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

We all at some point will be unable to care for ourselves, or will need the help of other people in some way. Why do we struggle so much to ask for help when we need it?

Singer, songwriter and performance artist Amanda Palmer, writes “So, a plea. To the artists, creators, scientists, nonprofit-runners, librarians, strange-thinkers, start-uppers, and inventors, to all people everywhere who are afraid to accept help, in whatever form it’ s appearing: Please, take the donuts. To the guy in my opening band who was too ashamed to go out into the crowd and accept money for his band: Take the donuts. To the girl who spent her twenties as a street performer and stripper living on less than $ 700 a month, who went on to marry a best-selling author whom she loves, unquestioningly, but even that massive love can’ t break her unwillingness to accept his financial help, please… Everybody. Please. Just take the…” expletive deleted… “donuts!” That’ s from Palmer’ s book, “The Art of Asking or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help.“

Palmer derives “take the donuts” as a metaphor for being willing to ask for and accept help from a tale she tells about someone we Unitarian Universalists claim as one of our own, Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau was among our transcendentalist ancestors, whose ideas still influence our Unitarian Universalist religious worldview today and, more generally, still influence the whole of American culture.

Thoreau is perhaps most remembered for his book, Walden, which chronicled his thoughts and experiences living mainly alone for almost three years in a 10 by 15 foot cabin in the woods next to Walden Pond.

What is less often discussed, as Amanda Palmer points out, is that Thoreau’ s cabin sat on land owned by his friend and fellow transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose home in Concord was less than a two mile walk from the cabin. What’ s more, Emerson had Thoreau over for dinner quiet often during his time roughing it by the pond.

Also, Thoreau’ s mother and sister brought him a basket of baked goods every Sunday, which apparently included fresh donuts.

We often attribute our hyper-individualism and extreme self-reliance to the transcendentalists, but it seems that these may not have encompassed the entirety of their thinking and way of living. Thoreau wasn’ t foolish – he took the donuts when they were offered.

Part of Palmer’ s point is that this misconstrual has led to a culture in which we can easily over value individual independence, strength and control. We can find it very, very difficult to ask for help, even when we very much need it. We will not let ourselves take the donuts, even when they are freely offered, because we view accepting help as a sign of weakness.

And this can be reflected both in us as individuals and in our larger communities and our larger society. Even our Unitarian Universalist churches have struggled sometimes with a go it alone perspective, not always fully actualizing how we could help and learn from one another. I am pleased to report that there is much work being done at the local, regional and national levels on how we can become better connected amongst our churches and other institutions. As a country, the U.S. has often taken a go it alone or even domineering posture. The U.S. spends more on military and defense than the next eight countries in our world combined, even though we live in a time when military strength alone will not solve problems like terrorism and global climate change. We need the help of others to solve many of our current problems.

At the same time, we do not provide adequate support and care for the poor, our children, people with disabilities and chronic disease and the elderly. If we view asking for help as a sign of weakness, it is far too easy for a society to begin to view needing help as a sign of some character flaw and thus being unworthy of our support.

A society’ s values and ethics, I think, can be evaluated based upon how well it takes care of its young, its sick and disabled and its elderly. By that measure, I’ m afraid ours is in danger of a great moral failure if we do not change course soon.

The thing is, we will all face many of these challenges in our lives. We may face economic challenges at some point. We will all get sick from time to time. All of us will age. Even if we may not currently face physical or mental challenges, still, we are only temporarily abled. In fact, the only way we can avoid an eventual deterioration of our physical abilities is if we manage to somehow get ourselves dead first. We will all need the help of other people at various points in our lives.

On top of that, there are many other life situations wherein, even if we are capable of making decisions and acting on our own, we can still benefit from asking for help. By doing so, we can improve our lives and the lives of others. Complete self-reliance is an impossibility. Human beings need and always have needed one another to survive as a species and to live as fully and as best we can as individuals.

In her book, “Mayday: Asking for Help in Times of Need”, M. Nora Klaver, a renowned business and organizational coach, argues that asking for help can actually lead to making better decisions, generating more creative possibility, improving our emotional well being and forming deeper relationships. Klaver says that not only do we often fail to ask for help when we need it, we also are usually terribly bad at it when we do ask for help. We fidget and fumble our words and cast our eyes downward.

She offers several reasons why we dislike and are so bad at asking for help, but the greatest among them is simply fear. She describes three forms of fear that are rooted in lies that we tell ourselves.

1.) Fear of surrendering control. We’ re afraid that, if we ask for and accept help, we will give up our independence and our control over our own lives. In reality, though, we have far less control than we think we do in the first place. Sometimes surrendering into the present moment, the current situation, the flow of our lives leads to some of our greatest spiritual experiences. Likewise, allowing someone else to help us when we are in need can be a gift of graciousness to them.

2.) Fear of separation. We fear that if we ask for help, those from whom we seek that help or others who witness our asking for it may reject us. This is based in a primal human fear – the lie that we are always, ultimately alone in this world, when in fact, we are greatly interconnected.

3.) Fear of experiencing shame. We fear that if we ask for help, we will reveal our inabilities, flaws and shortcomings and be judged unworthy. We tell ourselves a lie about how we must be perfect in order to deserve human worth and dignity.

Klaver tells a story about a woman she calls, “Gina” to illustrate all of this. Gina was a young mother. Her husband had lost his job and was out of work for an extended period. Gina found herself supporting her family not just financially, but emotionally as well. She had been promoted to a position of high responsibility in her work life, so she had people relying on her both at home and at work. However, to meet their needs, she had been neglecting herself. She gained weight, started smoking and ignored the growing depression she was experiencing.

When Klaver first met Gina, she was on the verge of breaking down, but terrified to ask for help.

She was scared of failing at her job – that if she took any time off to deal with her own needs she would be letting down those who reported to her (fear of surrendering control). She felt as if she had to be perfect – a boss, wife and mother without flaws (fear of shame). In fact, she worried constantly that she might actually lose her job (fear of separation).

Wiping tears from her eyes she had sobbed, “No one can help me! I just have to deal with this situation on my own.”

It took a lot of convincing, but Gina finally agreed to direct some of the concern and compassion she had been showering on others toward herself. She sought help. She called the Employee Assistance Program at her work and got their help finding counseling for her depression. She asked her boss for time off to attend to her own needs. She got her mother to help watch her young son for a few days so that she could spend some time in a rural cottage to get some rest. She asked her husband to understand that she needed this time to herself and that she needed him to take care of things while she was gone.

And every single one of them gave her the help she needed.

Three months later, Gina’ s life was going significantly better. She and her husband had grown much closer. She no longer worked overtime every week, and in fact had become very protective of her family and alone time. Her energy returned. She lost weight. She quit smoking.

To bring about this change and allow herself to reach out, Klaver says that Gina had to embrace three virtues –

• compassion, particularly for herself,
• faith that if she asked for help at least some of the change for which she hoped would happen
• and finally, gratitude for all she already had and for the help received from others so that those relationships could grow even stronger.
• Asking for help had transformed her life in ways that going it alone never could have.

