That little four-letter word called Hope

by Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Guest Speakers, Sermons

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Chris Jimmerson
July 21, 2013

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

 

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

Reading
-Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace, 1986

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

Prayer

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

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

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

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

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

So may it be. Amen

Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By persistently seeking justice; and

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

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

The answer may lie in embracing this paradox:

Faith can exist only when there is uncertainty.

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

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

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

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

The family was Catholic and spoke both Spanish and English.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I asked him, “What is it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isn’t it remarkable that hope turns out to be contained within how we live our lives in the here and now?

And so, as we leave today and go back out into our daily lives, may we continually be asking ourselves, “What story are we helping to write? What are we putting into our letters to the future?”

Even in the midst of life’s struggles and hardships, we can choose to live grounded in love for all that is, all that came before and all that will follow.

The poet, Adrienne Rich put it like this:

“My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed. I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world. A passion to make, and make again where such un-making reigns.”

And so may we create hope where hope has been lost.

And so, may we dwell in a faith courageous enough to embrace uncertainty.

As we go out into our world today, may we co-create the ever- unfolding story in ways we hope will bend the narrative toward justice, transformation and love.

May an enduring faith sustain us. May love continue to overcome.

May hope abound. Amen.

Offering words

People say, what is the sense of our small effort.

They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time.

A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that.

No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless.

There is too much work to do.

Benediction

May your days to come be filled with peace and your spirit overflow with boundless and endless love.

Grounded in such love, may your courage rise up and embrace uncertainty as an opportunity and possibility for hope that glimmers eternally and a faith that sustains.

May you know Grace and may you bring Grace into the lives of others. Go in peace. Go in love. Go knowing that part of this place and of this beloved community travel with you until next you return.

Blessed be. Amen.

 

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

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

The least of things

by Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Guest Speakers, Sermons, Video available

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Chris Jimmerson

August 19, 2012

 

Sometimes we make things that are really not all that valuable more important than they really are. Paradoxically, sometimes we miss that the seemingly smallest of gestures can make all the difference. After spending this summer serving as chaplain at the largest level one trauma hospital in our area, these are among the many lessons I learned – sometimes the hard way, and sometimes through the humor and amazing resilience of others.

 

CALL TO WORSHIP

Come into the circle of caring,

Come into the community of gentleness, of justice and love. Come, and you shall be refreshed.

Let the healing power of this people penetrate you,

Let loving kindness and joy pass through you,

Let hope infuse you,

And peace be the law of your heart.

In this human circle,

Caring is a calling.

All of us are called.

So come into the circle of caring.

PRAYER

by Dr. Davidson Loehr

We pray to the angels of our better nature and the still small voice that can speak to us when we feel safe enough to listen.

Help us to love people and causes outside of ourselves, that we may be enlarged to include them.

Help us remember that we are never as alone or as powerless as we think. Help us remember that we can, if we will, invest ourselves in relationships, institutions and causes that transcend and expand us.

Help us guard our hearts against those relationships and activities that diminish us and weaken our life force.

And help us give our hearts to those relationships that might, with our help, expand our souls and our worlds.

We know that every day both life and death are set before us. Let us have the faith and courage to choose those involvements that can lead us toward life, toward life more abundant.

And help us find the will to serve those life-giving involvements with our heart, our mind and our spirit.

We ask that we may see more clearly in these matters, and that we have the will to hold to those relationships that demand, and cherish, the very best in us. Just that, just those.

Amen.

SERMON

Chris Jimmerson

“The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.”

That’s a quote from the Swiss Psychologist and Psychiatrist, Carl Jung. Many of the world’s wisdom traditions express similar ideas. The bible speaks of the simple treasures of the heart far exceeding in value those of the material world. Islam embraces modesty and talks of the meaning in doing for others. Many of the Eastern traditions emphasize compassion and the letting go of unnecessary attachments.

Anyway, I’ve always really liked that quote, and I had thought I understood it.

I found out this summer that I didn’t.

Not really. Not the way we understand things down deep in the gut; down in the cellular level; in the soul.

I spent this summer doing a unit of professional education for ministry students on pastoral care. I was assigned to a group of six other seminary students, 3 Episcopalians, a Presbyterian, a Catholic and a Muslim. Sounds like a setup for one of those jokes, doesn’t it? “Three Episcopalians, a Presbyterian, a Catholic, a Muslim and Unitarian Universalist are in a bar…”

Of course, since we were all ministry students that never happened. Much. OK, some of us, sometimes.

Anyway, we spent the summer learning together while serving as chaplains at local hospitals. I was assigned to Brackenridge Hospital, where I worked on a floor that provided care for people struggling with a number of illnesses. We were also required to take turns serving as the on call chaplain overnight, covering four local hospitals.

During on call shifts, our home base would be the little Chaplain’s sleep room down in the basement of Brackenridge Hospital. Some of my fellow students decided that the sleep room was haunted. Being a good, rationality-based, Unitarian Universalist, I secretly dismissed the notion, and did my best to ignore the inexplicable sounds that often startled me awake at 3 in the morning, uneasy and shivering in the little sleep room at the bottom of the hospital.

The day before my first on call shift, I was too slow to react while driving, and I a hit another car from behind. No one was hurt, but my car was damaged pretty badly and not driveable. We managed to pull the cars off the road into a parking lot and called for a police officer and a tow truck.

I was frettin’ – frettin’ about my car; frettin’ about how I was going to arrange for having something to drive for my upcoming on call shift; frettin’ about how much all of this was going to cost me!

But as we stood waiting together, the young guy who’s car I had hit asked me what I did for a living, and so I told him about being a seminarian. He said, “Oh, wow. Can I talk to you about something?”

And so that’s how it happened that I ended up in a parking lot off North Lamar Boulevard, standing around in 103 degree heat, leaning against my wrecked car, providing pastoral care for the guy who’s car I had just crunched.

