earlier describes a transformational way of being together: Welcome and serve. Nurture and protect. Sustain and build. Thus we do covenant with one another.

These are methods. They are ways of being together, and they emanate a strong message about who we are as a religious people.

The mission we have emblazoned onto our wall and into our memories and hearts compels us toward creative and transcendent possibilities.

Now, I know we just said it together a few minutes ago, but I am feeling a little low energy after all this talking I have been doing up here on my own, so I wonder if you might indulge me in reciting it together again? And, yes, a preacher is really going to encourage other people to talk during his sermon! At First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin…

We gather in community to nourish souls, transform lives and do justice.

Thanks. I feel better now. I just love that!

Gather. Nourish. Transform. Do Justice.

These may imply goals and ends; however, first and foremost they are actions. They are verbs. They describe ways of doing and being together. They are each a method, and the method matters.

It matters because it help us maintain an awareness of that capacity to transform one another. It opens up a space for creative potentialities – what I like to call “Grace that we co-create” and it does so in sometimes surprising and unexpected ways. This happened during a powerful and moving experience at the church where I served as ministerial intern.

For the holidays in the first year of my internship, we had been putting together a multigenerational Christmas Pageant. The pageant was a Unitarian Universalist version of the biblical nativity story. Our cast and crew included folks ranging in age from four or five to this beautiful woman in her eighties who ran circles around me and kept our rehearsals on track.

Putting together a pageant, complete with costumes, props, songs, a little platform that served as our imaginary stable and children dressed up as the stable animals had been quite the challenge sometimes but lots of fun too. Alongside the human characters, we had camels, cows, a donkey, some doves and at least a couple of kitty cats. An ongoing challenge was helping the youngest of the children to remember that there were imaginary stable walls around the edges of our little platform. More than once during rehearsals, a cow or camel would walk right through one of the imaginary walls, and we would have to stop, go back and remind them not to do that!

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

I talked with my supervising minister. We had to decide whether to go forward with the pageant or whether it would be too light hearted given the circumstances. We decided to go forward. On Sunday morning though, we first stood together before the congregation, and she offered a prayer for the victims and their families.

There was a pervasive tone of grief among our church members that morning – a sense of shock and emotional paralysis. We started the pageant.

About halfway through it, one of the children costumed as an animal in our imaginary stable, one of our cats, I believe, got so wrapped up in the pageant song we were singing, that she stood up and started dancing. She pirouetted right through one of our imaginary stable walls, whirling and swirling in balletic circles in front of our carefully set up nativity scene. She was about the same age as the youngest children who had been killed at Sandy Hook.

The woman who had helped keep our rehearsals on track and I were sitting together, and we looked at each other, both wondering if we should get up and lead our little dancing cat back into the scene. As soon as our eyes met though, we both knew that we had to let her continue.

And she was dancing, and the music was playing and the congregation was singing. At one point the song almost faltered. The children were mesmerized by the little girl’s impromptu ballet and the adults were nearly overcome with emotion. I looked around the sanctuary, and the adult’s eyes were glistening, their tears reflecting tiny pinpoints of light in almost infinite directions. We kept on singing, and the little girl kept her ballet afloat, and our spirits were dancing through joy and sorrow and back again in small, fragmentary slivers of time. The music and the singing and the dancing were the method. That we must continue our part within the struggle and the creative co-telling of life’s ongoing pageant was the message. A young girl’s dancing had spread Grace throughout our sanctuary and transformed a congregation that morning.

A minister who I consider one of my mentors says that a key element of spiritual growth is to be always mindful of and open to this possibility of Grace. I learned that morning that she is right. And, I believe our faith and our churches can go even a step further – actively creating that potential for Grace through the ways in which we do congregational and denominational life – cultivating an ever-present awareness of our capacity to transform one another.

And speaking of grace, I am so blessed and so filled with gratitude that, with Meg’s wisdom and guidance, my ministry now involves walking with all of you, as we build beloved community, as we nourish and transform one another and our world, as we engage in the vital and life-giving work of doing justice. Together, may we reach for the transformative potential, bursting forth in each new moment.

So may we be. Amen.

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

That little four-letter word called Hope

July 21, 2013 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Guest Speakers, Sermons

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Chris Jimmerson
July 21, 2013

Chris Jimmerson just completed his second year of seminary at Meadville Lombard School of Theology, one of only two Unitarian Universalist seminaries in the United States. He is currently the minister intern at Wildflower Church. Before entering seminary, Chris served in a variety of lay leadership positions at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin where he helped to coordinate the church’s process of discerning its mission and reorganizing its governance structure.

