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

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

Call to Worship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

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

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

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

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

Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Never mind that Abraham’s wife is barren.

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

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

Bummer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m just sayin’.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is much more complicated than that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suddenly, God’s rainbows become abundant.

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

Benediction

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

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

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

Until next we gather again, be blessed.

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

Go in peace.

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

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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

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

Call to worship

Now let us worship together.

Now let us celebrate our highest values.

Transcendence

To connect with wonder and awe of the unity of life

Community

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

Compassion

To treat ourselves and others with love

Courage

To live lives of honesty, vulnerability, and beauty

Transformation

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

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

Now we worship, together.

Reading

In the night,

I dreamt of a world made better by our togetherness.

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

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

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

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

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

Our world made whole again.

These things we had done together.

These things we had brought to pass with each other.

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

I awoke,

And still, the dream continues.

Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that’s when transformation becomes possible.

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

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

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

Feels pretty good, doesn’t it?

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

Benediction

Transcendence.
Community.
Compassion,
Courage.
Transformation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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

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

Call to Worship Litany

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

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

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

Compassion
To treat ourselves and others with love

Courage
To live lives of honesty, vulnerability, and beauty

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

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

Reading

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

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

Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet the killings will still continue.

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

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

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

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

Benediction

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

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

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

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Chris Jimmerson
August 15, 2015

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

This is a “We Gather” Alternative Service

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

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

Because stories matter. Remembering matters. Black Lives Matter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tamir Rice. Son. Grandson. Brother.

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

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

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

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

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

Akai Gurley. Father. Partner. Brother. Son.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matthew Ajibade. Son. Brother. College Student.

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

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

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

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

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

Natasha McKenna, Daughter, Sister

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time for Centering and Lighting Candles

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

Bernard Moore. Father. Grandfather. Beloved community member.

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

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

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

Call and response three times:
Bernard Moore
Black Lives Matter

Walter Scott. Father. Son. Brother.

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

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

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

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

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

Freddie Gray. Son and brother.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spencer McCain, Father, Brother, Son

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

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

Call and response three times:
Spencer McCain
Black Lives Matter

Jonathan Sanders. Father. Husband. Son.

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

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

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

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

Samuel Dubose. Father, Husband. Son. Brother.

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

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

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

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

Call and response three times:
Samuel Dubose
Black Lives Matter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prayer

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

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

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

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

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

Amen

Extinguishing the chalice

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

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

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

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

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 15 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
July 19, 2015

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

Call to Worship

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

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

Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermon

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

Ingrid was pregnant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benediction

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

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

May you freely give and receive compassion.

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

May possibilities for transformation be ever present before you.

May the congregation say, “Amen” and “Blessed be.” Go in peace.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 15 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
July 5, 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I asked him what time that had been.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And in doing so, it transformed my life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It would have hurt and disappointed me.

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

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

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

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

Amen

Benediction

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

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

Compassion – To treat ourselves and others with love

Courage – To live lives of honesty, vulnerability, and beauty

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

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

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

Many, many blessings upon you.

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

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 15 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
May 10, 2015

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

Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”

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

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

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

And they did. We won that one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Water that tastes like salt and chlorine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benediction

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

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 15 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.