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

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

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Call to Worship

WE TRAVEL THIS ROAD TOGETHER
by Tess Baumberger

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

We travel this road together. 

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

We travel this road together. 

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

We travel this road together. 

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

We travel this road together. 

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

We travel this road together. 

Reading

HAVING COME THIS FAR 
by James Broughton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

Wow, that’s a big topic. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hero Video

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whyte Video

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Six word video

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

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

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

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

Cheating by using contractions is allowed. 

Six words! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

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

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

SERMON INDEX

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

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

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

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Call to Worship

THE BLESSINGS OF TRUST SOUL MATTERS 

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

Reading

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

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

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

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

Sermon Notes

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

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

Research from psychologist John Gottman.

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

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

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

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

Loss of trust also comes in small moments of betrayal.

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

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

“Trust is choosing to make something important to you vulnerable to the actions of someone else.” 

“Distrust is when what I’ve shared with you something that is important to me is not safe with you.”

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

BRAVING

B– Boundaries
R– Reliability
A– Accountability
V– Vault
I– Integrity
N– Non-Judgement
G– Generosity

Boundaries – yours are clear and expressed openly and you respect mine. 

Reliability – we do what we say to each other and not just once but over and over again. Don’t overcommit.

Accountability – when we make mistakes, which we will, we own it, apologize and make amends. And we allow each other to do so. Exception when trust has been repeatedly been broken and abused – if it becomes clear accountability is not possible.

Vault – we acknowledge confidentiality and hold to it both each others’ and other peoples. Sharing with me something that it not yours to share destroys trust.

Integrity – choosing courage over comfort, doing what’s right over what’s fast fun or easy and practicing our values not just professing them. Example – if say compassion is a value and then I do not act with compassion it shows lack of integrity and destroys trust.

Non-Judgement – being OK with asking for help and not judging when others do. We are better at giving help than asking for it.

Generosity – we make generous assumptions about each others words and actions and we check in with each other. So if I tell a good friend I am having a rough time and then do not hear from them for a while, I don’t start by presuming they are uncaring. Check in. Not assuming good intentions – more the reverse – having the generosity to NOT go immediately to presuming ill intent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SERMON INDEX

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

PODCASTS

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

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

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

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

Call to Worship
Rev. Chris Jimmerson

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

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

I am taught to fear difference.

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

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

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

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

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

Come, let us enter into this journey together.

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

Reading

A NETWORK OF MUTUALITY
by Martin Luther King Jr.

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

Injustice anywhere is a threat justice everywhere.

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

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

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

The foundation of such a method is love.

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

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

We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.

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

Sermon Handout

COSTS OF OPPRESSION TO PEOPLE FROM PRIVILEGED GROUPS

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

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

Social Costs: Loss and Diminishment of Relationships

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

Moral and Spiritual Costs: Loss of Moral and Spiritual Integrity

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

Intellectual Costs: Loss of Developing Full Range of Knowledge

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

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

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

Benefits of Social Justice for People from Privileged Groups

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

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

Benediction
by Bell Hooks

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

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

SERMON INDEX

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

PODCASTS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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

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

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Call to Worship:

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

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

Reading 

FOR A NEW BEGINNING
John O’Donahue

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VIDEO 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OK, you may begin now.

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

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

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

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

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

“The Low Road” 

What can they do to you? 
Whatever they want. 
They can set you up, 
they can bust you, 
they can break your fingers, 
they can bum your brain with electricity, … , 
they can take your child, wall up your lover. 

They can do anything
you can’t stop them from doing. 
How can you stop them? 
Alone, you can fight, 
you can refuse, 
you can take what revenge you can 
but they roll over you. 

But two people fighting back to back can cut through a mob … 
Two people can keep each other sane,
can give support, conviction, love, massage, hope, sex. 
Three people are a delegation, a committee, a wedge. 
With four you can play bridge and start an organization. 
With six you can rent a whole house …
and hold a fund-raising party.

A dozen make a demonstration. 
A hundred fill a hall. 
A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter; 
ten thousand, power and your own paper; 
a hundred thousand, your own media; 
ten million, your own country. 
It goes on one at a time, 

it starts when you care to act,
it starts when you do it again after they said no, 
it starts when you say WE and know who you mean, 
and each day you mean one more.

Here is another take on how movements start. 

VIDEO 

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

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

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

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

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

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

How will we answer? 