What is hope? One of the theologians we studied in seminary last year says that basically there is no such thing as hope, and we should abandon hope and embrace struggle because the struggle is all we have. I am thinking that would not make a very inspiring sermon. How do we have hope without it becoming just wishful thinking?

Reading
-Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace, 1986

Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Either we have hope or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul, and it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons…. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more propitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the faith that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

Prayer

Spirit of Love and Life, breathe into us the compassion and courage that will sustain us.

Fill us with gratitude for the faith, grounding and hope to be found through living life filled with boundless and endless love.

When the news from our world is filled with injustice and struggle, as it often has been in these past weeks – when our work to end oppression and bring about the beloved community seems challenging and the road ahead seems long – when we face struggles sometimes just in our daily lives, let us breathe in the spirit of life and dwell in the essence of love.

For in doing so, we find renewal and the knowledge that love shall indeed, in the end, overcome.

For in doing so, we create greater faith and more hope. In doing so, we create our world anew.

So may it be. Amen

Sermon

Not long ago, one of my instructors at seminary was trying to explain to us a theology he called “non-theistic, liberative, naturalistic humanism.” I’m still not sure I completely understand it, but it does make for a great vocal warm up. Before giving any talk or sermon, I just say “non-theistic, liberative, naturalistic humanism” three or four times very quickly and then anything else comes trippingly off the tongue.

Now, I think he was engaging in a bit of seminary professor witticism when he bound all those words and concepts together; however, he was quite serious when he explained that this theology expresses the idea that oppression and human suffering — natural disasters and disease – imperialism and war — just the vagaries of the human condition are so random and so dire that we cannot realistically think that there is a God, much less a kind and loving God. On top of that, according to this theology, our struggles to end oppression occur within a sort of “zero sum game,” where advances attained by one group can only be made at the expense of greater oppression of another. Justice for all cannot be realized.

Thus, a central tenant of this theology is that we should abandon hope and embrace struggle, because the struggle is all we really have. And have a nice day. I ended the class discussion feeling something less than uplifted.

Later, I talked with my partner, Wayne, about it.

He said, “I don’t think you should try preaching that when you get out of seminary and start the search process for a church. None of them will hire you.”

Now, I think Wayne was absolutely right about that, so don’t worry — I’m not testing out an “Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here” sermon on you today.

However, it did get me thinking about that little four-letter word called “hope”. What exactly is hope, really? Should we have hope?

What is its source and how do we sustain it, especially during the more difficult times of struggle that we do encounter in life? How do we keep it from becoming just wishful thinking?

So, I went on a theological search – a metaphysical quest, if you will, to find the meaning and source of hope. Like any good, modern day spiritual seeker, I did a Google search.

The first link I followed was to the Emily Dickinson poem titled, “Hope is the Thing with Feathers”.

The next thing I saw was a link to a book by Woody Allen called, “Without Feathers”.

It seemed I was right back where I had started. Thanks a lot, Woody. At least the book is really funny.

So, “Google as a pathway into spiritual enlightenment” having failed, I turned to looking at what some of our leading thinkers among Unitarian Universalists have had to say about hope. I know those of you who have been UU s for a while may not be overly surprised to hear that Unitarian Universalists have had quite a lot to say about it, rather often not agreeing with each other on the subject.

However, I did find much that moved me in reflections on faith and hope from Rebecca Ann Parker, President of our Unitarian Universalist seminary in Berkley, California, as well as those of Sharon Welch, Provost at the seminary I attend in Chicago.

The two have very different philosophical and theological perspectives and yet out of both of them I drew that indeed we must start by embracing the struggle – that hope may be found by realistically acknowledging that suffering and oppression are a part of life, but then seeking to transcend them in several ways:

By steadfastly continuing to act in ways that are loving and life- giving;

By persistently seeking justice; and

By purposefully finding the wisdom we need to sustain ourselves in the voices of those who have suffered oppression people who so often have found ways to restore hope out of hopelessness by creating joy, grace and beauty in day-to-day life. We must also guard against a kind of false hope that can lead to disillusionment and making harmful choices — a hope that seeks certainty, wherein we only have faith if we believe that we can control the outcomes of our actions.