I suppose it was the least I could do.

The funny thing was, after listening to him for that time, my wrecked car seemed the least of things to worry about.

By the way, though I have tried to keep the essence of the stories I am telling you today intact, I am changing enough details to protect the privacy and identity of those involved.

The next morning, I arrived at the hospital in my freshly acquired rental car at 8 am. My pager went off immediately, calling me to the emergency room. When I got there, a woman was lying on a stretcher, holding the body of her 21-year old daughter. The daughter had just died from injuries she sustained during a car wreck in which the mother had been driving. The mother’s sorrow filled the air and for a while it was all there was left to breathe.

Over the next five hours with her and the other family members, there were no words that would console the inconsolable. The only thing anyone could do was just to stay with them in their grief.

And yet, somehow, families hold each other; and tell their stories; and hold tightly to the love that exists between those who survived; and begin the process of honoring the memories of those who have been lost; and somehow they pick themselves up and leave the hospital and find a way to go on with their lives. Their stories continue, including those of the ones that were lost. It is a testament to courage and resilience of the human spirit that defies even the tragic – that overcomes even great loss.

Later that day, I went down to the sleep room, and I called my partner, Wayne, and I said, “I need you to stay on the phone with me while I cry.” He did. I love him so much.

You see, that little chaplain’s sleep room in the basement of the hospital is haunted. It is haunted with memories so strong, losses so profound, yet courage, love and the will to live on so boundless, that they awaken you at three in the morning and demand to be heard.

But, you know, somehow, so often, we miss the things that really matter. Instead, we make “the greatest of things” out of the stuff that is not really important at all.

In fact, some of the things to which we assign such meaning are actually almost comical if you really think about them. For example, here are just a few things we make way more important than they really are – that when you really think about how much meaning they truly have, are the least of things:

  • Most church budget battles;
  • Anything having to do with “reality” television;
  • What the neighbors think of our car, house, clothing, etc.
  • U.T football. (Don’t throw things at me. I enjoy it too.)
  • Most of the material things in our lives.

Don’t get me wrong; I know we love our iPads and Priuses. I do too, and to a certain extent enjoying them is great. But we also have to remember what truly brings us comfort and joy and meaning and beauty.

And that’s where a paradox about the least of things comes in. There are things that can seem so small and so unimportant, yet they can be so meaningful, so powerful, so life-giving – a kind word, a loving gesture, the friend who shows up to visit us just when we need them, prayer.

I know. I know. As UU’s, we often shy away from prayer, and yet, as a chaplain, I was often called upon to pray with people and to do so in religious language that you might never hear in a Unitarian Universalist church.

And I saw prayer calm the disturbed, bring peace and hope to families experiencing great loss and release the tears that allowed people to finally express their grief so that they could begin to reclaim hope.

Here is one example. Late one evening, I was called to the room of a woman who was too distraught to sleep. She had just made it through a protracted legal battle to regain custody of her children from an abusive husband, only to be diagnosed with leukemia.

We talked for a while, and she shared both tears and laughter. Finally, she asked if I would pray for her. I asked her what she would like me to pray for. She answered for God to be with her children.

And so, we prayed the prayer she needed, together.

At the end of the prayer, she squeezed my hand and said, “I think I can go to sleep now.” Later, she said that it was the first time she had slept through the night in months. Later, she looked at me one day and said, “You know, I’m starting to be able to laugh and tell jokes with my kids again.”

It might seem counterintuitive, but that’s another of those seemingly little things that can be so meaningful — humor. So often, humor can bring light into the darkest of situations; bring humanity to people who had been feeling as if they had become their disease.

During the summer, I got to know an older gentleman who was in for surgery to remove a non-malignant mass attached to his brain. We had talked several times before his surgery. He had expressed his fears about it and talked with me about some decisions he had made in his life that he regretted.

The afternoon after his surgery, I saw him walking around in the hallway with the help of a physical therapist. He smiled, pointed at the stitches on his head and said, “Hey look chaplain, they say I can go home tomorrow — the new brain fits just fine.”

Before I even thought about it, I laughed and said, “Well, I hope it works better than the last one did.” Luckily for me, we had formed a relationship that already included humor, so he returned the laugh!

There are so many of those little things that can matter so much, but what it seems to always come down to is loving presence. It always comes back to relationship – to love for one another and the sacred and fragile web of existence of which we are part.

One Sunday, I brought a young woman back to the Intensive Care Unit to see her younger brother. He had just died as the result of an accident at his summer. She had fought with him before he left for work that morning and needed to say her goodbyes and seek forgiveness before the rest of the family would get there. As we stood by his bed and she spoke the words she needed to say to him, she suddenly turned and placed her head on my shoulder, cupped a hand over each of my shoulders and collapsed her entire weight onto me. I hadn’t expected this, and it was as if her body had suddenly become a stone weight and her overwhelming grief was pouring into me though the tears she was shedding on my shoulder.

In that moment, I thought I would collapse too. That I didn’t have the strength, and that we were both going to fall down in great puddles of sorrow on the cold tile floor of that room in the ICU.

But we didn’t. Somehow, the experience was as if something was holding me up, so I could keep holding her up. Rebecca Ann Parker, one of our UU theologians, calls this an “upholding and sheltering presence” that is “alive and afoot in the universe”. Others might simply call this God. Still others might say that it’s some sort of a bio-psychological reserve built deeply into our DNA that helps us help others survive so that our species can go on.

I’m happy just to dwell in the wonder and awe and mystery. I am just grateful for it.

I think that it has everything to do with love.

That young woman was eventually able to go on, not because of anything I or anyone else did, but because there was love in that room that Sunday — love that transcends everything else; love that upholds us; love that we carry with us always and that is simply present. It is there, and we can find it in the least of gestures, the fewest of words, the silences we share when there is nothing to be said, and yet we stay connected with each other nonetheless. Simple, loving presence can be the least of things and yet the most meaningful of things.