Compassion. Faith. Gratitude. Transformation.

Those sound like spiritual terms to me.

And it makes me believe that developing our willingness and capacity to ask for help when we need it is a spiritual endeavor.

Like many of our spiritual quests though, it takes intentional practice. We do not automatically get better at it.

Especially with asking for help, we need the practice, because most of us have never been taught how to go about asking for help. We have few if any models, stories or mythologies to follow.

For example, how many of you are familiar with the New Testament story about the Good Samaritan? (No, really, raise a hand if you are.)

Now, how many of you know the biblical story of Jairus?

How about the Canaanite woman?

Less of us are familiar with the latter two.

The Good Samaritan story is about offering help. The other two are about people who asked for help.

It is telling that the religious tale about offering help is in our psyches much more strongly than the stories about asking for help. Perhaps we need to tell and uphold those other stories more often.

In this religious community, we could do that, and we also could create new stories and practices affirming that developing our individuality and accepting communal support are not opposite ends of a duality – that we can help each other become our most whole selves and to be as self reliant as is healthy and possible given whatever our circumstances might be.

Church it seems to me is a great place within which we could create a loving environment, a beloved community that encourages and supports asking for help – a place where we can all help each other learn how to take the … expletive deleted … donuts.

Here is the process M. Nora Klaver suggest we practice regarding asking for help.

Before making a request for help, get clear on what the real need is. Make sure what would actually be helpful. Then, if the timing is not urgent, take a break first and engage in something that helps you find a greater sense of calmness. Then, set up a time to ask in person if at all possible. During the request, take a leap of faith that new paths will open up no matter what the response to the request, and then word the ask as simply as possible.

After the request, be grateful, listen intently and then express your gratitude no matter what the response. You will have something for which to be grateful. No matter what, you will learn more about your relationships, as well as the situations your friends and loved ones might be in themselves. Sometimes people want to help but cannot because they do not have the capability or are facing some big challenge themselves at the time. At the very worst, you might discover that a relationship is not what you thought it was or is in need of repair.

Most of the time though, people will want to help.

No matter what happens, new opportunities will appear to you, and you will have grown in compassion, gratitude and faith.

Asking each other for help requires that we have the courage to be vulnerable – to risk real human connection.

May the members of this church practice this together.

May this be a community of love and support that nurtures both asking for and offering help to one another.

May we walk in the ways of love together, giving and receiving of one another’ s unique gifts and abilities.

The song says, “I get by with a little help from my friends.”

May we go even further.

May we proclaim together, “We’ re going to thrive with a little help from our friends, our families and this, our beloved religious community”.

Amen.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
July 2, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Many, if not most of the world’s religions have a sect that is mystical. We will examine why religious experience is so often to be found through mystery, awe and wonder.

What if I told you that there might be a relatively simple way you can become a more compassionate, ethical person, increase your life satisfaction, slow down you perception of time and improve your health?

Now, what if I told you that to gain these benefits all you need to do is have more experiences of mystery, awe and wonder, brought on at least in part by a sense of your own relative insignificance given the enormity of our universe and the vastness of time.

The good news is, paradoxically, the experience often also involves a mysterious, ineffable sense of expansion – of connection to, even oneness with all that is, ever has been and ever will be. Within these experiences, there is also a sense of non-duality – that the ultimate reality is non-linear and much more complex than can be expressed through either/or thinking.

Broadly defined, these are sometimes called mystical experiences, and mysticism, a belief that this type of experience is necessary for faith, can be found within all of the major world religions. Mystic sects have developed within each of them that have created various practices, some monastic and some communal, intended to bring about these types of experiences.

Within the monotheistic religions, mystics believe that one can only know the ultimate reality of God through this mysterious, awe-inducing direct experience of the divine. And this is because God is so large and so great – so beyond our usual comprehension. God is beyond what words or concepts can capture, and so this ineffable and fleeting experience of oneness with God is necessary.

For instance, many Hindus have concepts called the Atman, the individual soul of the self and the Brahman, the cosmic soul. The merging of the Atman into the Brahman, is necessary for human beings to end a continuous cycle of suffering and rebirth. Paradoxically though, the Atman has always been the Brahman.

The Abrahamic religions – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – all also contain mystic sects. For example, the Muslim Sufis engage in practices and a way of life intended to bring about experiences of the divine -experiences of awe and wonder over a sense of both insignificance in the face of the divine and at the same time oneness with the divine. Again, we find a sense of paradox and non-duality.

Notably, mysticism does not require a belief in a deity at all. In Taoism there is a mystical sense that one must flow into the Tao, which is literally translated “the way” and is more a process, pattern and underlying substance of all that exists that cannot be grasped as an intellectual concept. It must be lived and experienced.

The Buddhists have a concept of “no-self” or release of self that must be experienced in order know Dharma, the ultimate reality that involves constant change and paradox. Even the very concept of “no-self” is non-dualistic. It is like the flame in our chalice, which visibly exists to our eyes. Yet, it is actually being burnt away and begun anew in each instant and therefor, also does not exist.

And, one can certainly find mysticism within Unitarian Universalism. The transcendentalists of the 19th century developed at least in part in reaction against what they viewed as the overly staid, overly intellectual Unitarians of the time. They argued that an experience of the over soul, a kind of oneness between God, man and nature was necessary for spiritual development, and they often found and experience of wonder and awe through nature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, perhaps the most well known of them all, wrote of an experience he had in a forest, “Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes, I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”

Likewise, Universalism also has long had elements of mysticism within it. Later, after the merger of the Unitarians and the Universalists, many folks with a spiritual grounding in the earth-centered faiths came into Unitarian Universalism, and also brought experiential practices into our religion.

Today, even many Unitarian Universalists (or UUs for short) who ascribe to non-theistic (or at least firmly undecided) humanism and/or naturalism, nevertheless also consider themselves mystics. We even have a national UU Mystics in Community group with a website, newsletter and Facebook page.

Rather than experiences of a diety, these UUs describe having had experiences of an ultimate reality or a oneness with all of humanity and with all of existence. Often these are brought about through encountering the wonders of nature, contemplating the mysteries of our universe, or engaging in ritual practices such as meditation.

Even loss, sorrow and facing the mysteries of death can sometimes lead to mystical experiences. Here is a story from someone who found themself in just that situation.

“It was a few weeks after my mom died. I was lying in my bed the evening after her memorial service. I was experiencing this strange mixture of grief and gratitude all at once – gratitude that she was no longer suffering – gratitude that I had been able to be with her until the last. I had been able to look into her eyes and tell her how much I loved her and how grateful I was for all she has done for me. I held her hand and sat with her even after she had fallen silent and her eyes had gone dim. I was there at the sacred moment when she exhaled her last breath.

At the same time, I was feeling overwhelming sadness and grief over losing her. I had this sense of unreality. How could it be that I would never see her again, never get to hug her again or tell her that I love her? And there was this feeling of being unmoored. With my mom now gone, I felt unanchored in my world, adrift and floating without direction.