Benediction 

GOD SAYS YES TO ME 
– Kaylin Haught

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

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

SERMON INDEX

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

PODCASTS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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

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

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Call to Worship

“We Hold a Place for You”
By Chris Jimmerson

Come into this sacred space. 

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

Come into this, our beloved community. 

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

Come onto this hallowed ground. 

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

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

Reading

“Burning the Old Year”
by Naomi Shihab Nye 

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

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

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

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

Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” Eve replied. 

“In sickness and in health?” 

“I was,” she replied. 

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

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

And Eve took it off and handed it to him. 

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

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

This story illustrates so perfectly the power of ritual. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Burning Bowl Ritual 

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

---

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

SERMON INDEX

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

PODCASTS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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

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

---

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

What does it mean to be a people of mystery? 

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

What does it mean to be a people of mystery? 

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

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

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

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

Eagleman video 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OK, ready? 

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

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

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

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

The staff offices? It’s a mystery. 

The classrooms? It’s a mystery. 

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

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

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

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

Except in the imaginings of Monty Python that is. 

Python Video 

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

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

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

VIDEO 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I loved this explanation of the difference: 

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

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

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

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

Perhaps we can become that people of mystery. 

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

May it be so. Amen. 

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

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

SERMON INDEX

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

PODCASTS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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

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

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Call to Worship

We Come to Love a Church
Andrew C Kennedy

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

Both backward into history
and forward into the future —

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

Reading

Joy Harjo, 1951

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

Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let me give you a few examples.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And this is just one of many such examples.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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

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

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Call to Worship

This place is sanctuary
Kathleen McTigue

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

Sermon

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

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

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

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

More on this later!

Our Lifespan Faith Development programs are following a monthly, theme-based format called “Soul Matters”, so I decided to offer a worship service each month on the same theme being explored though our “Soul Matters” activities.

It did not even occur to me when the theme for for Soul Matters for October ended up being “Sanctuary”, that we would be in a state of not being able to use our church sanctuary so we can complete its expansion and renovations.

So we find ourselves creating sanctuary here, in this room, which was actually the church’s original sanctuary many years ago.

And on top of that, on November 11, we will be creating sanctuary wherever we can, because the building will be without electricity. We’ll let you know soon where and what we’ll be doing on the 11th!

And I think that is one of the themes of Gilkyson’s wonderful song and of our service today – while sanctuary sometimes refers to a physical place, we humans are capable of creating sanctuary wherever we may be and however we may need it.

Anyway, as I said, none of this occurred to me when I was adopting the Soul Matters theme of sanctuary as our topic for today.

It also never occurred to me that I would end up writing this sermon on this past Friday, which just happened to have been the 17th anniversary of my 19th birthday. Apparently there is no sanctuary from getting older.

Nor did it occur me that today, October 14, happens to be national “Clergy Appreciation Day.”

Just thought I would mention that. Anyway, our word, “sanctuary” comes from the Latin root “sanctus” which means “holy” – a place set aside for holy worship. Today, it also means a place or situation of refuge, protection, such as a bird or nature sanctuary. For we humans, it can also mean a place or circumstance where we find renewal of the mind, body and spirit – a restoration of wholeness and integration, which is related to the meaning of the Germanic root of the word “Holy”.

So, when we think about what “Sanctuary” means, what it means to be a people of sanctuary, as our faith development programs are examining this month, there is a rich tapestry of understanding to explore.

One meaning of sanctuary that we have been actively engaged in here at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin is the ancient tradition of temples and churches providing sanctuary, refuge to folks being wrongly persecuted by the government. This tradition goes all the way back to the time of the Hebrew scriptures and has recurred again and again through the centuries and throughout the world.

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.

In the 1970s, religious groups provided sanctuary to soldiers on leave from the Vietnam war who refused to return to the war for ethical reasons.

In the 1980s and 90s, churches provided sanctuary for refugees from civil war and political turmoil in several Central American countries, when our government was refusing to provide asylum to these persons even though our government and corporations were at least partially responsible for the situations causing them to have to flee their home countries.

Now, of course, we find ourselves with similar or even worse circumstances, and this church has stepped into that ancient tradition and offered sanctuary to two persons whose very lives would be at threat were they deported to their home countries.

We have also provided advice based upon these experiences to over 20 other churches that have become sanctuary or sanctuary supporting congregations, growing the sanctuary movement.