It is where we find purpose — a comforting hand on the shoulder, a kind word, a meal for an ailing neighbor, just remembering to say “I love you” before leaving the house in the morning; these are where we ultimately find meaning. These are the things worth more in life.

For all I know, that loving presence with each other and within all of life and creation is the place where, in the end, we find beauty and truth and joy. For all I know, it is where God lives.

Amen.

OFFERING

We all have so many needs-

A thousand prayers-a thousand needs–

That really need only one answer:

Let the world not be indifferent.

And may we live and be with

each other in the way that

shows this truth whatever the day brings:

That neither are we indifferent to each other.

BENEDICTION

As we go forth today, I wish you love.

And even more so, I wish you the courage to love and to love deeply.

Let us live it in the smallest and the greatest of ways. Let us always be asking ourselves, “what would it look like if we were to truly live love?”

All blessings upon you and yours.

Go in peace and love.

Amen

 

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

 

A Prophetic Liberal Religion

by Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Guest Speakers, Sermons, Video available

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Chris Jimmerson

February 26, 2011

Both the Unitarians and the Universalists have a long history of prophetic ministry – speaking truth in the public square and, perhaps more importantly, taking action on social issues. From Michael Servetus espousing an early Unitarianism in the 16th century through the Prophetic Sisterhood of the late 19th and early 20th century, to the Unitarian Universalists (UUs) publishing the Pentagon Papers in the mid-20th century, UUs, though not always unified, have a long tradition of being at the forefront of social change and carrying our values into the world. Will we continue that tradition into the 21st Century and beyond?

 

How many Unitarian Universalists does it take to change a light bulb?

We’re not sure. The Lighting Technologies Study Team of the Clean Energy Options Working Group of the Green Our World Starting Here and Now Task Force of the Facilities and Grounds Committee hasn’t issued its report and recommendations yet.

You may have heard other variations on this or similar jokes, all on the theme that we UUs can sometimes seem to talk, study, argue, debate, disagree, discuss and “400 plus pages written report” things to death.

It’s not that doing our due diligence, making sure we understand the issues or working through our differing viewpoints isn’t a necessary part of it; it’s just that we (and pretty much all liberal religious groups) have been accused of getting so caught up in our mental gymnastics that we never actually end up doing much about whatever the issues might be. Those 400 plus pages can end up in a file somewhere.

But that’s certainly not always true and it never has been. Even before the merger of the Universalists and the Unitarians, the Us and the Us had often acted as prophetic liberal religions. As our Unitarian Universalist training curricula A People so Bold says it, prophetic religion is “religion that is on the cutting edge, reading the signs of its times, creating a just and loving community in its midst, and advocating passionately for a better world”.

In 16th century Europe, even the very idea of believing in a Unitary God was prophetic and could get you branded a heretic and burned at the stake. And don’t even try for universal salvation! They’d have just added more dry wood to the fire.

In America, early Unitarians and Universalists were among the first to work for improved education, provide charity for the poor, ordain female clergy, call for emancipation and work for women’s suffrage.

Later, after the merger in 1961, this prophetic spirit would continue, with UU participation in environmental issues and in the fight for racial justice, sexuality and gender equality, political and religious freedom.

To be sure, our efforts historically have never been perfect or unified – at no point have either of our Us ever managed to be in complete agreement about anything. However, there is little doubt that overall we have a history of being at the forefront of social issues.

Any yet, as I mentioned earlier, liberal religion can run the risk, sometimes, of intellectualizing more than engaging the core issues. Due at least in part to our roots in the Enlightenment, we tend to focus on the individual as rational and self-determining rather than place our “being” within our connections to others and the web of existence. We see the INDIVIDUAL bigots, the individual abusers, the individual classists and so on, but we don’t as often see the underlying societal structures that perpetuate the oppressive behavior. We focus on the individual victims and not entire cultures, races, classes and other groups that are being systematically subjected to injustice.

For example, let me share some questions I have been asking myself. In the past few years, how often have I given canned goods or the like to the food pantry or the homeless shelter but done little to speak out against the social conditions that force people to live on the streets and go hungry in the first place? I wonder — how many of us recycle, conserve and work to reduce our own environmental impact, yet remain largely silent as our government subsidizes businesses that do far more damage?

How often have we written checks or volunteered for the non-profit clinic, the shelter for battered women, the halfway house for recovering addicts or any other of a number of non-profit groups and then returned to the security of our own homes and lives without having to really consider –what is creating the need for these service agencies to begin with?

Now, I am going to pause for a moment of liberal religious guilt. OK, that’s long enough — because these acts of care and service really are vital and needed and wonderful and necessary and a part of creating the world we seek as UUs. But I believe there is another arena of action required if we hope to really make change. And that’s where living our prophetic religious tradition comes back in.

Will we really be “a people so bold”?

Will we volunteer at the immigrant assistance non-profit AND rally against the economic imperialism that is so often at the root of migration in the first place? Will we join forces with oppressed groups and their organizations to demand and work for change? Will we proclaim our liberal religious principles in the public square? We will do so even if it raises questions about our own middleclass privilege?

The President of our religious movement got himself arrested protesting an unjust immigration law in Arizona. Personally, I say, “more of that!” I believe there has never been a time that so cried out for us to assume the mantle of prophetic religion with renewed vigor and purpose.

Because we are losing our democracy.

Because we are killing our planet.