And as I drifted between fitful sleeping and then waking up, being washed over by great waves of sadness and sorrow and contemplating the mysteries of life and death and my own mortality, I suddenly had this experience of spreading out, dissolving into all that was around me.

It’s hard to describe, but it was as if I was in the leaves of the trees in my yard and in the roots of the plants in my garden. I flew in the birds, swam within the creatures of the sea, moved within my fellow human beings and the myriad creatures of our earth. So too, was I in the rocks and stones, in the wind and rain, ever expanding, ever dissolving, ever no more and yet ever everywhere.

I would swear it was not a dream. It didn’t feel like a dream. It seemed more real than a dream, somehow more real even than day-to-day reality.

And then it stopped.

I was in my room again. Me again.

And yet, I felt a greater sense of peace, a greater acceptance. The grief and sorrow were not gone, but somehow the unreality was no longer so present. The feelings I was having seemed more right, more necessary.

And then, I have no idea why, but into my head popped the one about how the Dali Lama orders pizza.

He just calls up and says, “Make me one with everything.”

And that terrible joke sent me into a burst of giggles. I realized that I could not remember the last time I had laughed or felt joy.

And suddenly I knew that I would eventually find my bearings, get anchored in my world again. I would miss her profoundly the rest of my days and yet the love I knew for her would go on, carried within an all-encompassing love that is enduring and may well even be eternal.

So somehow, delving into mystery, allowing ourselves to be drawn into that sense of awe and wonder, letting mystical experience happen if it comes seems to be helpful to us. As I mentioned earlier, scientific research is beginning to discover it can be beneficial to us, whether we associate such experiences with a divinity or not.

I don’t know why this might be true. It’s a mystery.

I think maybe it is a result of, a response to the situation in which we find ourselves. Perhaps, it is a shift in perspective that brings us both humbleness and a sense of expansiveness and possibility.

David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Stanford, illustrates this perspective shift through describing what happened some years ago when NASA conducted the Ultra Deep Field Experiment. In the experiment, NASA repeatedly pointed the Hubble telescope at a tiny point of our sky that appeared to be completely dark – so tiny that it would be equivalent to our perspective of looking at the tip of a pencil held at arms length. Using technology I do not completely understand, they hoped to capture any light photons that might have emanated from that tiny patch of space that would not be visible to our naked eye but that could be detected through the Hubble lens and this technology. They thought they might discover a few stars previously unknown to them.

Instead, they discovered thousands of galaxies – trillions of stars like our own in just that tiny patch of dark sky. And because the light from those galaxies had traveled such a great distance to reach the lens of the Hubble telescope, it had taken a long, long time for it to cross that distance, even at the speed of light. Those thousands of galaxies, those trillions of stars in that tiny patch of our sky had existed billions upon billions of years ago.

Now, place ourselves and our lifespan within the immensity, the enormity of the size of our universe and the vastness of that kind of time period. It’s humbling and yet awe inducing. For Eagleman, the enormity of the mysteries that surround us, the vastness of what we don’t know, far from being frustrating, is full of wonder, creative potential and almost infinite possibilities for new discoveries. In fact, he calls himself a possibilian and rejects both fundamentalist, literal interpretations of the world’s religions but also rejects the absolute certainty expressed by some of the neo-atheists. He quotes Voltaire who said, “Doubt is an uncomfortable position. Certainty is an absurd one.”

Over the past 400 years, science and mathematics have brought us wondrous discoveries about how our world and universe work. It has created amazing advances in technology. It has even expanded the average human lifespan. And yet, all that we still do not know in this incomprehensibly vast universe means that ours is still a very, very small island of knowledge floating in an almost infinite sea of mystery.

If we think of our current knowledge as that island surrounded by an immense sea of what we do not know, that means that even as we learn more, as our island of knowledge grows, the circumference, the perimeter of where our knowledge bumps up against that sea of the unknown also expands. We generate even more questions and more potential discoveries to explore.

That sea of the unknown includes that which we cannot yet explore scientifically because our scientific toolkit does not yet have the ability to observe and measure it. It is the yet to be discovered territory, the possibilities wherein our island of knowledge will continue to grow, continue to take us into new understandings and new possibilities.

And the unknown also includes the meaning making and experiences of beauty we create for ourselves over and over again, generation after generation, as we learn more and create new metaphorical understandings – the art and poetry and theatre and dance and literature and storytelling and music we have yet to imagine.

The unknown includes how we are interconnected with the web of all existence in ways that we do not yet fully understand.

Given this perspective, how can we not be mystics? How can we not look out over that vast sea of mystery and be filled with awe and wonder?

Perhaps our human capacity for mystical experience is there to give us glimpses into that almost infinite sea of mysteriousness that surrounds us – to help us gain that shift in perspective – to fill us with a sense of humility, expansiveness and interconnectedness all at once.

My friends, we call ourselves a people of faith. The very word faith implies an acceptance that there is much we do not know, that revelation is not sealed but rather is continuously unfolding.

Given that, shall we embrace the unknown, praise uncertainty, celebrate nearly endless possibility?

What if we did that?

What if we dive into the sea of mysteriousness and swim in its vast waters, at least from time to time?

Might it be where the divine is yet to be discovered?

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
June 18, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Telling stories is central to how human beings make meaning and view our world. How do the stories we learn and tell ourselves affect our lives and our society?

Sermon

Genesis: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the deep. Then God said, “Let there be light”. And there was light.

Then God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters.” Thus God made the firmament, and divided the waters, which were under the firmament from the waters, which were above the it; and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven.

Turn

The Sky World Woman: Back at the beginning, the world that we now know as earth was nothing but water, while above it was a larger, more ancient world – above it was the sky world.

And a woman from the sky world, who was very curious, had dug a hole in that sky world. She dug and dug until she dug all the way through and fell into the hole and out the other side of it. And so it was that this sky woman came tumbling down toward the vast ocean of water that was the whole of our world at that time.

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Then God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear”; and it was so.

Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed, and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind”; and it was so.

Then God said, “Let the waters abound with an abundance of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth. Let the earth bring forth the living creature according to its kind: cattle and creeping thing and beast of the earth”; and it was so.

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Now, living upon our ancient watery world were all manner of water animals, and the animals looked up to heavens and saw the sky world woman falling toward them at an altogether alarming rate of speed. And so the geese and ducks and other water birds flew up to her, forming a net with their bodies and catching her as she fell, bringing her gently to the face of the waters, where they placed her on the back of a giant sea turtle.

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Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created male then female. Then God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply.

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Well, now the sky world woman and the water world animals had a problem, because the sea turtle could not hold her up forever, and the woman really could not swim all that well. One of the animals, many say it was the platypus, recalled that there might be a substance called mud deep below the surface of the waters and perhaps that could be brought up to create something upon which the woman could rest.