For example, we are faced with the fact that the effects of global climate change are likely to get much worse before they get better, even if the world begins truly acting to try to mitigate them now. Given that, how do we hold onto a hope that can sustain environmental activism? Where do we find the resilience to continue to act, even knowing that we may not be able to prevent great loss?

The answer may lie in embracing this paradox:

Faith can exist only when there is uncertainty.

Hope arises out of what we cannot know – our choosing to act out of love for each other and the web of existence even in the midst of our not knowing, even when we encounter great challenges.

I saw this element of hope — this faith even in the face of an uncertain future – a future clouded by unexpected loss and grief, when I was a chaplain intern at a local Hospital last summer.

I’m changing the details a little to protect the privacy of the people involved, but here is in essence what happened.

I was with the husband and the father of a woman in her early forties who had collapsed near the end of the workday. Despite valiant efforts to revive her, she had died in one of the trauma rooms in the emergency center of the hospital. We learned later that a blood clot had loosened and traveled through her blood system to her heart, likely the result of a long flight she had recently taken to visit her sisters in South America. Her husband and her father were at her bedside, mourning over her now lifeless body.

The family was Catholic and spoke both Spanish and English.

They asked me to contact their Priest to come and say prayers and perform the sacraments in Spanish. They wanted me to stay with them as the rest of the family gathered and they waited on the priest.

Soon after, her daughter and son arrived, both of whom looked like they might be in their late teens or early twenties, followed by other family members. All that I could really do was to be with them, to put a comforting hand on a shoulder sometimes, a provide a soothing voice at others _ at times just stand at the doorway, trying to provide them sanctuary from the noise and commotion of the rest of the emergency center.

After the Priest came and performed the sacraments and a final prayer, I turned to walk him out, when suddenly the husband looked up at me from where he was sitting by her bedside and said, “would you stay with us while we tell her ‘goodbye’?”

I hadn’t even known that he knew I was still in the room. I stayed, of course.

They gathered around her – this mother, this wife, this daughter of theirs. They began to tell stories of her, blending laughter with tears, as they joined together in their love for one another and their love for her, as they one by one said goodbye to her.

The amazing love, the astounding human resilience, the astonishing courage they showed in being able to tell her goodbye, leave that hospital and move forward into an uncertain future bound tightly in their love for one another and their shared memories of her – sometimes, that is faith. Sometimes, that is hope.

Sometimes, hope is finding a way to continue our stories, even up against a struggle that turns toward the tragic at times. Hope is to be found in the fact that we carry forward the stories of even those we have lost _ just as the story of that mother, wife and daughter goes on through her loved ones continuing the telling of it.

Hope is that a grand narrative is still unfolding, and we get to participate in the telling of it, even if in only small ways,

And I think hope involves even a bit more. I think it also compels us to move toward a vision ofthe future, even though we cannot control and may not ever even know what happens in that future,

I think about something my Grandfather did when I reflect on this aspect of hope. My parents divorced when I was young, so my mother’s parents helped raise me and my younger brother and sister while mom was at work. My grandfather, Leo, became very much a father figure for me.

I still carry great love for him. He was a person who loved largely, embracing with true warmth and compassion everyone he met. I love that he would go from hyperkinetic in one moment to having an amazing stillness in the next. I love that he also had a strong vision for living and doing rightly in the world. In fact, the family always joked about how he could sometimes be a little irritating because he wouldn’t hesitate to tell you when he thought you could do something better in life,

That wasn’t really the irritating part though. The really annoying thing was that he was almost always right.

My family still pokes fun at me because they say I am so much like him, though I suspect not nearly as often right! Whether through nature or nurture or both, lowe much of who I have become to him. Another way of saying that is to say that many of his values and much of what mattered to him most live on in me, and I think there is a lot of hope to be found just in that.

To give you some idea of how much of who I am comes from my Grandfather, I want to tell you what happened the first time I brought my partner Wayne to meet my grandparents. I must have been in my thirties at the time. We drove to their house and sat in their living room for several hours, talking and being treated to delicious baked items from my grandmother’s kitchen.

My grandmother had to take us around their yard and show us all of her beautiful flowering plants, and my grandfather had to get out his maps and show us all the places they were going on their next trip (something I find myself subjecting others to even today).

After the visit, we said our goodbyes and got in the car to leave. I noticed that Wayne had this perplexed, maybe even bewildered look on his face.

I asked him, “What is it?”

There was a slight pause, and then he replied, “I feel like I just met an 80 year old YOU.”