Before you diagnose me with “hyperbolic propensity syndrome”, allow me just a few minutes to explain why I do not think these are overly dramatic statements. Since the economic crash of 2008, economics professor Edward N. Wolf’s ongoing research revealed that wealth inequality in the United has actually increased even more sharply. The top 1% of wealth owners in the U.S. hold about 40% of all of our wealth; the top quintile hold almost 90%

Other research has found that wealth inequality is highly correlated with power inequality and political corruption. Further, such wealth inequality and corruption form an escalating cycle that threatens the viability of democratic government – wealth inequality begets corruption begets greater inequality begets greater corruption and on and on and on, until only the illusion of democracy remains.

In the U.S., fewer and fewer people own greater and greater percentages of corporate stocks, and corporations are amassing greater and greater power. After the recent Supreme Court decision allowing unlimited spending by corporations and other groups outside the political parties, spending by these groups totaled 135.3 million dollars in the 2010 elections – outside conservative groups spent 119.6 million, while outside liberal groups and unions spent 15.7 million.

Conservative politicians did somewhat better than did liberals, you might recall.

In reaction, democratic groups plan to try to match outside spending by conservatives in 2012. To do so, they too will rely on corporate wealth. By mid-February of this year, the presidential candidates and their Superpacs had already spent in excess of 69.6 million dollars. A recent study found that 30 of our largest companies now spend more on lobbying than they pay in federal taxes.

Wealth inequality begets corruption begets greater inequality. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Listen to what a Republican congressional staffer, who recently retired in disgust after almost 30 years has to say. Republican operative, Mike Lofgren states, quote — “Both parties are rotten – how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money?… Both parties are captives to corporate loot.” End quote.

We are losing our democracy. Democracy is a core element of our religious principles — all that we as UUs value.

More and more, we face an Orwellian political system that promotes and affirms the inherent worth and dignity of the few over the many. We cannot hope for justice, equity and compassion if we allow our democratic process to be subverted in this way. There can be no peace, no liberty, no justice when such vast inequality is allowed to exist and increase.

But this unrestrained economic disparity of power is potentially even more destructive, even more threatening.

In their fascinating and sobering book, Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, editors Kathleen Dean Moore and Michael P. Nelson bring together essays written by people from throughout the world. With wisdom and expertise that varies from the scientific to the spiritual, they make a compelling case that any sense of ethics requires our immediate action on global climate change. They also paint a terrifying picture regarding the consequences of failing to act, such as:

Already, 40,000 people per week die of hunger-related illness worldwide. As global temperatures continue to rise, this is likely to get worse. 33 million acres of Canadian forest have died because it no longer gets cold enough in winter to kill the beetle that is killing the trees.

High-altitude glaciers that provide much of the drinking water in Asia, Latin America and the American West are disappearing. The U.S. Park Service estimates that by the year 2020, there will no longer be any glaciers in Glacier National Park.

The Great Barrier Reef may well be lifeless within two decades. Fifty percent of the world’s animals are in decline. One quarter of mammals face potential extinction, including elephants, humpback whales, gorillas, tigers and polar bears.

We have effectively ended the Holocene era of our planet, into which human civilization arose and during which countless life forms evolved and flourished. We have replaced it with an era of human-caused extinctions.

There is already no chance that we will leave to future generations, our children and grandchildren, a world as rich with life and possibility as the one we inherited.

We are quickly finding out that our 7th principle, that we affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part, goes much deeper and is much more sacred than we may have known – that our free and responsible search for truth and meaning can only exist within and through that web, not separately — not purely as individuals, but instead in communion with one another and with all that exists on this beautiful blue planet and beyond.

So, what more can we do? How do we sustain ourselves and have hope when the scientific predictions seem so huge, so overwhelming.

We can begin by realizing that the things I’ve mentioned that we are already doing are vital and must continue. The services and social action programs Unitarian Universalists are providing, both here in the U.S. and internationally are needed and wonderful. The actions of our congregations, as well as individual people within those congregations, to do what we can to conserve and protect our ecosystem are admirable. They are making a great difference in our world.

Today though, our world asks even more of us. Embracing again our movement as prophetic religion asks that we go even deeper — that we recognize that the corporatist undermining of western democracies and the escalating destruction of our planet’s sustainability are interrelated – that we name this malfeasance publicly and join with others to fight it. We must reaffirm the wisdom our UU sage, James Luther Adams, taught us about the “power of organization and the organization of power”.

Today, commercial, industrial and agricultural giants are producing more greenhouse emissions than all of the ecological conservation efforts of individual citizens combined can offset.

Today, industries so large that they are beyond our dissent, more powerful than most governments, are making decisions that will have tremendous effects on whether and what life survives on our planet in the future.

To have any meaningful influence will require that we engage with other religious groups and with secular and public policy organizations in ways that may have been uncomfortable to us in recent times. It will require that we engage with our more conservative friends in difficult but imaginative and necessary conversations. It will require that we find ways of harnessing the creativity and power of collective voices, making those voices heard, amplifying their strength.

I believe that we must walk a careful line, upholding the separation of church and state, yet realizing that our religious principles will be lived or not in the political arena.

As Sulak Sivaraska, cofounder of the International Association of Engaged Buddhists writes, “Politics without spirituality or ethics is blind. Spirituality without politics is simply inconsequential.”

Our Unitarian Universalist principles are calling us to the consequential. Our community’s values and mission compel us to act together out of compassion, out of love for one another and that sacred web of existence, with the courage to risk potential failure, despite the loss and the irreparable damage we witness. Climate change provides our greatest test so far of that compassion — of that love. It requires a people so bold.

Against all odds, we must still act. We must act to place love and community above market values and profit. We must proclaim our Unitarian Universalist beliefs beyond our church walls. We must act as if those values and principles — indeed the future of humanity and the beautiful world we inherited — depend upon it.

Because they do.

How many Unitarian Universalists does it take to change the world?

Every single last one of us, along with the many others who might join an invitation to reclaim paradise before it is lost, if only we were to engage with them. If only we were to be so bold.