And so one by one the animals began trying to dive as deep as they could in search of mud. The pelicans tried. A walrus tried, and on and on, but each of them returned to the surface without having been able to go deep enough to bring up any mud. Finally, the otter tried. It was gone avery, very long time under the waters until they all feared it had drowned.

Suddenly though, it popped to the surface of the waters a scoop of mud in its paw.

The sky woman spread the mud on the back of the turtle and began to sing and dance upon it, and the animals sang and danced with her and the mud began to spread and separate the waters until there was plenty of muddy land for the Woman to live upon, as well as son1e of the animals who had decided to go with her.

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Now, you probably know the rest of the biblical Genesis story.

God puts Adam and Eve into a great garden – a perfect world of beauty and bliss where all their needs are met. He tells them there is only one rule. They may not eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. They do anyway, many tellings of this story blame the woman, and an angry God thrusts them out of the garden and into a howling wilderness, after which much toiling, trouble, sinning and suffering ensue.

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In our other story this morning, which I found through the work of two Native American writers and storytellers, Robin Wall Kimmerer and Thomas King, the Sky Woman gives birth to twins, who work with the animals to mold the mud into mountains, valleys and plains, as well as to cut rivers and streams through it. From seeds the woman had in her hand from all her digging before she fell, they place upon the land all of the plants and vegetation that the animals and early humans will need for food and shelter.

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Now, for those of you on this side of the sanctuary to whom I just told the Genesis creation story, let’s think about some of the key themes and elements of this story.

There is a formality to it. It creates a hierarchical world – God, then humans, then animals and plants. Humans are given dominion over all other life. We have an omnipotent, male God who speaks of all creation into existence in a solitary, individual act. We have humans being given abundance and then, because of their original sin (and thus their fundamental depravity), being thrown into scarcity. The world is a competitive place – God versus the devil – humans versus the elements – and each other. We have woman made second and blamed for the original sin. We have harmony being transformed into chaos.

And let’s think about what sort of culture those of us with this creation mythology might form – one that is hierarchical, staid and individualistic – one that focuses on competition and scarcity?

Perhaps it might become a culture that values power over others and thus could easily become warlike, could justify imperialism, colonization, slavery, racism and other forms of oppression – a culture that is foundationally patriarchal and that sees the natural world as a resource to be exploited.

Turn

And for those of you on this side of the sanctuary, some of the main themes of the Native American creation story I told to you are quite different.

It is far less formal, even playful. There is no omnipotent God.

Instead, the humans and the animals start with divine-like abilities. Working in cooperation, the humans and the animals bring the world into being, turn chaos toward harmony. They exist communally and with far more balance and equity – no human dominion here. The original human is female, and the story has a maternal quality to it.

With this as a creation myth, what sort of culture and society might we form? Might it not be very different?

Now, I am over simplifying a bit. Still, the differences are stark.

The power our stories have over us at a very fundamental level as individuals and as communities and societies is clear.

We are storytelling creatures. We make sense of our experiences by folding them into a narrative that our brains are constantly constructing and reconstructing for us.

And this is important to know, because once we let a story loose in our world, we can never really take it back. We can only change the telling of it or create a competing narrative.

Of course, we should not read these mythological stories as being literally, historically true. They are to be read as metaphor, as poetic and symbolic. Reading them as too literal is a mistake we often accuse fundamentalists of making.

Yet, I think we too can do this in a sort of reverse way, by also reading these stories too literally and thereby dismissing them without considering the poetic meaning and beauty we might find through them.

Many of you are likely familiar with the Christian story of the virgin birth of Jesus, the divine son of God, whom God sent to the earth only that he might die on the cross to wash our depravity clean with his very blood so that whosoever should believeth in him should not perish, but rise again as he did after his crucifixion.

I, personally, cannot take this story in a literal sense. And told the way it often gets told, it sometimes embodies values and ideas that I believe can be harmful – violence, human depravity, redemption through suffering, the spilling of blood and death.

There are other ways this mythological story can be told though, with a poetry that I find much more agreeable.

Here’s an example.

Once there was a spark of divinity that arose out of humanity’s highest aspirations for living more fully, with more love, compassion and joy. And this spark lured humans toward the more life-giving, lifefulfilling choices available to them within the creative possibilities of their universe.

But the evils of avarice, jealousy and tribalism obscured their ability to see these creative choices held before them. The powerful could not see past their dominance and greed. The poor and oppressed were prevented from reaching for their full potential.

Still, there was good in humans. And this found expression in the story of a child – a child who represented our highest human aspirations. The child grew into a wise leader, teaching others the healing power of love, drawing them toward compassion, calling them to give preference to the poor and oppressed until such circumstances would no longer exist.

But some of the most powerful among them would not hear this call. They vowed never to allow such teachings to continue, and they killed this wise one to extinguish that spark of divinity.

What they did not know, is that human aspirations transcend any one person. They rise again and again even up against the physical loss of one or more among us.

What they could not know was that by killing one person, they only caused that spark to grow stronger, carried forward in the hearts of those who wished to dwell in love and in all that is life giving.

Same story told metaphorically and expressing a very different set of values, not to mention far less blood and gore than in the Mel Gibson film about it.

And I think it is important for us to reclaim and recast some of these ancient stories because they have been implanted into the very foundational structures of our societies. Social and political science research has found that these myths are transmitted even into modern secular societies where, for even the non-religious, they are enculturated through the ethno-symbols, memories, values, rituals and traditions embedded within the ongoing practices of a people. They are present even within the very language in which we think and speak.

Some of you may have heard me talk about how when I was five years old, I told my mom I was going to be a minister when I grew up. But we were Southern Baptists, and when I found I could not fit within that religion, I created a story about what all religion was and so thoroughly rejected the religious stories of my childhood, that I left my self with absolutely no context within which to even consider ministry.

It wasn’t until many years later that I found Unitarian Universalism and began to feel a calling toward ministry resurging.

I described that calling to a rather sharp-tongued friend of mine as “a really really persistent little voice inside me”. She replied, “Well, tell the little voice to shut the hell up.” I laughed. She did too.

Later though, I realized that telling the little voice to shut up was what the story I had created for myself about religion had been causing me to do for all those many years. I began to recreate my own story about religion, as well as reframe the religious stories of my childhood, so that I could finally fulfill the aspiration toward which I felt beckoned.

And I think that it is vital that we as a liberal religious faith reclaim and recast these religious stories even though we may not share the beliefs and theology they have sometimes been used to express. They are a part of the very fabric of the culture and country in which we live.

And currently they far too often are being used to cast a narrative that justifies vast wealth inequality, authoritarianism, violence, oppression, hyper-individualism and the destruction of our planet. Certain folks are among the valued, chosen people and thus deserving of their wealth and power and others are expendable or even to be debased.

The New York Times recently ran an article about how a new public and political, liberal religious voice is awakening after lying largely dormant for nearly 40 years.

I believe that voice is sorely needed right now. It’s been too quiet for too long. To amplify our highest aspirations for greater peace, environmental stewardship, compassion and communalism, we have to be willing to reclaim our religious voices in the public square and recast the religious narrative that has taken hold. We have to be willing to use words like morality, good and evil.