To this day, he still tells me that I am “pulling a Leo” from time to time.

After my grandfather died, our family opened his safe where he kept his important papers. In it, we found letters he had written to my grandmother and to their children — my mother and her brother and sister.

In the letters, he spoke of his love for them, the joy they had brought to his life – his delight in who they had become and how they were living their lives. He wrote of his love for his grandchildren and his faith in the lives we would live. He thanked my grandmother for their life together.

Even all these years later, I am still overwhelmed by the fact that he even thought to do that. How much love can one heart possibly hold? How can we call this anything else but hope grounded in boundless and endless love?

Hope is writing letters to the future, even though it is a future that will not include us, at least not in our current form. Hope is writing letters to the future knowing that we may never know whether or how they will be received – never know what difference they may make.

I have to pause here and say, “Thanks, Leo, your letters made a huge difference to me.” It turns out he was right again – because he taught me something else:

The lives we live are our letters to the future. They are our hope for how the story will continue.

Isn’t it remarkable that hope turns out to be contained within how we live our lives in the here and now?

And so, as we leave today and go back out into our daily lives, may we continually be asking ourselves, “What story are we helping to write? What are we putting into our letters to the future?”

Even in the midst of life’s struggles and hardships, we can choose to live grounded in love for all that is, all that came before and all that will follow.

The poet, Adrienne Rich put it like this:

“My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed. I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world. A passion to make, and make again where such un-making reigns.”

And so may we create hope where hope has been lost.

And so, may we dwell in a faith courageous enough to embrace uncertainty.

As we go out into our world today, may we co-create the ever- unfolding story in ways we hope will bend the narrative toward justice, transformation and love.

May an enduring faith sustain us. May love continue to overcome.

May hope abound. Amen.

Offering words

People say, what is the sense of our small effort.

They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time.

A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that.

No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless.

There is too much work to do.

Benediction

May your days to come be filled with peace and your spirit overflow with boundless and endless love.

Grounded in such love, may your courage rise up and embrace uncertainty as an opportunity and possibility for hope that glimmers eternally and a faith that sustains.

May you know Grace and may you bring Grace into the lives of others. Go in peace. Go in love. Go knowing that part of this place and of this beloved community travel with you until next you return.

Blessed be. Amen.

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

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

The least of things

August 19, 2012 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Guest Speakers, Sermons, Video available

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Chris Jimmerson

August 19, 2012

Sometimes we make things that are really not all that valuable more important than they really are. Paradoxically, sometimes we miss that the seemingly smallest of gestures can make all the difference. After spending this summer serving as chaplain at the largest level one trauma hospital in our area, these are among the many lessons I learned – sometimes the hard way, and sometimes through the humor and amazing resilience of others.

CALL TO WORSHIP

Come into the circle of caring,

Come into the community of gentleness, of justice and love. Come, and you shall be refreshed.

Let the healing power of this people penetrate you,

Let loving kindness and joy pass through you,

Let hope infuse you,

And peace be the law of your heart.

In this human circle,

Caring is a calling.

All of us are called.

So come into the circle of caring.

PRAYER

by Dr. Davidson Loehr

We pray to the angels of our better nature and the still small voice that can speak to us when we feel safe enough to listen.

Help us to love people and causes outside of ourselves, that we may be enlarged to include them.

Help us remember that we are never as alone or as powerless as we think. Help us remember that we can, if we will, invest ourselves in relationships, institutions and causes that transcend and expand us.

Help us guard our hearts against those relationships and activities that diminish us and weaken our life force.

And help us give our hearts to those relationships that might, with our help, expand our souls and our worlds.

We know that every day both life and death are set before us. Let us have the faith and courage to choose those involvements that can lead us toward life, toward life more abundant.

And help us find the will to serve those life-giving involvements with our heart, our mind and our spirit.

We ask that we may see more clearly in these matters, and that we have the will to hold to those relationships that demand, and cherish, the very best in us. Just that, just those.

Amen.

SERMON

Chris Jimmerson

“The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.”

That’s a quote from the Swiss Psychologist and Psychiatrist, Carl Jung. Many of the world’s wisdom traditions express similar ideas. The bible speaks of the simple treasures of the heart far exceeding in value those of the material world. Islam embraces modesty and talks of the meaning in doing for others. Many of the Eastern traditions emphasize compassion and the letting go of unnecessary attachments.

Anyway, I’ve always really liked that quote, and I had thought I understood it.