May we be so. May we be that prophetic religion for our time.

Amen.

 

 

Experience of the Holy

by Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Guest Speakers

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Chris Jimmerson

February 20, 2011

You may listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

Sermon

Ralph Waldo Emerson famously asked, “Why should not we enjoy an original relation with the universe?”

Last year, when we were in the process of discerning that wonderful mission statement, along with our values and ends, our facilitators had us participate in an exercise they called the “Experience of the Holy”. They put us in pairs and asked that each of us in the pair tell the other of a time when we had experienced the holy.

Here is how they described such experiences and encouraged us to recall them:

“I invite you to reflect on an experience of the Holy in your life — A time when you felt connected to something larger than yourself, a time when you felt your heart and mind expand.”

As a member of your Board of Trustees, I was fortunate not only to get to participate in this exercise myself but to be asked to observe as other pairs described to one another their experiences of the holy.

I remember that the irony in a bunch of non-theistic humanists sitting in a church talking about holy experiences was not lost on me.

On the other hand, I do not remember anyone saying, “I don’t know what you’re talking about and I have never had such an experience.”

But mostly, I remember how powerful and moving it was.

The individual stories of what prompted peoples’ experience of the holy varied widely. Some people spoke of it happening right here in the church, when the actions of our community evoked something transformative within them.

Some of the women spoke of giving birth. Other people spoke of quiet times surrounded by the beauty of nature. Some spoke of being moved into the experience through listening to music, viewing a wonderful piece of art, watching an exhilarating moment of live theatre. Still others told of experiencing the holy during the simple or the seemingly mundane – just catching the beauty of patterns of sunlight streaming through the kitchen blinds. One war veteran told of holding a dying buddy in their arms, of being the last person who would hold and comfort their friend.

The stories were beautiful and evoked a wide range of events from the solitary to occurrences of being a part of something terrific in a large group. The descriptions of the experience of the holy though, were remarkably alike, and people expressed that they were struggling to convey their experience because normal, everyday words and emotions were inadequate.

This is how some of your fellow church members struggled to describe their experience of the holy:

“I was enveloped by mystery, awe and wonder.”

Another person said, “I felt suddenly at peace with myself and with everything – connected to something larger.”

Another said, “It was hyper-realistic, being truly present and in the present, receptive to greater wisdom than can be known in words.”

Someone else put it as “timeless, transcendent, a sense of unity and compassion with and for, well, everything.”

We described these experiences as deeply meaningful, profoundly moving and powerfully motivating, sometimes life altering.

Reverend Dr. William F. Schulz, the most recent self-described humanist to serve as President of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations called this the “apprehension of the holy” and spoke of the holy being “embodied in the abundance of a scarred creation.” One of our church’s values, “Transcendence – To connect with the wonder and awe of the unity of life”, is another way of trying to describe this.

Humanistic psychology’s founder, Abraham Maslow, described essentially the same type of experiences as what he called “peak experiences”, and he believed that they were instances wherein people become maximally what he referred to as “self-actualized”. More recently, researchers have examined similar phenomenon, such as “quantum experiences”, a sort of peak experience that the person evaluates as profound in a life changing way, and “flow” experiences, a sense of timelessness and ultimate fit in the universe.

You probably remember that Maslow was the creator of the pyramid or hierarchy of human needs. In Maslow’s hierarchy, as our basic needs, such as food, water and shelter get met, we move up through successions of higher level needs. Finally, if each of the preceding levels of needs have all been met, human development results in our fulfilling our highest need, self-actualization. He described self-actualized people as, creative, fulfilled, fully alive, connected with something larger, dedicated to justice, compassionate, playful – well, basically what most Unitarian Universalists want to be when we grow up.

Maslow described these characteristics as “Being-values” and found that they were parts of the knowledge people reported carrying forward from within their peak experiences. He found descriptions of such experiences across all cultures and within all of the world’s major religions.

Maslow thought that peak experiences were random occurrences of self-actualization that arise when uncontrollable life events happen to push us into a moment of such self-actualization. In fact, he said, “In general, we are ‘Surprised by Joy’. Peaks come unexpectedly…. you can’t count on them. And hunting them is like hunting happiness. It’s best not done directly. It comes as a by-product, an epiphenomenon, for instance, of doing a fine job at a worthy task you can identify with”. Thus, he did not think we could induce our own experience of the holy; although, he did seem to think that self-actualized people might be more likely to have peak moments.

Recent research has found that Maslow was only partially right – that there may be a neurobiological mechanism behind peak experiences that can be activated not only by random life events of being “surprised by joy” but also though meditation and other forms of what I will call spiritual ritual and practice. Using a brain scanning technique called Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography or SPECT, researchers examined brain activity in a group of experienced meditators. What they found is that while meditating, particularly at the point of reaching a deep meditative state, wherein the meditators reported experiencing a sense of universal connectedness, a peak experience, there was decreased activity in the areas of the brain normally associated with a sense of ones own body image and with the sense of the time and space one inhabits.

Could this explain the experience of the holy? Could this elucidation of a potential biological mechanism behind our peak experiences mean that such experiences are really just delusions?

Further research examined long-term meditators and found that their brain patterns, even in a non-meditative state, were different from the patterns in people who do not meditate. The researchers also found that the brain patterns during meditation were different from those induced by dream states, as well as different from those associated with delusions, including delusions with religious themes. In fact, they reported that, unlike people who experience a delusion, people who have these peak experiences articulate them as hyperlucid and MORE real than their normal state.

This has led some to question a purely reductionist interpretation of the SPECT research as failing to explain the whole of the experience – to find yet more awe and mystery in the fact the we appear to be biologically equipped with the capacity to experience the holy.

