Honoring Norman Martin

by Posted in Guest Speakers, Uncategorized

Robert Janett and Wendy Janett
July 23, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Norman, we love you and we are all going to miss you. Your life should be an example for all of us. Enjoy the present, embrace your family and friends, sing, be prepared to go to war against tyranny, rail at the prejudice and the geo-political injustices in the world, think big thoughts, be generous, and eat a lot of ice cream.

Norman Martin

Norman Martin January 16, 1924 – July 13, 2016

About Norman

Norman Martin was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1924, where he attended primary and high school. As a teenager, just for fun, he taught himself Dutch, first by reading children’s books from the public library and later, upon invitation of the Dutch Consul in Chicago, by attending parties with native speakers to learn the proper pronunciation. At the time, of course, he had no idea where this rather obscure language skill would lead him in the future.

At age 16, he entered the Central YMCA College in Chicago and the next year the University of Chicago, both on full academic scholarships. In 1943, he enlisted in the Army and fought in Normandy, Belgium and Germany and was severely injured. He was discharged in 1945, a decorated war veteran, after the end of the war.

After returning to the US, Norman obtained his Master’s degree in philosophy at the University of Chicago. In 1949, he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study mathematical logic at the University of Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. While there he met Emilia, a Dutch mathematics student, in July 1950. Emilia was seeking information regarding study in the US, and she initiated their first meeting on the advice of a mutual friend. Norman was immediately and permanently smitten with her, and they were married forty days later. In September he moved to Urbana, IL, to begin a teaching position at the University of Illinois. The following month his bride followed, and the couple happily settled into their new life together.

In the spring of 1951, Norman received an opportunity to teach at UCLA while finishing his PhD dissertation in logic. The couple said goodbye to his family in Chicago and undertook the long but beautiful train trip to California. They made many friends and Norman successfully obtained his degree. But after two years when his appointment ended, he found himself in need of a new job. One Sunday, while reading the newspaper, he noticed a very improbable want ad for a logician at the research lab of the University of Michigan in Ypsilanti. Soon after applying he was offered the position, and he flew to Ann Arbor while Emilia temporarily stayed behind to finish her degree in mathematics. While in Michigan he learned all that was known about computers, which at the time was very little. After they reunited in Ann Arbor, the couple’s first daughter, Gabrielle, was born.

Norman was invited to join Space Technology Labs in Los Angeles in 1955, and he commenced an eminent career in computer architecture for the aerospace industry, designing computers for the nascent US space program, ICBMs, and other applications. He helped found Logicon, a computer, aerospace and defense contracting company, with several colleagues in 1961, as the computer era dawned. Logicon was an extremely successful enterprise, and it was ultimately acquired by Northrup Grumman several decades later. Norman and Emilia’s second daughter, Wendy, was born while the family lived in southern California.

In 1965, Norman decided to leave his work in industry and accepted a professor ship in the Departments of Philosophy and Computer Sciences at the University of Texas in Austin.After a distinguished academic career there, he retired in 1990 and was appointed Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Computer Science.

Norman is survived by his wife of 66 years, Emilia, his daughters, Gabrielle Block and her husband Alan Block, and Wendy Janett and her husband Robert Janett, his grandchildren Naomi Salamon, David Janett, Hannah Block and Ethan Block, and his great-grandchildren, Anna and Noah Salamon.

Eulogy for Norman Martin, part 1
Robert Janett (son-in-law)
July 23, 2016

I took a lot of notes here. It reminds me of the story of the doctor giving a eulogy. He hand wrote his talk and when the time came to speak he couldn’t read his own handwriting. “Is there a pharmacist in the house?…”

Seriously, though. I can promise that I wrote this eulogy. It was not copied from anyone else’s eulogy.

It feels comforting to be back in this sanctuary, in this church in which Emilia and Norman have been members for fifty years. They helped build this sanctuary, so this space is very special to the family and is a fitting venue for today’s memorial service.

Who better to spend time with at the end of life, contemplating the meaning of life and death, than a philosopher. Norman Martin was an extraordinary man, a very complex man, brilliant, generous, a man who was gifted in so many ways. Philosopher, mathematician, logician, computer science pioneer, rocket scientist, entrepreneur. He lived a long a full life. Normally we define genius is an average student with a Jewish mother. And Norman did have a Jewish mother. But he was a true genius. We celebrate his life today even as we mourn his death.

I want to tell you a story about Norman’s life that starts with recent events, takes us back 72 years, and then returns us to the present.