I am pleased to report that Alirio, who has been in sanctuary with us for more than a year now, along with Hilda, who has been in Sanctuary at our partner church, st. Andrew’s Presbyterian, will be filing applications for stays of removal, which would prevent their deportation, at the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement office in San Antonio later this coming week. They’ll be accompanied by their attorneys and a small group of supporters and will have the benefit of much congressional support that has been built on their behalf.

Let’s all hold them in love’s sanctuary this coming week.

Another meaning of sanctuary is a physical place that we hold sacred – a place where we feel safer, where we connect with something larger than ourselves, a place where we can renew ourselves after the challenges of life and our world.

As we discussed, that can be a church sanctuary such as we have created here, but can also be any place or circumstance within which we find refuge and renewal – somewhere in nature, in the arms of a caring loved one, gardening in our back yard, listening to music that moves us, in the words of a favorite poem, etc.

Some folks also make it a practice to create sacred spaces and daily rituals within their homes and families to make their home a place of sanctuary.

What are the places and practices within which you find refuge and renewal? Do you have enough of them? How often do you spend time within them?

Forming a sense of belonging and relationship is another way that we also can create sanctuary for ourselves and others.

When I was twelve years old, my Grandparents gave me the gift of sanctuary. My parents were in the midst of a difficult divorce, and my mom was having to work a lot, so her parents took care of us before and after school each day.

At my Grandparents house, I always knew I was loved. I always felt safe. I always knew I would be cared for.

I was struggling over the divorce and my not so great relationship with my father. I was also having problems with some of my schoolmates, because they were sensing that I was somehow different, though I do not think they or I yet knew that it was because I was a young gay kid growing up in a small, ultraconservative, South East Texas town.

My grandparents loved to travel and would sometimes go out of town for a month or more. Right before they were about to go on one of their trips for the first time since the divorce, my grandfather took me aside and gave me a key to their house. He told me that I was welcome to go there any time I needed to do so, even while they were out of town.

Their providing me with that sanctuary, that place of escape and safety, made such a huge difference for me as I moved through that difficult time. It was about having access to that physical place of refuge, yes, but even more so it was their gesture of love and understanding that created sanctuary for me.

Finally, I think we create sanctuary when we take care of each other at an even larger level – when we tend to one anothers’ wounds communally.

I think of the way in which at this church we have worked to make ourselves a welcoming space for LGBTQI persons, who so often have been hurt by religion in the past.

Likewise, we are trying to tear down white supremacy both within these church walls and beyond them, though we still have much work before us to do regarding this.

I think of how we take care of each other when we get sick, comfort one another when we encounter life’s inevitable losses, mark life passages with one another.

I think of how we help each other confront our own fears, challenges and “growing edges”, as they said when I was in seminary.

And I think of how, on an even larger level, we create sanctuary for each other when natural disasters strike, such as the hurricane we have just witnessed or the raging fires we have seen recently in some of the Western states. People coming together to create the chance for recovery and renewal for other people struck by such disasters.

This is human love and compassion in action. This is us creating love’s sanctuary.

Here is more from Eliza Gilkynson’s song:

Through desolation’s fire and fear’s dark thunder, thou art with me.
Through the sea of desires that drag me under, thou art with me.
Though I’ve been traded in like a souvenir, in love’s sanctuary thou art with me.

Now, I have been talking about our human ability to create sanctuary, but I would be remiss if I did not also talk about our human tendency to create the need for sanctuary in the first place because of the evils we do to one another.

As we have been discussing, we have to create spaces and circumstances of sanctuary to help ourselves through life’s inventible challenges and hurts and losses, as well as to celebrate its joys. We create sanctuary in response to the ravages that sometimes come from our natural world.

Far too often though, we also find ourselves having to create sanctuary for the victims of the harmful behavior perpetrated by human beings.

For far too many women and not just a few men, the past weeks have felt like being traded in like some cheap souvenir, as Gilkynson puts it in her song, as people in positions of power (primarily white, wealthy men) dismissed and belittled stories of sexual harassment and assault.

And so people have had to build “me too” and “times up” movements to try to provide some relief from the abuse.

We have to create shelters like SafePlace here in Austin for victims of domestic violence.

Alirio has to take sanctuary with us because he would likely be killed if our government were to deport him to his home country, even though our country helped create the horrible situation in EI Salvador in the first place.