The SPECT researchers themselves, taking perhaps a more postmodern viewpoint, stated “…spiritual or mystical states of reality recalled in the baseline state as more certainly representing an objective condition than what is represented in the sensorium of the baseline state must be considered real”. Whew! In other words, intellectual investigation alone cannot reveal the experience itself. Knowing the potential mechanism may not fully explain — or explain away — the phenomenon — or epiphenomenon, as Maslow put it.

Beyond this, there is also evidence that peak experiences can be beneficial. Studies have found that meditation and other spiritual rituals can reduce anxiety and stress, even blood pressure, not only in the moment, but also over the longer-term. Even more fascinating, research has shown that peak experiences can lead to what some psychologists have termed “quantum change” – a sudden shift in one’s values from things like achievement, fitting in, attractiveness, career, wealth and power to values such as peace, humility, spirituality, forgiveness, growth, creativity and generosity.

It appears Maslow’s theory about “Being Values” and self-actualization may have been correct. Perhaps, we should lock our political and economic leaders in a retreat center and tell them “we will not let you out until you have experienced the holy!”

More and more, I have come to believe that we do enjoy Emerson’s “original relation with the universe”. I have had too many of these experiences to answer otherwise and believe that they can have profound implications for how we live our lives – how we are ABLE to live our lives.

I’ve known the movement toward wholeness and self-actualization, the shift in values, that can occur in these experiences, but this knowing comes from within the experience of the holy itself and is a knowledge that like other people, I have trouble expressing in normal, everyday language. I’m struggling to express it now.

Maybe I can come closest though, by sharing one of these peak moments that, for me, led to a beneficial change in life direction, even though it occurred during a time that was contained a sense of sadness over an anticipated loss. Maybe, it is the sharing of these experiences, no matter how difficult it is to find an adequate vocabulary for describing them that allows us to bring forward those “Being-values” that Maslow talked about.

My parents divorced when my brother and sister and I were very young, so my maternal grandparents became more like a second set of parents to us. They helped raise us while my mother worked often long hours. They were our role models and always instilled in us a sense of worth, value and respect for ourselves and for others. I owe much of the adult I became to them.

Later, they welcomed my partner, Wayne, into our family with great love and genuine warmth. In fact, my grandmother always called us “her boys”, even long after a time where either of us could claim any resemblance to the term. However, we had never discussed the … exact nature … of our relationship with my grandparents. My Grandfather was a deacon in the First Baptist Church of Groves, Texas, after all. Still, to their great credit, they treated us both with genuine love, even if it was never openly discussed.

After my grandfather died, my grandmother only lived two more years. Wayne and I were visiting her in the hospital for what we all knew would likely be the last time – she had congestive heart failure and had decided against any more medical intervention after having been in and out of the hospital too many times, after deciding to let go with grace and dignity.

As we said our goodbyes and prepared to leave, she took us both by the hand and said, “Take care of each other.”

Then she locked her eyes with mine.

It was only a moment, maybe even less. Just an instant.

In that instant, we knew as much love as it is possible for human beings to comprehend — more love than the mere humans in the room could contain. The love rushed forth, sweeping us into a different state of experience, spreading us out into an ever expanding way of being, permeating us with all that is holy.

In that instant, we experienced existing in connection with, being one with, not just each other, but with all that has ever been and ever will be. In that instant, we experienced existing in all times and all places at once and yet outside of linear time and in no material space at all.

For an instant, we knew all that we would ever need to know.

I still carry something of that knowledge with me now, but in fragments, in smaller pieces of understanding, because the knowing that occurs during these experiences is a knowing that is outside our usual language of thinking and emotions. That is why it is so hard to express our experiences of the holy to others.

Perhaps, it is a level of understanding that occurs in a more fundamental, yet more encompassing language; a knowing that exists in a language we can only rarely fully access – a language that we have sometimes called, “God”.

Still, I believe those smaller pieces of understanding we are able to retain are important, because they are the burning embers that have the potential to spark further peak experiences and quantum change — what we call in our church’s values, “transformation — to pursue the growth that changes our lives and heals our world”.

I wonder, since research has shown that these peak experiences can lead to a shift in our values, if it is possible that the reverse is also true. I wonder if, combined with spiritual practice, living those values can help us experience the holy more and more, further reinforcing and deepening those same values? I wonder if living lives of transcendence, compassion and courage, if gathering in community to nourish souls, transform lives and do justice wouldn’t be the ultimate experience of the holy?

I say we find out! Let’s conduct our own experiment by bringing our best translation of that “language of mystery and awe”, our values and mission, into a growing, vital, thriving reality.

I invite us to actualize the Holy in our lives — to actively seek connection with something larger than ourselves, to continuously expand our hearts and minds.

I invite us to embrace our original relation with the universe.

Benediction

In “Our Humanist Legacy”, Rev. Dr. William F. Schulz wrote: “What is of supreme importance is that I live my life in a posture of gratitude-that I recognize my existence and, indeed, Being itself, as an unaccountable blessing, a gift of grace. Sometimes, it is helpful to call the source or fact of that grace God and sometimes not. But what is always helpful and absolutely necessary is to look kindly on the world, to be bold in pursuit of its repair, and to be comfortable in the embrace of its splendor. I know no better term for what I seek than an encounter with the Holy.”

May we each go forth and encounter the holy in our world, be open to its presence in our lives — however we may know it.

Amen.

Unmasking Courage

by Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Guest Speakers, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Chris Jimmerson

October 31, 2010

Happy Halloween! One of Halloween’s main themes is fear. On this Halloween, what do Unitarian Universalists fear as a religious community and where do we find courage, one of our churches values, in the face of those fears?

I’ve been studying our earliest Unitarian predecessors and have found in their stories remarkable examples of courage – courage in a religious context, what we might call “spiritual courage”. So, I’ll ask you to indulge me for a bit, as we travel back to the 16th century, Reader’s Digest version.