I found out this summer that I didn’t.

Not really. Not the way we understand things down deep in the gut; down in the cellular level; in the soul.

I spent this summer doing a unit of professional education for ministry students on pastoral care. I was assigned to a group of six other seminary students, 3 Episcopalians, a Presbyterian, a Catholic and a Muslim. Sounds like a setup for one of those jokes, doesn’t it? “Three Episcopalians, a Presbyterian, a Catholic, a Muslim and Unitarian Universalist are in a bar…”

Of course, since we were all ministry students that never happened. Much. OK, some of us, sometimes.

Anyway, we spent the summer learning together while serving as chaplains at local hospitals. I was assigned to Brackenridge Hospital, where I worked on a floor that provided care for people struggling with a number of illnesses. We were also required to take turns serving as the on call chaplain overnight, covering four local hospitals.

During on call shifts, our home base would be the little Chaplain’s sleep room down in the basement of Brackenridge Hospital. Some of my fellow students decided that the sleep room was haunted. Being a good, rationality-based, Unitarian Universalist, I secretly dismissed the notion, and did my best to ignore the inexplicable sounds that often startled me awake at 3 in the morning, uneasy and shivering in the little sleep room at the bottom of the hospital.

The day before my first on call shift, I was too slow to react while driving, and I a hit another car from behind. No one was hurt, but my car was damaged pretty badly and not driveable. We managed to pull the cars off the road into a parking lot and called for a police officer and a tow truck.

I was frettin’ – frettin’ about my car; frettin’ about how I was going to arrange for having something to drive for my upcoming on call shift; frettin’ about how much all of this was going to cost me!

But as we stood waiting together, the young guy who’s car I had hit asked me what I did for a living, and so I told him about being a seminarian. He said, “Oh, wow. Can I talk to you about something?”

And so that’s how it happened that I ended up in a parking lot off North Lamar Boulevard, standing around in 103 degree heat, leaning against my wrecked car, providing pastoral care for the guy who’s car I had just crunched.

I suppose it was the least I could do.

The funny thing was, after listening to him for that time, my wrecked car seemed the least of things to worry about.

By the way, though I have tried to keep the essence of the stories I am telling you today intact, I am changing enough details to protect the privacy and identity of those involved.

The next morning, I arrived at the hospital in my freshly acquired rental car at 8 am. My pager went off immediately, calling me to the emergency room. When I got there, a woman was lying on a stretcher, holding the body of her 21-year old daughter. The daughter had just died from injuries she sustained during a car wreck in which the mother had been driving. The mother’s sorrow filled the air and for a while it was all there was left to breathe.

Over the next five hours with her and the other family members, there were no words that would console the inconsolable. The only thing anyone could do was just to stay with them in their grief.

And yet, somehow, families hold each other; and tell their stories; and hold tightly to the love that exists between those who survived; and begin the process of honoring the memories of those who have been lost; and somehow they pick themselves up and leave the hospital and find a way to go on with their lives. Their stories continue, including those of the ones that were lost. It is a testament to courage and resilience of the human spirit that defies even the tragic – that overcomes even great loss.

Later that day, I went down to the sleep room, and I called my partner, Wayne, and I said, “I need you to stay on the phone with me while I cry.” He did. I love him so much.

You see, that little chaplain’s sleep room in the basement of the hospital is haunted. It is haunted with memories so strong, losses so profound, yet courage, love and the will to live on so boundless, that they awaken you at three in the morning and demand to be heard.

But, you know, somehow, so often, we miss the things that really matter. Instead, we make “the greatest of things” out of the stuff that is not really important at all.

In fact, some of the things to which we assign such meaning are actually almost comical if you really think about them. For example, here are just a few things we make way more important than they really are – that when you really think about how much meaning they truly have, are the least of things:

Most church budget battles;
Anything having to do with “reality” television;
What the neighbors think of our car, house, clothing, etc.
U.T football. (Don’t throw things at me. I enjoy it too.)
Most of the material things in our lives.

Don’t get me wrong; I know we love our iPads and Priuses. I do too, and to a certain extent enjoying them is great. But we also have to remember what truly brings us comfort and joy and meaning and beauty.

And that’s where a paradox about the least of things comes in. There are things that can seem so small and so unimportant, yet they can be so meaningful, so powerful, so life-giving – a kind word, a loving gesture, the friend who shows up to visit us just when we need them, prayer.