We have to build shelters and legal services and a whole gamut of support structures for immigrants being treated so deplorably by our government. We have to cry out against children being held in tent city internment camps like the one here in Tornillo, Texas, after being forcibly separated from their parents.

Scientists are forced to try to find ways to provide sanctuary, indeed to save from extinction, species after species whose very continued existence is at threat because of what humans are doing to their environment.

And I could go on and on and on. People have to create, Back Lives Matter and other groups to try to create some relief from the gross injustices of our criminal justice system against African Americans and other people of color.

We have to create housing assistance and other support for the basic needs of families because their employers are not paying them enough to survive.

Refugee services for victims of war and genocide. Medical services for people with inadequate or no health insurance. Services that provide sanctuary for elderly folks so often discarded and abused in our society.

Well, again, I could go on and on. You know the list. You know the many ways people are having to create relief, renewal, some form of sanctuary for the victims of so many forms of abuse and societal neglect.

It can feel pretty discouraging sometimes, can’t it? It can be tempting to fall into despair.

But that is exactly what an ideology that is on the rise throughout our world encourages – despair. It is an ideology of scarcity. An ideology that sees life as a zero sum game, wherein there must be winners and losers. A cynical ideology that wants to keep us in doubt and off balance. An ideology that sees authoritarianism as the only way to maintain order.

But, my beloveds, we can take another world view. We can choose faith over despair. We can have an ideology, indeed, a theology, ‘Of abundance. A theology that says we are all in this together. A theology that envisions a world wherein we all thrive together. A theology based on compassion and love and that create’s love’s sanctuary, knowing that the “thou” in love’s sanctuary with us is each other.

A theology that says that together we have this mystical ability to bring divine possibilities into being, into full realization, which in turn then offers back to us ever more creative and live-giving choices.

That’s a theology that will build a larger and larger sanctuary of beloved community in our world.

I am so thankful that we have this place, not just the beautiful new physical space we will soon occupy, but more importantly, this religious community – a community where we can come to be in sanctuary together to regain our bearings, renew our faith, nourish our often wounded souls so that we can go back out into our world and keep creating love’s sanctuary in that world.

Through the doubter’s gloom and the cynic’s sneer, thou art with me.
In the crowded rooms of a mind unclear, thou art with me.
Though I’ll walk for a while through a stream of tears.
In love’s sanctuary thou art with me.
In love’s sanctuary thou art with me.
In love’s sanctuary thou art with me.

Amen

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

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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

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

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Call to Worship

Now let us worship together.

Now let us celebrate this congregation’s highest religious values.

• Transcendence – To connect with wonder and awe of the unity of life
• Community – To connect with joy, sorrow, and service with those whose lives we touch
• Compassion – To treat ourselves and others with love
• Courage – To live lives of honesty, vulnerability, and beauty
• Transformation – To pursue the growth that changes our lives and heals our world

Now we raise up that which we hold as ultimate and larger than ourselves. Today and all the days of our lives.

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

Reading
by Sophia Lyon Fahs

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

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

Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is another example.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We started the pageant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think that’s right.

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

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

Amen.

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

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

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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

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

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Sermon

Swedish Chef Video

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My God, they’re Unitarian Universalists!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s how Lithwick explains her Unified Muppet Theory:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you an order muppet or a chaos muppet?

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

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

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

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

Kermit Video

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fozzy Video

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

I also suspect Janice may be Buddhist.

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

Janice Video

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

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

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

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

Statler and Waldorf Video

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

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

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

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

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

Ms Piggy Video

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

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

I am leaning towards Gonzo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bohemian Rhapsody Video

And Amen.

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

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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

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

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Reading

After the Blinding Rains
Chris Jimmerson

After the blinding rains came and washed away the foundations;

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

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

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

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

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

And together, we built new structures of meaning.

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

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

Sermon

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

One hundred twenty five people died.

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

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

Entire communities experiencing collective disorientation and disconnection, shock.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I want to read a definition for you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

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

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
July 15, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Our new mission statement says that we “build the Beloved Community”. As Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. defined it, that’s a huge dream though. We do not do it alone. We do so as part of a rich Unitarian Universalist heritage and our larger UU movement, as well as in partnership with many other faiths and groups. We’ll examine our mission in relationship to these larger efforts.

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Call to Worship
Susan Frederick-Gray

We love to celebrate when we were on the right side of history–when we let our faith and commitment to human dignity and commitment to universalism lead us into the practice of justice. But that is not the whole story, and it is important to be honest about our complicated history, not to bring shame or guilt, but to bring understanding that can inform our faith today.