Very frightening things are happening. The Gutenberg press has allowed for the wide scale printing of the bible, so people outside the Catholic Church hierarchy can actually read it! The protestant reformation has begun. The Renaissance in literature, arts and sciences has begun. Those scary Humanists have started studying things. Now, all of this is a great threat to the Catholic Church, so the Inquisition is in full force also.

It is a time when the power and wealth of governments and that of the Church are tightly intertwined, and biblical interpretation, doctrine, has been a major role of the Church in this power structure.

So, to protect their own influence (not to mention to avoid becoming victims of the inquisition themselves), the leaders of the larger reformation movements have expressed their differences with the church as points of practice, not essential doctrine.

Into this volatile situation, a book appears, On the Errors of the Trinity, by a Spanish Scholar in his early twenties named Michael Servetus, questioning one of the sacred creeds of the Church – God in Trinity; the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

The year was 1531, and young Servetus had published his book hoping to convert the Reformers to his position that there was but one eternal God. His hopes were dashed. The Reformers quickly reaffirmed the Trinity. After trying and failing again with a second book, Servetus realized his books had put him in danger, changed his name and went into hiding in Lyons, France. He eventually become a medical doctor and is even mentioned in medical history texts for having elucidated the pulmonary circulatory system – like a good proto-Unitarian, he couldn’t be satisfied with only one field of excellence.

However, also like a good proto-Unitarian, Servetus had a little trouble letting go of things, and so, 15 years later, in 1546, he began another book AND, using his assumed name, struck up a correspondence debating theology with none other than John Calvin, the influential Protestant reformer who had established a powerbase in Geneva.

Calvin was courteous at first but quickly grew exasperated and sent Servetus his own views, as set out in Calvin’s, “Institutes of the Christian Religion”.

Upon receiving Calvin’s seminal book, Servetus responded with one of the first recorded instances of a long and beloved religious tradition still practiced in Unitarian Universalist churches across North America even today. He scribbled disparaging notes in the margins on where he thought Calvin was wrong and sent it back to him.

This may not have been wise.

An incensed Calvin, realizing he had actually been corresponding with Servetus, wrote to a friend that if Servetus should ever come to Geneva “I will not suffer him to get out alive”.

In 1553, Servetus published his new book, “The Restoration of Christianity”. By April 4 of 1553, the French Inquisition had arrested and jailed Michael Servetus for heresy, with evidence for the charge supplied by Calvin.

By April 7, 1553, Servetus had escaped from jail. After convincing the jailer to let him out so he could relieve himself in the jails walled garden, our proto-Unitarian ripped off his nightgown, and fully dressed underneath, scaled the wall and ran away. Inexplicably, he headed to Geneva. This most definitely was not wise.

In Geneva, he was recognized, arrested and convicted of spreading heresy, in a process largely manipulated by Calvin.

On October 27, 1553, Michael Servetus was burned at the stake. They used moist, green wood so that it would burn more slowly and prolong the suffering. They placed a crown sprinkled with gunpowder on his head.

And as the flames grew and the terror consumed him, as flesh was slowly turned to ash, Michael Servetus cried out in agony, but he never renounced his beliefs.

I wonder if today our religious beliefs could cost us our lives, could we summon that kind of courage? If facing that kind of terror, could I? Of course, I’m just speculating, because in modern America, such a situation seems to be a long ago and far away threat.

On September 21, 2005, the DuPage Unitarian Universalist Church received a bomb threat because of their support for marriage equality for gays and lesbians. It would be only one of many such threats against supporters of marriage equality.

On July 27, 2008, Jim David Adkisson walked into the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church and opened fire with a shotgun, murdering two people and injuring several others because “he wanted to kill some liberals”. Not so long ago. Not so far away.

Perhaps the crazed acts of disturbed individuals. Perhaps the consequences of a growing rhetoric of violence over disagreement in “modern” America.

Michael Servetus left two legacies; 1. His execution led to a slow growth in religious tolerance and 2. His writings influenced many to reconsider some of Christianity’s most central doctrines, including the Unitarians in Poland and those in Transylvania.

The histories of both are fascinating and contain lessons in spiritual courage.

The Socinians, as the early Polish Unitarians came to be known, thrived for a while in the 16th century protected by the Polish minor nobility, even establishing their own township. However, it was not to last. The Catholic Counter Reformation, a series of invasions by surrounding peoples and shifts in economic and social influences led to growing persecution, until by 1660, the Socinians faced a choice – recant their beliefs, leave Poland or be but to death.

Many did recant. A few gave up all they owned and left, seeking the freedom to practice their beliefs elsewhere, some eventually joining the Unitarians in Transylvania. After only a little over a century, the Unitarian religious movement in Poland had all but perished.

Again, having to make such a choice – to have to summon the courage to migrate, destitute to a foreign land in order to remain true to our religious convictions – may seem like a distant and remote possibility to us now.

Any yet, thousands of people from throughout the world come to the U.S. every year seeking asylum, having fled religious persecution in their home countries, having made exactly that choice. We imprison most of them as soon as they arrive here and, since 9-11, fewer and fewer are seeing their asylum requests granted, especially those we consider to have the “wrong” religion.

Even closer to home, a group calling themselves “Repent Amarillo” has been attacking our Amarillo UU Fellowship, using techniques learned from the “New Apostolic Reformation”, an international organization that provides training on, quote, “taking communities though militant spiritual warfare techniques” — mapping whole geographic areas to identify where the sinners are located (such as in UU churches apparently) and either convert them or “drive the demons out”. Now in case you’re picturing me wearing a rather large tinfoil hat at this point, consider that, before his disgrace, the Rev. Ted Haggard in Colorado Springs adopted these same techniques to harass people he had decided were witches. Ten of his 15 targets sold their homes and moved away because of the harassment.