And, if we are to ever develop greater understanding and compassion with those whom we disagree, we must also be able to hear and understand their stories and to speak our own.

The stories we tell and the ways in which we tell them define us as human beings.

To change ourselves, our relationships, our communities, our nation and our world for the better, we will have to reclaim and reframe some stories that have already been let loose in our world.

From time to time, we will even have to create new ones.

It may not be as hard as it might seem. Maybe we dive into the deep, bring up a little mud and begin the act of creation over and over agaIn.

May we sing and dance as we do so. Amen.

Benediction

As you go out into our world now, may you carry with you stories of compassion, joy and peace.
May the story of your life be centered in love.
May the ongoing story we write together be one of justice and healing.
May the congregation say, “Amen” and “Blessed Be”.

Go in peace.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
June 4, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

We are in challenging times, encountering much change within UUism and our church. We look at how stress can show up in our lives and steps to manage it.

Reading:
By Erika A. Hewitt

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

Silence the voices that ask you to be perfect.

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

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

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

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

Reading:
David O Rankin

There must be a time when we cease speaking
to be fully present with ourselves.

There must be a time when we exclude clamor
by listening to nothing whatsoever.

There must be a time when we forgo our plans
as if we had no plans at all.

There must be a time when we abandon conceits
and tap into a deeper wisdom.

There must be a time when we stop striving
and find the peace within.

Sermon

After the first day of the meeting, we had a nice dinner and an opening night party and then all went off to our rooms to get some sleep. Wayne and I were in a room located on one of the upper floors of the hotel. At around 4:30 a.m., the next morning, the building started shaking violently. I anchored myself in bed holding tight to one edge of it until the shaking stopped, at which point, the building commenced swaying back and forth, something that felt most unnatural for a building to be doing. Foolishly, I got up and looked out the window. The water in the pool far below was splashing out of each side of it. It looked about half empty. Terrified, I dashed back into the center of the room.

We had just experienced the Northridge Earthquake, the epicenter of which had been less than 60 miles away.

After the swaying finally stopped, and we had calmed down a little, we finally went back to bed to try to get some fitful sleep, when suddenly, a speaker in the wall of our room blared to life and the very young sounding voice of the overnight manager came over it.

“Ladies and Gentleman, we have just experienced an earthquake.” “Dooooon’t panic.”

Then there was this clicking sound, which I am guessing is when he thought he had turned the mike off, and then we hear from further away, “So, what do we do now?”

We found out the next day, that one of the other meeting attendees had panicked, bolting from his bed wearing nothing but his underwear and out the door of his room, which slammed shut behind him. He ran across the hallway right into a mirror on the wall opposite his room, breaking the glass with his forehead. And so it was that he found himself, dressed in only his skivvies, locked out of his room with his forehead bleeding.

Now, the moral of this story is stress and anxiety can make us do really stupid stuff. They also can be bad for our health, (even when we don’t run around half naked and bust our forehead on a mirror).

The terms “stress” and “anxiety” are interrelated. They can cause very similar effects on our behavior, health and mental status. They are not exactly the same though.

Stress is normally thought of us an acute reaction to external events or situations in our lives.

Anxiety is an internal state rooted in fear that can exist with or without such external stressors.

In common everyday language though, we often say something like, “I am really stressed out” when we are actually feeling is anxiety, whether or not it is in reaction to an external stressor.

Family systems theory is a field in psychology and psychiatry that looks at how entire human systems – families, communities, churches, nations – can as a system “get stressed out”. Anxiety can fill up the whole system.

The entire system can start to do stupid stuff.

And we as members of the system can pass the anxiety around to one another, causing it to spread throughout the system like a virus.

The longer the anxiety lasts, the more chronic it becomes, the more it can hold us back and do us harm to us, as individuals and to our family, church or community.

And, my beloveds, we are living in a highly stressful, anxiety provoking time.

We face potentially devastating consequences from global climate change, and, speaking of doing stupid stuff, Trump just withdrew us from the global climate pact. Covfefe indeed.

We are witnessing terrorism. We are experiencing increased hate crimes and violence.

No matter what our political outlook, the divisiveness and polarization we are seeing at the national and state levels produces anxiety for folks of all political persuasions.

I know many folks in this church have recently gotten more involved in political activism than ever before, moved to action by fears of growing authoritarianism and harmful public policy being enacted.

It’s wonderful that so many folks are living out their highest values in the public and political arena. Yet doing so can also stress us out. It can be hard to keep up with all of the rallies, petitions, town meetings and other actions. It is scary to call up the office of a politician whom we know disagrees with us.

I’ve talked with many of you who have expressed how difficult it can be to balance all of this with the demands of life and family and just paying attention to our own needs for physical and mental wellbeing.

And this is in addition to the normal stressors of our day-to-day lives – jobs, bills, overloaded schedules and the like.

Peter Steinke is a renowned congregational consultant who applies family systems theory to churches. Listen to some things he lists as potentially being the most anxiety provoking for a religious community:

Strife or conflict at the denominational level. Check.
Large decreases or increases in attendance or membership. We have averaged about 40 more folks attending on Sundays since the election. Check.
The unexpected absence of a minister or other key leadership. Check.
Building construction or renovation. Check.
Ladies and gentlemen, doooooon’t panic.

Joking aside we are experiencing a lot of things that can make as fearful and anxious, and, as I mentioned earlier, a chronic state of anxiety can cause us harm.

As individuals, it can cause ill health effects too numerous to mention them all. Examples include things like premature heart disease, mental health problems, infertility and immune suppression. It can also impede our memory, decision-making and general ability to function effectively.

In our families and congregation, anxiety can result in getting stuck, where we avoid making the tough decisions and lose our ability to respond creatively as a group. We can lose sight of our mission. It can lead to the formation of factions and infighting. It can result in fake fights and highly emotional responses that are greatly out of proportion to whatever the stressor might be.

In one church, lots and lots of email messages were sent expressing great upset over the fact that the church secretary used the term “worship associate” rather than “lay leader” in the order of service one Sunday.

That was a fake fight to avoid the real anxiety that folks were feeling because a new minister was making larger changes to how they did worship overall.

OK, we know anxiety can have these ill effects and that we currently have all these potential sources of anxiety.

So, what do we do now?

I’m going to share some of what we can do, but first I want to offer the caveat that I an not seeing much at all in the way of anxious reactivity currently in this church. I offer the following as tools should we need them.

At the congregational level, there are several healthy ways we can handle anxiety and help keep its level lower. We have in place structures and systems, such as our covenant of healthy relations and our conflict resolution procedure. These and other resources are on our church website.

We also try to make clear what the lines of authority and accountability are. For example, our senior minister, Meg, has asked me to serve as the acting senior minister during her sabbatical so that folks will know to whom to take matters they would normally have brought to Meg.