We are in a time of deep challenge and opportunity in our faith. The reality for many is dire, and increasing threats are real. Policies of the state seek to silence, imprison, deport, and even murder people. Our congregations are faced with important questions of how we answer to empire as well as how to wrestle with how close we have come to beloved community–or how far we still have to go. It is important that we not let the opportunity or the urgency of this moment slip away. Like the theme of this year’s GA says, “All are called” to this work, and I believe we have been readying for it.

My hope is that this GA may be one more collective pace forward to “becoming the religious people we want to be,” the religious people we are called to be.

Mission

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

Reading
– Reverend Shirley Strong

“Beloved Community is an inclusive, interdependent space based on love, justice, compassion, responsibility, shared power and a deep and abiding respect for all people, places and things that radically transforms individuals and restructures institutions.”

About Beloved Community

“Dr. King’s Beloved Community is a global vision, in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth. In the Beloved Community, poverty; hunger and homelessness will not be tolerated because international standards of human decencv will not allow it. Racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry and prejudice will be replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood. In the Beloved Community, international disputes will be resolved by peaceful confict-resolution and reconciliation of adversaries, instead of military power. Love and trust will triumph over fear and hatred. Peace with justice will prevail over war and military conflict.”

– THE MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. Center for Nonviolent Social Change

Sermon

As I listened to you all read that description of the Beloved Community with David earlier, I thought, wow, that is a lot, isn’t it? It is a huge undertaking.

And if you look at the definition of the Beloved Community by the King Center printed on the back of your order of service, it says that building the Beloved Community, means we have to eliminate “poverty, hunger and homelessness”, eradicate “racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry and prejudice” and abolish “war and military conflict”.

No problem! And if we are going to get all that finished by tomorrow, I am going to have to go ahead and wrap this up early so you all can go get to it.

It is a lot. Dr. King’s vision of the Beloved Community is a big, bold dream, an ultimate outcome that we strive to create.

And, if you’ll notice, we have made it the ultimate outcome toward which we strive here at the church we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice TO build the Beloved Community.

I don’t know about you all, but with the events we see in our news every day, for me that dream can sometimes seem awfully far away. The vision of Beloved Community for which we yearn can seem pretty big and overwhelming.

So, I think it is important that we remember that we do not build the Beloved Community alone. We build the beloved community as a part of something much, much larger than ourselves.

Here in this congregation, we say that we strive to build it together.

And we build it alongside our other local Unitarian Universalist churches, along with a host of local interfaith and secular partners and coalitions.

We build the Beloved Community as part of our larger Unitarian Universalist or UU faith. And our larger UU Faith also has interfaith and secular partners at the regional, national and international levels.

We also build upon the foundation of a rich faith heritage, which has not been perfect at times, and yet was among the first to call for abolition, ordain women and then ordain LGBTQ persons into our ministry, as examples of those foundations upon which we build.

So, please allow me a few moments of indulging my inner polity geek by reviewing with you a little about how our larger Unitarian Universalist Faith is organized.

We are a member congregation of the Unitarian Universalist Association or UUA. The UUA is composed of, largely funded through and broadly governed by our UU congregations, fellowships and other organizations.

We elect the UUA board, and we also elect the UUA President, who oversees operations and other UUA staff. The UUA provides a number of programs that support us, represents us regionally and nationally and helps organize our efforts to build the Beloved Community at the national level.

We also have a number of UU organizations with which we partner that are working for justice in specific ways. I’ll mention just a few:

Did you know we have a Unitarian Universalist United Nations Office that has been and continuous to be a highly effective advocate for human rights worldwide?

Likewise, our Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, or UUSC, challenges injustice and advances human rights both at home in the U.S. and abroad.

We have a Women’s’ Federation, the Side with Love campaign; two UU specific seminaries, UURise for immigration sanctuary and human rights; our disability rights group EqUUal Access, the UU College of Social Justice (or UUCSJ); Diverse Revolutionary UU Multicultural Ministries or DRUUM; Black Lives ofUU or BLUU; Allies for Racial Equity or ARE; and our professional associations for ministers (the UUMA), religious educators (LREDA) and musicians (the UUMN).

We love ourselves some acronyms, don’t we?