The past few months were not easy. My father-in-law was on a revolving door in and out of the hospital and each time he was in the hospital he got noticeably weaker. His final hospitalization told us why. It turned out that he was harboring a chronic form of leukemia. It was not diagnosed until it caused a very severe and life threatening anemia. He was treated gently but aggressively until they could give him a drug to knock down some of the leukemia cells and thereby stabilize the anemia. So he was in the hospital for a week and a half. Wendy and I came to Texas during the crisis, followed soon by Gabby. We wanted to spend time with him because we knew the situation was grave and we didn’t know if we’d get another chance. As it turned out, it was our last visit with him. But we were able to help coordinate a transfer back to the Arbour, a nursing facility at their Westminster life care community, where he received loving attention from the staff and where it was much easier for Emilia to visit him. She could travel by elevator, because his Arbour bed was 3 stories below his independent living apartment.

In the quiet evening hours at the hospital, when everyone else had gone home, he and I spent hours in deep conversation. As some of you know, I am a primary care doctor and quite often I sadly find myself in conversations with patients facing serious illness and difficult decisions. These discussions often revolve around care choices at the end of life. But as a doctor, I have limited time with these patients. It is unusual to have the luxury of time to talk with someone for an hour without interruption. So it was a rare privilege to spend hours on end day after day, in deep conversation with my father in law-a brilliant man who always enjoyed reflecting on profound issues-talking about the big questions in life and of life’s end. On the first evening, he asked me to tell him his prognosis. Sadly, I got it right this time and estimated that he had weeks to months to live-and it turned out to be weeks, not months. He shrugged his shoulders and said that he wanted to make the most of it.

I feel like I learned more about him in the last week that we spent together than I learned in the previous 40 years. A deeply caring man, he was mainly concerned about the impact of his illness on Emilia, on Gabby & Wendy, on the staff that was caring for him. He didn’t want to be a burden. That was his biggest worry. He was not afraid of death and was pleased that he lived an accomplished and prosperous life. He considered himself one of the lucky ones. This seemingly mild mannered man, this consummate nerd, this egghead intellectual, was also a warrior.

He claimed without irony to have won the Cold War. A real honest to goodness rocket scientist, he had important roles in the design and development of the computer guidance systems of Atlas, Titan, and Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles when he worked as senior staff at the Space Technology Laboratories in Pasadena, California. I remember when I first saw Wendy’s birth certificate from Santa Monica. Under father’s field of work it said “guided missiles”.

He spent his last few weeks reminiscing-reviewing some of the key moments in his life. His mind kept returning to his World War II experiences. His experiences in Normandy seemed to dominate his memory and the story.

In those late night chats, he found himself wishing he was 20 again, until he realized that when he was 20 he was lying in a field near Cherbourg, France, gravely wounded. He couldn’t swim and yet he volunteered for the army and landed on Utah Beach on D Day. He was a 145 pound infantryman, an assistant forward artillery observer. That part of France consists of fields bordered by earthen fences knee to waist high with hedges and trees growing on top. What the French call bocage. His job was to stand on top of these earthen berms to look beyond the hedges to see where the enemy was and to direct fire from the allied cannons and mortars. It was up on that hedgerow that he was most exposed and it was near there that he was hit by mortar fire-grievously wounded in the chest and shoulder by shrapnel. He kept recalling how it actually felt to be laying there watching him bleed his life’s blood. He had come to Europe to fight the Nazi’s and he thought to himself, “So this is how it ends.” It was a miracle that he didn’t die on the field between the hedgerows in France. He told me about being found by a chaplain who called a medic to help him; about treatment in a field hospital and then the painful transport down to the sea and across the channel to England for surgical care. As it turns out, Norman died on the day after the 72st anniversary of that fateful event in Normandy.

They offered to send him home after he recovered, but he declined. It was his strong sense of duty, his personal ethics and integrity-because he saw soldiers more seriously injured than him return to battle, and soldiers less seriously injured return home. So they sent him back to France to continue to fight the battles in Europe. Battle of the Bulge nearly did him in with that winter’s bitter cold. His wounded arm became paralyzed and he could no longer fight with the infantry. The Psychological Warfare Division of Supreme Army Headquarters took note of his ability to speak fluent German and tasked him to be an investigator in the Intelligence Section.

He was on an advance team that was assigned to enter Munich as soon as it was captured. His small unit followed just behind the battle front as it advanced through Germany, getting ready to begin their mission in Bavaria. It was on that route from Luxembourg to Munich that they became some of the early liberators of the Dachau concentration camp. He carried into old age nightmare memories of what they saw at Dachau. Along with less traumatic memories of searching out German documents in Bavaria, where he discovered the complete archives of the Nazi party of the region in the dungeon of Eichstadt castle, acting on a tip from a German girl with whom he was illicitly flirting.

The intervening time, from 20 to 92, was a gift. And during those late night conversation he marveled at the miracle of his survival in Normandy, and about all the good things that subsequently came to him in life. His love for Emilia and their long marriage. The pride that he took in his children and his love for them. Scientific and academic accomplishments. The seminal part that he played in the development of radar and guidance systems. His company, Logicon, that he started with a few buddies and is now the IT Department of Northrup Grumman. The countless students he taught and guided over the years as a professor at University of Texas. His knighthood from France as a Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur.