Another thing we can do is use “I statements” when having important discussions in the church. I statements are when I clearly label my point of view as what I think, rather than expressing my world view as a fact of nature to which, of course, any reasonable person would naturally have to agree.

We can also help prevent the spread of anxiety within the church system by avoiding what’s called triangulation.

I’ll give you an example, but I must pause for the following disclaimer. “The persons and events in this triangulation example are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.”

OK, so triangulation is when Tommy is upset with Walter because Walter was supposed to give him a ride to church last Sunday. Walter completely forgot and did not pick him up. This Sunday, Tommy sees Walter getting coffee in the fellowship hall, but instead of talking directly with Walter, he goes to Suzy and says, “I’m so mad at Walter I could spit. He was supposed to give me a ride last Sunday and he never showed up. Could you go tell him how rude that was and make him apologize to me?

Translation: “Hi Suzy, have some of my anxiety.”

Suzy can avoid being triangulated by refusing to take on the anxiety and saying something like, “Wow, that sounds like you really need to talk with Walter. Want me to walk over there with you?”

What Dr. Steinke and other family systems folks will tell you though is that the number one thing we can all do to most greatly lower the anxiety in our family, community or church is to work on lowering our own anxiety as individuals.

We do that through a process called, “self-differentiation”. Self-differentiation is when we get to know ourselves and our own patterns deeply. We define what our own highest values and beliefs are.

And, we identify activities – practices that are calming and centering for us and get disciplined about engaging in such practices. By doing all of this, we can become a more non-anxious presence when we interact with others.

Now being a non-anxious presence doesn’t mean that we will never feel anxiety. It just means that we have identified our unconscious responses to anxiety – our patterns and emotional reactions, so we can make these patterns conscious to ourselves when they are happening. This then allows us to make calmer, healthier choices if needed.

Many of our patterns grow out of the fight, flight or freeze responses embedded in the more ancient parts of our brain. And none of these are necessarily bad. Any of them might have been quite useful depending upon what predator or other threat our ancestors might have encountered. It is when we are not aware of them that they can be the wrong choice for the situation.

So if you’re one of those folks that has been engaging in the constant political resistance I was discussing earlier and your are feeling stressed out and in need of taking flight from it all for a little while. If you’re feeling the urge to escape by, as our choir sang earlier, wanting to rock and roll all night and party everyday (metaphorically speaking, of course), that’s OK, at least for a while! Just make it your conscious choice and know it may not be the healthiest thing for you as a way of life.

One of the things that our unconscious fight, flight and freeze responses can do is disguise anxiety as a different emotion. Identifying what that is for you can be very helpful.

How does anxiety show up for you? For some of us, it may be the classic fear response – a tightness in the chest, elevated heart rate, rapid breathing, an urge for flight. For others, it may show up as anger – an urge to fight. Yet others as a numbness, an inability to feel, which can be incapacitating – like being stuck or frozen.

Family systems theory says that we also translate these unconscious patterns into ways of interacting with each other within our family or church system that once again are largely outside of our awareness.

The three major styles include, 1. conflict. We fight – we argue, blame and criticize others. 2. distance, where we emotionally take flight – we distance ourselves from others and avoid uncomfortable yet important topics. And finally, fusion, a freeze response in which people get stuck in patterns where some people in a system over-function, taking on most of the responsibilities, decisions and activities required to maintain the system, while other folks under-function, abdicating these responsibilities.

By knowing ourselves and our patterns, we can interrupt anxiety and our unconscious responses to it.

Finally, I want to close by inviting you in these stressful times, to inoculate yourself against anxiety and give yourself a way to lower it when it does come, by finding one or more spiritual practices that work for you.

Now, the very term “spiritual practice” can cause anxiety sometimes because we think it necessarily has to be religious or onerous like – something like extended meditation every day or lengthy journaling.

It doesn’t have to be though. It can be anything from walks in nature to photography to knitting to gardening to cooking to singing, dancing, making music to writing to creating art to taking moments to cuddle with our loves ones, be they human or of the four legged furry variety. Humor and play can help a lot too.

Whatever is calming for you. Whatever brings you back to center and that you can commit to doing on a regular schedule.

A spiritual practice can be quite simple and yet quite effective. Sometimes if I am having a long or difficult day during the week here at church, I come in here. I sit sit alone in this sanctuary for just a few moments and feel the echoes of the sacred things that happen when we worship together in this space each Sunday.

And my breathing slows. And my thoughts stop racing.

And my emotions find calmness. And my heart begins to soar.

And I am able to know again that which I hold most important. I experience again that which is larger than me but of which I am part.

That which is sacred washes over me again in that quiet stillness.

Where do you find that stillness? What brings you that calm? What slows your breathing even as your heart soars?

My friends, stress and anxiety do not survive our encounters with the sacred.

Amen

Benediction

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

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson & Laine Young
May 28, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

For flower communion each person brings some flowers to church, and we enjoy them collected all together, recalling the beauty in our own diversity.

Reading

An Eye for Miracles
Diego Valeri

You who have an eye for miracles
regard the bud
now appearing on the bare branch
of the fragile young tree.

It’s a mere dot,
a nothing.
But already
it’s a flower,
already a fruit,
already its own death and resurrection.

Chris Jimmerson’s Homily

Each year around this time, many of our Unitarian Universalist churches engage in a ritual ceremony we call the “Flower Communion”. In just a few minutes, Laine will tell us about the history of our Flower Communion and lead us through our trading of flowers ritual itself.

But why has this ceremony become such a well-loved annual tradition? What larger truths does this enduring ritual allow us to embody together?

As I look out over the flowers we have arranged up front here, as well as those you still hold, I find striking the diverse beauty of the individual blooms. Somehow, the individual radiance of each one of them is magnified by both its unity and contrast with the other flowers.

Also though, gathered together, they form a bouquet that is its own new form of beauty, different than that of any of the separate, individual flowers.

That’s quite a metaphor for what happens when we gather in community, each of us bringing our individual talents, abilities, challenges and blessings for our world and one another – each of us bringing our own perspectives and desires.

And at our best, just like we do when we exchange flowers in the flower communion, we trade at least something of these magnificent expressions of our individual selves. At our best, each of us goes home with something new and beautiful, some broadened perspective because of our encounters with one another.

At our very best, we form a radiant bouquet that is greater than the sum of its individual elements. Together, our individual flowerings are amplified so that we are far better able to nourish souls, transform lives and do justice.

I think that within this metaphor dwells what has been a historical, theological challenge for Unitarian Universalists.

On the one hand, we arise from an ancestry with a strong inclination toward individualism – the heretics who have again and again questioned dogma and called for the freedom and right of conscious of the individual.

We are the products of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”, Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience”.

Yet, our history also includes the legacy of the Universalists, who valued a religious community of all souls and believed in the universal salvation of all people.

Likewise, our Unitarian ancestry has given us our covenantal way of being together. We make a promise as a religious community to walk together in the ways of love.