All of these and others are working in their own arenas to build beloved community. And all of these and more are our partners and help make up something much, much larger, of which we are a part.

Whether all of this is already familiar to you or you are hearing about some of it for the first time, I think it is good to remind ourselves that we are not alone in our struggle to build the world about which we dream.

As you heard about earlier, one of the ways we connect with our larger UU movement, is that each year, folks from our church attend the annual UUA General Assembly (or GA for short), where UUs from around the country and even the world gather to worship together each day, conduct UU A business and learn from each other.

The video that was showing as you came in may have given you at least a little sense of the connection to UUism and our traditions that attending GA can create.

I would like to share with you just a few things we did at GA related to building the Beloved Community.

First, we made some internal changes.

Based upon their membership size, churches are allowed to appoint a certain number of their members attending GA as delegates. Delegates are allowed to vote on issues taken up during the assembly.

Ministers have been automatically given delegate status; however, Directors of Religious had not been. Because most churches do not allow staff to also be members, this was effectively keeping our religious educators from having a full voice in their own faith association. I am thrilled to report that we voted to change the UUA bylaws so that active directors of religious education are granted delegate status and allowed that full voice.

Similarly, we have had two, non-voting youth observers to the UUA Board of Trustees. We changed the bylaws to make these full, voting trustee positions to give our youth a greater voice.

More externally focused, We also had a lively discussion about choosing a new congregational study action issue, or CSAI because we need yet another acronym. CSAls are issues that our congregations will then jointly study and engage in social action around.

One of two proposed CSAls was more explicitly focused around undoing white supremacy. It was important to many of our people of color that this more explicit CSAI be the one adopted. They asked Allies for Racial Equity to speak on behalf of it, and I ended up being the ARE representative to do so. Through the magic of people with cell phone cameras, there is video stitched together of it.

VIDEO

Occasionally, I have an opinion or two about something.

After continued good discussion, delegates voted overwhelmingly to select the undoing white supremacy CSAI.

One of our church members, Rob Hirchfeld, recorded a great reflection on how participating in such discussions at GA can challenge and deepen ones own faith.

VIDEO

The delegates also voted to take on a number of urgent social justice issues that you can find out about by searching for “actions of immediate witness” on UUA.org.

Finally, there were real efforts to feature the voices of people of color and other marginalized groups at GA, and, to stress the theme of this years G.A., “All are Called” – we are all in this together, which means we are both not alone in our struggles to build the Beloved Community, and we are each accountable to one another and our faith as we do so. Here are just a few of our UUA President, Susan Frederick-Gray’s powerful words on this:

VIDEO

No time for a casual faith. No time to go it alone.

So far, I have talked about how we build the Beloved Community as part of something larger than ourselves in ways that are very tangible – as part of the UUA, in cooperation with other faiths and groups.

I’d like to close by sharing with you an experience that I think demonstrates my belief that we also do this work as a part of something more intangible, spiritual and even larger.

A few of you may have heard me tell this story from many years ago now. I was still in seminary and serving as a chaplain intern at the old Brakenridge hospital. I’ve changed a few inconsequential details to protect the identity of the other people involved.

One Sunday, I was asked to bring 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 job earlier that same day. 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 crying on my shoulder.

In that moment, I thought I might collapse too.

That I didn’t have the strength, and that we were both going to fall down onto the cold tile floor beneath us.

But we didn’t, and 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 genes that helps us help others survive so that our species can go on.

I think maybe it was that on a level that is much deeper than words, I sensed that I was a part of and being upheld by my much larger faith tradition and movement that in turn is a part of something even greater.

I was being held up by all the love I have felt and been given and by an even greater love that emanates when we as human beings are at our very best when we glimpse that we are interconnected with each other and the web of all existence in ways that are far more complex than our day to day comprehension can fully grasp.

And that greater love sustains us and gives us strength and moves us toward building the Beloved Community.

It is a love of such power that it makes me believe that peaceful revolution is possible – that someday we really just might eliminate poverty, hunger and homelessness, abolish military conflict and eradicate racism and all forms of oppression.

My beloveds, we are not alone. You are not alone.

We are a part of something almost incomprehensibly larger than ourselves that is calling us all toward divine possibilities we have yet to even fully imagine.

Amen.

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

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
May 27, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

In her newest book, Brene Brown examines the supposed duality between becoming fully ourselves as individuals and finding true belonging and community. She finds it to be a false duality. She raises the question of how we find sacredness both in being a part of something and in standing alone when necessary.