I know. I know. As UU’s, we often shy away from prayer, and yet, as a chaplain, I was often called upon to pray with people and to do so in religious language that you might never hear in a Unitarian Universalist church.

And I saw prayer calm the disturbed, bring peace and hope to families experiencing great loss and release the tears that allowed people to finally express their grief so that they could begin to reclaim hope.

Here is one example. Late one evening, I was called to the room of a woman who was too distraught to sleep. She had just made it through a protracted legal battle to regain custody of her children from an abusive husband, only to be diagnosed with leukemia.

We talked for a while, and she shared both tears and laughter. Finally, she asked if I would pray for her. I asked her what she would like me to pray for. She answered for God to be with her children.

And so, we prayed the prayer she needed, together.

At the end of the prayer, she squeezed my hand and said, “I think I can go to sleep now.” Later, she said that it was the first time she had slept through the night in months. Later, she looked at me one day and said, “You know, I’m starting to be able to laugh and tell jokes with my kids again.”

It might seem counterintuitive, but that’s another of those seemingly little things that can be so meaningful — humor. So often, humor can bring light into the darkest of situations; bring humanity to people who had been feeling as if they had become their disease.

During the summer, I got to know an older gentleman who was in for surgery to remove a non-malignant mass attached to his brain. We had talked several times before his surgery. He had expressed his fears about it and talked with me about some decisions he had made in his life that he regretted.

The afternoon after his surgery, I saw him walking around in the hallway with the help of a physical therapist. He smiled, pointed at the stitches on his head and said, “Hey look chaplain, they say I can go home tomorrow — the new brain fits just fine.”

Before I even thought about it, I laughed and said, “Well, I hope it works better than the last one did.” Luckily for me, we had formed a relationship that already included humor, so he returned the laugh!

There are so many of those little things that can matter so much, but what it seems to always come down to is loving presence. It always comes back to relationship – to love for one another and the sacred and fragile web of existence of which we are part.

One Sunday, I brought a young woman back to the Intensive Care Unit to see her younger brother. He had just died as the result of an accident at his summer. She had fought with him before he left for work that morning and needed to say her goodbyes and seek forgiveness before the rest of the family would get there. As we stood by his bed and she spoke the words she needed to say to him, she suddenly turned and placed her head on my shoulder, cupped a hand over each of my shoulders and collapsed her entire weight onto me. I hadn’t expected this, and it was as if her body had suddenly become a stone weight and her overwhelming grief was pouring into me though the tears she was shedding on my shoulder.

In that moment, I thought I would collapse too. That I didn’t have the strength, and that we were both going to fall down in great puddles of sorrow on the cold tile floor of that room in the ICU.

But we didn’t. Somehow, the experience was as if something was holding me up, so I could keep holding her up. Rebecca Ann Parker, one of our UU theologians, calls this an “upholding and sheltering presence” that is “alive and afoot in the universe”. Others might simply call this God. Still others might say that it’s some sort of a bio-psychological reserve built deeply into our DNA that helps us help others survive so that our species can go on.

I’m happy just to dwell in the wonder and awe and mystery. I am just grateful for it.

I think that it has everything to do with love.

That young woman was eventually able to go on, not because of anything I or anyone else did, but because there was love in that room that Sunday — love that transcends everything else; love that upholds us; love that we carry with us always and that is simply present. It is there, and we can find it in the least of gestures, the fewest of words, the silences we share when there is nothing to be said, and yet we stay connected with each other nonetheless. Simple, loving presence can be the least of things and yet the most meaningful of things.

It is where we find purpose — a comforting hand on the shoulder, a kind word, a meal for an ailing neighbor, just remembering to say “I love you” before leaving the house in the morning; these are where we ultimately find meaning. These are the things worth more in life.

For all I know, that loving presence with each other and within all of life and creation is the place where, in the end, we find beauty and truth and joy. For all I know, it is where God lives.

Amen.

OFFERING

We all have so many needs-

A thousand prayers-a thousand needs–

That really need only one answer:

Let the world not be indifferent.

And may we live and be with

each other in the way that

shows this truth whatever the day brings:

That neither are we indifferent to each other.

BENEDICTION

As we go forth today, I wish you love.

And even more so, I wish you the courage to love and to love deeply.

Let us live it in the smallest and the greatest of ways. Let us always be asking ourselves, “what would it look like if we were to truly live love?”

All blessings upon you and yours.

Go in peace and love.

Amen

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