Last week, Reverend Brock spoke about America’s rising intolerance toward Muslims. Interesting then, that the Unitarianism that exists in Transylvania today was able to develop in the 16th Century because of the tolerance extended to them by the Sultan of the Islamic Ottoman State and because an intermixing of Islamic and Christian cultures bred an ethos of religious acceptance.

Their history is a long one, and religious tolerance toward the Unitarians in Transylvania has waxed and waned, as governments and societal influences have changed, yet they have persisted, providing us lessons in courage.

One such lesson is that spiritual courage requires standing up for religious tolerance. Our Amarillo Unitarian Universalist Fellowship knows this! You see, on September 11 of this year, the head of Repent Amarillo, part-time Reverend David Grisham, had planned to burn a Koran in a public park. The UU Fellowship organized a counter demonstration.

As the good Reverend doused his copy of the Koran with lighter fluid and held it over a barbeque pit preparing to set it on fire, the counter-protesters held their hands over the pit to stop him. Twenty three year old skateboarder, Jacob Isom, an avowed atheist, came up behind the Reverend, grabbed the book from his hands, said, “Dude, you have no Koran,” and ran away with it.

And so it came to pass that thanks largely to a bunch of Unitarian Universalists and a skateboarding atheist, no holy books were burned in Amarillo Texas that day.

A second lesson is that courage is not always one short act in time – that courage may be required over the long run, in the face of societal challenges and changes. We must practice a vigilant and a persistent courage. Only a few years ago, the Texas State Comptroller at the time, Carole Keeton Strayhorn, some of you may have heard of her, denied non-profit status to the UU church in Denison because they did not have one system of belief.

The Texas State Board of Education has been busily rewriting the rules for our childrens’ textbooks to, among other things, strengthen requirements for teaching the “Christian beliefs of the Founding Fathers” and to deemphasize Thomas Jefferson because he was a deist.

At the national Values Voters summit this year, attended by several of the nation’s most well-known politicians, the following statements were issued: that the U.S. should ban the construction of any new mosques anywhere in America; and that the 1st amendment to the constitution does not justify the separation of church and state.

Of the politicians attending, several of whom stand a chance of becoming our next President, not one of them disavowed these statements.

How are we to have courage in light of such challenges? How we do we avoid becoming discouraged in a culture filled with dogmatism and intolerance?

Well, research has found that practicing small acts of courage in our daily lives, such as reaching out to those with whom we have disagreed, builds confidence and prepares us to act with courage when confronting far greater risks.

Research has also found that discerning our values, and reflecting on them often, provides a higher purpose and the impetus for acting courageously. And this idea of finding courage in our values is why, this Halloween, I have resurrected our Unitarian ancestors; although, saying ancestors is a stretch. For the most part, Unitarianism in the U.S. developed independently of that in Europe. Still, each embraced a set of strikingly kindred core values, a shared religious DNA if you will, which UU historian Earl Wilbur identified as commitment to religious freedom, unrestricted use of reason and tolerance of differing views and practices.

This religious DNA is still a key element in the blueprint for Unitarian Universalism today, when we proclaim, “One religion, many beliefs”, or when we affirm our 4th principle, “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning”. This religious DNA drives our congregation’s support of individual spiritual practice and growth.

You see, this foundational core of our belief system requires that we not only work for religious tolerance in the outside world, but that we practice religious freedom within our very religion itself.

And that is good news. That is a saving message that people, whether secular or spiritual, need in our world today.

It demands that we proactively invite people into a place of spiritual exploration without creedal requirements. It compels us to evangelize. Now, I know this idea of UUs evangelizing is controversial. Nonetheless, I will risk being branded a heretic even among Unitarian Universalists by advocating for evangelizing!

Evangelizing is controversial because we’re afraid of it. We don’t even like the word. For many of us, rightly or wrongly, it carries connotations of an irrational, overly emotional form of religious worship; of fundamentalism and restrictive dogma; of conversion and coercion, promises of heaven and threats of eternal hell.

Those of you who are Star Trek nerds like me will understand when I say that the evangelism practiced by the small-town Baptist church I grew up in felt more like a “church of the Borg” – “Resistance is futile. Freedom is irrelevant. You will be assimilated.”

We are also afraid of evangelism, because if we bring to the world our good news (what evangelize means by the way), people might just join us, we might just grow, and growth means change and change can be scary. We are afraid of it because we are much better at talking about what we do not believe than what we do believe. But what we do not believe is not a saving message. Taking about what we do believe takes a lot more courage, but we might start practicing it with our UU principles or our churches’ values: “We find meaning in acceptance of one another, justice, equity, the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process.”

“We believe there is eternal beauty in transcendence, community, compassion, courage and transformation.”

“We find there is God in the inherent worth and dignity of every person; in the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part.”

Wherever your personal beliefs meet those of our shared religion, that is our faith. Our core values, our religious DNA, will not allow us to keep it to ourselves. As the President of our denomination Rev. Peter Morales so aptly demonstrated in a recent sermon, there is a tremendous need for a safe community within which to explore life’s deeper questions.

After I found this church, I realized that I have been a Unitarian Universalist all of my life and just had never known it. I’ll bet many of you had the same experience or have heard the same thought expressed. Sometimes, we seem almost proud of this, but I think it is heartbreaking. I wonder how many more people have never found community with us because they have never heard of us; never heard from us.

If we were to evangelize, if we were to radiate the light from that chalice out beyond these walls and into our community and our world with our saving message of religious freedom, hope, dignity, peace, love, justice, compassion — the sacred beauty of shared existence, well, we might just transform the world, reclaim this paradise we have been given. Here. And now.

And that is what terrifies us the most.

“How DARE we dream that?” we ask ourselves. We dare it because our most deeply held values compel us to do so. We have the spiritual courage. It is in our religious DNA.