And we have tended to view this instinct toward individualism (and sometimes radical individualism) and our inclination for forming deep religious community as standing in linear opposition to one another.

From this perspective, we have had to try to balance the rights and inherent worth of each individual with our desire to create strong and institutionally sustainable communities. We have seen it as either/or rather than both/and.

That is understandable given a long human history in which in which community norms and biases have so often stifled and oppressed individual expression and flourishing.

I think what the Flower Communion helps us to better understand though, is that this linear duality between individuality and community does not necessarily exist. The interplay between each of us as individuals and the larger community we wish create can be far more complex and multidimensional.

Like when we gather our flowers together, we can create communities that value our differences and see them as what fuels the richness and fullness of the community as a whole.

We can create communities wherein each of us can radiate our own beauty by locating ourselves in both solidarity and loving contrast with one another.

Our flower ritual reminds us and helps us to more deeply grasp that rather than having to be in opposition to one another, individuality and communalism can exist together in harmony.

And that truly is communion.

Laine Young’s Homily

In the city of Prague, in the land of Czechoslovakia, in the year nineteen twenty three, there was a church. But the building did not look much like a church. It had no bells, no spires, no stained glass windows. It had no piano to make beautiful music. It had no candles or chalices. It had no flowers.

The church did have some things. It had four walls and a ceiling and a floor. It had a door and a few windows. It had some wooden chairs. But that was all, plain and simple.

Except… the church also had people who came to it every Sunday. It had a minister, and his name was Norbert Capek. He had been the minister at the plain and simple church for two years. Every Sunday, Minister Capek went to church, and he spoke to the people while they listened, sitting quietly and still in those hard wooden chairs. When he was done speaking, the people talked a little bit among themselves, and then they went home. And that was all-no music, no candles, no food. There was no coffee, bagels, not even breakfast tacos.

Springtime came to the city of Prague and Norbert Capek went out for a stroll. The rains had come, the birds were singing, and flowers were blooming all over the land. The world was beautiful. Then an idea came to him, simple and clear, plain as day. The next Sunday, he asked all the people in the church to bring a flower, or a budding branch, or even a twig. Each person was to bring one.

“What kind?” they asked. “What color? What size?”

“You choose,” he said. “Each of you choose what you like.”

And so, on the next Sunday, which was also the first day of summer, the people came with flowers of all different colors and sizes and kinds. There were yellow daisies and red roses. There were white lilies and blue asters, dark-eyed pansies and light green leaves. Pink and purple, orange and gold-there were all those colors and more. Flowers filled all the vases, and the church wasn’t so plain and simple anymore.

Minister Capek spoke to the people while they listened, sitting quiet and still in those hard wooden chairs. “These flowers are like ourselves,” he said. “Different colors and different shapes, and different sizes, each needing different kinds of care-but each beautiful, each important and special, in its own way.”

When he was done speaking, the people talked a little bit among themselves, and then they each chose a different flower from the vases before they went home. And that was all-and it was beautiful, plain and simple as the day.

It is now time for us to share in our own Flower Communion. I ask that as you each approach the communion vases, do so quietly – reverently – with a sense of how important it is for each of us to address our world and one another with gentleness, justice, and love.

Once you bring your flower up, select a different flower to take with you. One that particularly speaks to you. As you take your chosen flower, noting its particular shape and beauty, please remember to handle it carefully. It is a gift that someone else has brought to you. It represents that person’s unique humanity, and therefore deserves your kindest touch.

Norbert Capek started this ritual to celebrate the beauty of our faith and the people in it. Remembering that the sounds of children are a part of the quiet, let us now share quietly in this Unitarian Universalist ritual of oneness, community, and love.

Benediction

And so go forth into our world, holding tangible representations of the beauty we have shared with one another.

And so go forth, knowing we carry the richness and fullness of this religious community with us.

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

Go with love. Go in peace.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
May 21, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Sometimes what helps the most is simply being a calm, compassionate presence in the lives of those we care about.

Several years ago, I was volunteering with a non-profit organization that assists the elderly and the disabled. Part of what I did was to visit with an elderly African American woman who was confined to Austin State hospital because she had end stage kidney failure and progressive dementia, and she didn’t have the resources for private care. She had survived incredible challenges and outright racial oppression during a long life in New Orleans, ending up in Austin because of hurricane Katrina.

When I would go to see her, I knew that the brokenness wasn’t going to get fixed. She wasn’t going to get better. Her present and her future were defined by uncertainty.

And so often, when I would visit her, all that could be done for her had already been done and everything that we needed to say to each other, we’d already said, and the only comfort I could provide was just to sit with her, just to be together, in the silence.

And every once in a while, she would suddenly look at me with this fire in her eyes and a slight grin on her face, and the quite strength and loving character that were her essence would shine through the dementia.

And I feel so fortunate to have gotten to hold at least some small part of her story.

It was also a challenging and very uncertain time for me for a number of reasons. I only later realized that those visits had become a time of calmness, love and a paradoxical sense of stability for me.

What I came to realize, is that the really transformative presence in those visits was her. I was blessed so much more than I could ever give to her.

My heart broke a little each time, yet with each break it seemed to expand a little, and the capacity for love grew – my ability to embrace uncertainty and yet get into the present moment expanded.

This morning we are missing a calm and compassionate presence among us. Our senior minister, Rev. Meg Barnhouse, as I mentioned earlier, has had to go on sabbatical so that she can heal from an infection that developed after surgery on her hip implant.

If you are visiting with us for the first time or started visiting only recently and have not yet gotten to experience what Meg is like – I can tell you that she exudes this presence that is filled with calmness and kindness.

So, understandably, knowing what Meg is going through and being without our spiritual leader’ s presence for a while can be worrisome and upsetting for folks. I want you to know that it is absolutely normal if, as an active participant in this religious community, you are experiencing feelings of worry or stress or even a sense of loss.

When something like this happens, it destroys our illusion of certainty. We are reminded that despite our best-laid plans and our comforting routines, we do not have complete control over the events of our lives.

Now, I don’t mean that we shouldn’t plan or that there is no value in our routines, just that we have to stop sometimes and realize that our future, indeed even the next moment, is uncertain for each of us. Our agency lies, not in having complete control over the events of our lives but in how we respond to those events.

By embracing that uncertainty, we can be better able to adapt our plans and adjust our routines when the “inevitable unexpected” erupts in our lives.

In fact a religious worldview known as process theology sees in uncertainty a divine process that contains all of the creative complexity that drives the continuous unfolding of our universe. Through this very uncertainty, this divine process also offers up to each of us the creative possibilities from which we may choose in each moment of our own, continuously unfolding lives.

From this point of view, getting intentional about embracing uncertainty and fully living each present moment becomes a spiritual practice. I think that, though no one would wish to have to go through such an extended recovery, by choosing to take the time she needs to fully heal, by accepting the choices before her and making the best choice she could from among them, Meg has modeled this very spiritual practice for us.