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Call to Worship

Exerpt from Dr Brene Brown’s book, “Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone”.

True belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world and find sacredness in both being a part of something and standing alone in the wilderness.

True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are. It requires you to be who you are.

Reading

Exerpt from Dr Brene Brown’s book, “Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone”.

Theologians, writers, poets, and musicians have always used the wilderness as a metaphor, to represent everything from a vast and dangerous environment where we are forced to difficult trials to a refuge of nature and beauty where we seek space for contemplation. What all wilderness have in common are the notions of solitude, vulnerability, and emotional, spiritual, or physical quest.

Belonging fully to that you’re willing to stand alone is a wilderness — an untamed, unpredictable place of solitude and It is a place as dangerous as it is breathtaking, as sought after as it is feared. The wilderness can often feel unholy because we can’t control it, or what people think about our choice of whether to venture into that vastness or not. But turns our to be the place of true belonging, and it’s the bravest and most sacred place you will ever stand.

The special courage it takes to experience true belonging is not about braving the wilderness, it’s about becoming the wilderness. It’s about breaking down the walls, abandoning our ideological bunkers, and living our wild heart rather than our weary hurt.

Sermon

I’d like to begin today with a confession.

I am still struggling myself with what I am going to talk with you about today. I still mess up. I still get angry or hurt and make mistakes.

The last time I preached, I talked about human rights activist, Valarie Kour, and how she says that to build the Beloved Community, we must practice revolutionary love – love that is an intentional act both brutally difficult at times and ultimately beautiful and life-giving.

She says that are three aspects of revolutionary love. We must love ourselves; we must love others who do not look like us; and we must love our opponents, even those who would harm us.

It’s that last one I am struggling with this morning.

Anyone else struggle with that one? Valarie Kour confesses that she struggles with it too.

She tells the story of the first person killed in a hate crime in response to the attacks of 911, a close family friend named Balbir Singh Sohdi who like her, was a Sikh. Frank Roak, the killer, mistook him for a Muslim, because of Balbir’s turban and beard.

Roak had bragged, “I am going to go out and shoot some towel heads. We should kill their children too.”

Flash forward 15 years, she returned to site of the shooting and was joined by Balbir’s brother, Ranna. They lit a candle, mourning how little had changed.”

Kour asked, “Who have we not tried to love yet?”

And so, 15 years later, they called Frank Roak, who was still in prison.

They asked him why he agreed to take their call.

Roak replied, “I am sorry for what I did to your brother, but I am also sorry for all the people killed on 911”.

Ranna somehow found the compassion to not react to the second part of that and say, “That is the first time I have heard you say that you feel sorry.”

Roak answered, “Yes, I am sorry for what I did to your brother. One day, when I go to be judged by God, I will ask to see your brother, and I will hug him, and I will ask him for forgiveness.”

Ranna replied, “We already forgave you”.

Here is how Kour explains what she learned from that story.

VIDEO

So forgiveness, finding a way to be in conversation even with our opponents, is not releasing them from accountability. It is not giving up on struggling, fighting, resisting, rebelling against an ideology we oppose.

It is living our own values to their fullest.

It is, as Kour puts it, tending the wounds, both theirs and ours – the wounds that are so greatly and dangerously dividing us.

Dr Brene Brown, social worker, researcher, author and our second Ted Talk divinity for this morning, approaches much this same challenge in her book, “Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone”.

I can only scratch the surface of this book full of great information this morning, so I’ll start by simply highly recommending it to you.

Part of what she reveals though is how we as a society have been moving more and more into silos.

We are segregating ourselves not just by race and ethnicity anymore, but also by societal and political ideology.

We move geographically to live around people whose ideology largely matches our own.

We interact on the web and social media with people of like mind.

We attend churches or other communal institutions with folks who think and believe much like us.

Conservatives watch the “Fox Propaganda Network” and progressives watch the Rachel Maddow Ultimate Truth and Journalistic Integrity Hour”.

OK, I am joking. The truth is we all are getting a lot of editorializing.

And yet the data shows that we are lonelier than ever before. We have LESS of a sense of belonging, the more we segregate ourselves with only the likeminded.

Perhaps it is because we never have to be challenged by a different perspective. Perhaps we never have to go out into the wilderness and truly determine who we are, what we believe, what values we hold dearest, because all we have to do is go along with what the people with whom we already agree are saying.

And if we haven’t done the work of knowing who we truly are, we get triggered far too easily. We lose civility. We get on Facebook and spout simple slogans or share dehumanizing posts about our political opponents, which Brown notes diminishes our own humanity and drives us to feel even more isolated.

We avoid having the substantive and much needed conversations that might allow us to find reconnection. Hells Bells, as my grandmother used to say, we avoid even being around those with whom we disagree.

The problem is these are our fellow human beings, our fellow citizens and, far to often, our friends and family members.

The problem is, if we never have those difficult but civil conversations, we will never move forward. We will retreat more and more into our ideological bunkers until the fabric of society itself comes unraveled.

I know I sometimes avoid such conversations because they can be so very, very hard. I’m afraid I will make mistakes. I’m afraid I’ll get hurt.

That’s why it made me feel so much better to hear my Guru Brene Brown say much the same thing.

VIDEO

Good advice – especially for social media.

Another of my personal gurus, Van Jones, human rights activist, attorney, CNN commentator, and author of another recommended book, “Beyond the Messy Truth: How We Came Apart; How We Come Together” also offers much that is very, very helpful on this subject.

Today, I want to share a story he told at a recent conference I attended.

Jones tells of visiting communities in West Virginia where they were having to bring in freezer trucks on Friday nights because too many bodies of people who had died of opium overdoses were coming in over the weekend to hold them all in the local morgues.

Babies were being born already addicted and then losing both their parents.

Jones brought five leaders who had emerged from the 1980s crack epidemic in his community in Los Angeles with him West Virginia to work with five leaders there.

He says that was hard, because when drugs were ravaging his community, it was not treated as a public health issue. It was treated as a criminal issue – with brutality and imprisonment.

They began by sharing pictures of people each of them had lost. Out of that common pain, came a common purpose. They forged relations across their differences and divides.

I want to let you hear him tell about something that happened while they were there.

VIDEO

“The biggest danger we face is becoming what we are fighting”

But how do we avoid that? How do we engage with civility, even when those whom we disagree, are not always so civil toward us?

Well, there are no easy answers. It’s difficult even for these folks with far more expertise on this than me. All three say it is hard. And yet all three also say it is absolutely necessary.

Here are some thoughts.

Brene Brown says that people are hard to hate close up, so move in. Get to know them. Engage with them.

In the best book chapter title of all time, she also writes, “Speak Truth to Bullshit. Be civil”.

We can hold people accountable without using personal attacks. We can hold fast to our values without dehumanizing others.

No shaming, no name calling, no putting other people down.

We can listen and reflect back to people what they say. We can ask, “can I tell you how that makes me feel or what I understand about this?”

Valarie Kour talks about approaching other people with curiosity and wonder. She talks about the importance of sharing our stories and listening to theirs. “Stories,” she says, “can create the wonder that turns strangers into sisters and brothers.”

Van Jones speaks of searching for common ground – not mushy middle ground – but true shared interests. He talks about how he is working with conservatives such as Newt Gingrich on issues such as our criminal justice system, the addiction crisis and creating high tech and clean tech jobs.

It is difficult. Finding compassion, much less love, for those who might harm us is gut-wrenchingly hard. I know. 1’m one of the targets. Certainly none of should try to engage in a situation where we are at threat for physical harm.

I don’t have all the answers. None of us do.

I do know this. I know we have to try. I know we will never build the beloved community if we disconnect from, leave out, 30 to 40% of the population. We have to build a new way.

After the last Presidential election I found myself needing to have this kind of conversation with my mom. She gave me permission to share this story with you.

She had voted for Donald Trump.

I had posted some things on social media that were … strongly worded.

Our relationship had become strained. We avoided the topic. It is hard for love to flourish when pain has been left unspoken.

We agreed to talk. We set ground rules – each of us in turn would talk about our perspectives on the election and its aftermath – no interrupting, no arguing, no trying to convince the other of anything.

And it was difficult. And it was holy. And the ground beneath us and between us shifted, as if God had entered the room and held us both as we moved through that difficult but ultimately loving conversation. My beloveds, we can do this. It will not be easy, but we can build that new way.

We can build the be-(revolutionary)-loved community.

Amen.

Benediction

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

Rev. Dr. 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 to help build the beloved community goes on, as we work for 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.

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

Go in peace. Go in love.

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

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