Now, when I first started making those visits to my friend in the state hospital that I told you about earlier, one of the first challenges I encountered is that I wanted to be able do something to help her. That’s also a natural human response to such a situation. It is natural to want to do something for people we care about when they are in need. I suspect also though, that getting busy doing something can be another way we try to establish a veneer of control when faced with uncertainty. I know it is for me personally.

And yet, as I mentioned, really all that could be done for her was already being done, so all that I could really do was to be with her – to be present in a calm and cOlnpassionate way. And to do that, I had to love her. I had to open my heart and allow it to risk being broken.

Though Meg’s situation is quite different and much brighter in the long run, still, I am feeling that tug – that need to get busy doing something. I am hearing that from some folks here in the church too, and again, that’s natural. At some point, Meg and Kiya may even let us know if there are things folks can do that are helpful. I know they have both already expressed that your words of support and encouragement in cards, email messages and on Facebook have lifted their spirits and given them fortitude.

It might not surprise you to ~ear that I think Meg holds the welfare of this church and its people in her thoughts and concerns more than anything else. Knowing that, one thing we can do is make it such that Meg knows that this church and its people will be all right during the time she has to be away – that we will take care of each other – that we will continue to support this church and live out its mission.

What if, starting today and throughout the weeks to come, we vowed to offer to each other that calm and compassionate presence with which Meg has continually blessed us? What if do our very best to offer that kindness and loving presence to each and every person who comes through our doors? What if we break our hearts wide open and do our very best to make being present for others like this a way of life?

Now, you might well be thinking, “Sounds great, Chris. How exactly do you propose we go about doing that?”

Great question.

And the answer is, “I don’t entirely know.”

I don’t entirely know because even though I spent a lot of time in seminary spent a lot of time discerning how to show up as that calm, loving presence I hope to be, sometimes I do, but sometimes I fail. I make mistakes. My own anxieties and emotions distract me sometimes. I am imperfect at it. I’m not as good at it as Meg is.

Sometimes I remember to be aware of what kind of presence I am embodying in the check out line at the grocery store, but sometimes I am in a hurry, and I’m distracted and I’m thinking about all of the rest of the things I need to get done that day. And so sometimes even though I may exchange pleasantries with the cashier, I never really make any human connection at all. I just rush through, absorbed by own preoccupations, failing to acknowledge their humanity.

I wonder how often we do the very same thing even with our families and loved ones.

Here is some of what I do know.

I know that we start by simply trying. We start by getting intentional about it. We think back on what happened in that check out line and vow to be lTIOre present the next time. We count to ten or take several deep breaths or do whatever works for us and helps us take a step back when we find ourselves feeling something less than calm and kind in reaction to what our friend at church just said. By that way, that taking a step back works a whole lot better if we do it BEFORE we respond to our friend.

Likewise, we re-read that email message or Facebook post that we have filled with the opposite of loving-kindness before we hit “send” or “post”. Maybe we even delete it and instead just send a message that says, “Hey, could I get together with you soon and talk about this?” I fear that internet communications can turn us into relational cowards, because we can send them from afar and thereby avoid the difficult conversations we need to be having with each other. We don’t have to present with each other and so it is far easier to not be calm or compassionate.

Here is another thing I know. I know that we have to start with ourselves, which can sometimes be the hardest. We start by directing that sense of calmness and compassion to ourselves – our whole selves, warts and imperfections and all. We forgive ourselves when we make mistakes and are not as kind as we aspire to be. We start over again and again, knowing that we can never be present for others in the way that we want to be until we are present first for ourselves in that same loving and kind way.

Part of how we do that is to take care of ourselves physically, emotionally and spiritually. And these take practices and discipline. For me, learning to take better care of myself physically has made a huge difference. When I feel good physically, my emotions and my spirit are lifted also.

Now, here’s the really challenging part. To truly be that calm and compassionate presence in our world, we have to take risks. We have to be vulnerable. We have to love, and when we know love we will also inevitably know loss.

We have to embrace that uncertainty that I was talking about earlier and know that we must love others even when they may not always respond in kind. We must forgive, knowing that perhaps they are just having a terrible time of things and it may well be us having the really bad day and falling short the next time.

We have to know that we will mistakes. We will fail, and so we must learn to forgive ourselves and each other and pick ourselves back up and dust ourselves off and re-center our hearts in that place of compassion and start over again and again, learning what we can each time.

We have to risk our hearts being broken so that they can break wide open and love with a great fierceness.

This is how we offer each other calm and loving presence. Imperfectly, forgivingly, determinedly.

This is how we help each other live the most richly and most fully.

This is how we can feel as if we get to live many lives in the one precious life we have been given.

And the good news is, we have this church, this beloved community, where can practice all of this with each other . We can follow Meg’s example and show up for each other in the ways of kindness, calmness and compassion. We can practice forgiving ourselves and one another when we fall short and practice bringing ourselves back into right relationship if it happens.

And having practiced this loving-kindness, this calm, compassionate presence together, we can become better able to take it out into our daily lives and our world – a world that needs it pretty badly about now.

Our lives are filled with uncertainty, so let us practice living and loving fully in the moment, beginning now, in this time and in this place.

I invite you to rise in body or spirit and, as you are comfortable with it to take the hand of those on each side of you. You can stretch across aisle ways if you wish.

And feeling one another’s touch, feeling the loving presence of those in this hallowed space today, I invite you to repeat after me.

On this day and in this place, we vow to walk in the ways of love together.

We make a promise to be present for one another.

To practice together the ways of calm and compassionate presence. To forgive and to be forgiven.

To begin again and again in the days and weeks to come.

For in so doing, we create this the beloved religious community together.

In so doing, we bring healing and transformation to ourselves and to our world.

And that’s a good thing.

Amen and blessed be.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

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

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

Call to Worship

Visions
by Chris Jimmerson

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

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

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

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

We gather to worship together.

Reading

exerpt from Thinking Like a Mountain
by Aida Leopold

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

Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

Benediction

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

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

Go in peace.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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

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

Reading
exerpt from Being Human Religiously by James Luther Adams

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

Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sound familiar?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The organization of power and the power of organization.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hope. Love. Justice. Courage. Joy.

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

Amen.

Benediction

Go now, with hearts overflowing with hope.

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

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

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

Go in peace.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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

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

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

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

VIDEO (Music and images with no dialog)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the list could go on and on.

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

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

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

VIDEO

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

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

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

BILL MOYERS: From your house?

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

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

BILL MOYERS: What kind of transcendence did they receive?

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

BILL MOYERS: What’d they find out?

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

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

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

We are going to need each other.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And wouldn’t that be terribly beautiful.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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

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

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

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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

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

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

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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

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

Call to Worship

Come, Come
-adapted from Rumi by Leslie Takahashi Morris

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

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

Reading

Song of the Universe

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

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

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

Listen carefully…
Can you hear it still?

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

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

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

The music calls us

Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[“Song Crosses Boundaries” video]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[“Enter the Faun” video]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[“Quando Quando Quando” video]

That video just makes me feel happy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dance the dance the best you can.

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

Amen.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.