His personal and professional accomplishments were astounding…

He was generous to a fault and freely gave gifts to many people. We also enjoyed giving him gifts. The watch with irrational numbers on its face (the Einstein watch). I remember meeting with the Ecuadorean general who ran the military health system. On his office wall was a poster of all of the Ecuadorean military insignias. I knew that he would love that poster and the general took it down from his wall and gave it to me to bring to Norman. It is still hanging on his office wall. I think that one of the best gifts we ever found for him was a baseball cap that said “As a matter of fact, I am a rocket scientist.”

One of my fondest memories is from time we spent together in Colorado. Norman and Emilia decided to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary by bringing the extended family to Estes Park. We stayed in cabins and took advantage of the proximity to Rocky Mountain National Park to have fun in nature. Now Norman was not an outdoorsy kind of guy. One day the large family gathering split up into smaller groups to take walks or hikes, each to his or her ability. Emilia, Norman, and I took an easy walk through the woods on a relatively flat trail. While walking, he explained to me non-stop, for about two hours, minute details of the history of political parties in Argentina and Uruguay. It was not unusual for him to expound at length on such esoteric topics, as those of you who spent time with him know all too well. And I have been a ready listener to these sagas for forty years.

Well, we were so focused on his stories that we failed to follow the map. And we became a little disoriented in the woods. Not quite lost, because we knew that the road was to our right and down-hill. So we chose a short down-hill trail to the road. It turned out to be an extremely steep old stream bed full of loose rocks. Emilia was sturdy and was generally able to negotiate this rough and dangerous trail without much help. But Norman needed assistance the whole way down. Arm in arm, we picked our way from foot hold to foot hold. I was sure that we were going to end up with four broken hips before we got to the road. At least one of them might well have been mine! But we made it back with happy memories. Another survival story.

That family reunion was so great. A picture of the group hangs today over Emilia’s desk. And I was looking at it this morning. We all looked really good, not just the kids (who still look good today!)

Emilia deserves credit for sustaining him for all of these years, taking care of his every need. I am sure that her loving dedication gave him several extra years of life-because she relentlessly insisted that he get up out of the chair and walk. He hated exercise, but if he was going to get to the dining room for some of the marvelous Westminster food he had to walk there. No matter how long it took. And that walking kept him vigorous.

Norman delighted in strong flavors and he enjoyed spicy ethnic foods from exotic countries. But he hated his vegetables. At the end, he couldn’t really eat because he was too sick. He despised the bland pureed or ground food they were giving him in the hospital. He just couldn’t bring himself to eat it. But leukemia means never having to eat your vegetables, and he seemed to thoroughly enjoy the various flavors of ice cream shakes that we brought to him 3 or 4 times per day for the next few weeks. They were his only source of nutrition, but they did the trick.

Special thanks are due to his medical and nursing team, especially his oncologist, Dr. Cline, who managed to halt the hemolytic process with gentle interventions. This gave him more quality time for several extra weeks of life, and gave us the extra precious time that we had with him. He didn’t suffer. He used those weeks well, singing songs, being read to by family, watching TV and railing at the geo-political news on TV, engaging in lively discussions with all of us, at his usual high intellectual level. David Newton was a frequent visitor and was his usual entertaining self, keeping Norman engaged in erudite conversation and laughter. Norman was holding court with friends from is room in the Arbour at Westminster even on the last weekend of his life. He knew and we knew that his time was severely limited. But that didn’t stop him from experiencing joy at the end of life. And we can all take comfort in that, both for him and for ourselves.

Norman, I love you and we are all going to miss you. Your life should be an example for all of us. Enjoy the present, embrace your family and friends, sing, be prepared to go to war against tyranny, rail at the prejudice and the geo-political injustices in the world, think big thoughts, be generous, and eat a lot of ice cream.

Eulogy for Norman Martin, part 2
January 16, 1924 – July 13, 2016
Delivered by Wendy Janett (daughter)
Memorial Service – July 23, 2016

My father was the son of immigrants. His mother, Fay Kaplan, came to this country from Poland in 1908 as a young girl. Her father was a rabbi. My father’s father, also a Jewish immigrant, came from Ukraine as a teenager at about the same time. At the time, Ukraine was still part of the Russian empire, though many of its residents longed to return to independence. As a member of the Social Democratic Party since the age of 15, my grandfather participated in an uprising against the czar. Sometime thereafter, he learned that he was on a list of people selected to be deported to Siberia, and decided instead to flee to the US. He traveled on foot and, when he could, hitched rides on wagons with other travelers, all the way across what are now Poland and Germany, to the city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, a distance of over 1200 miles. There he worked odd jobs until he earned enough money for passage to America. After disembarkation at Ellis Island, his name, once Kagansky, became Harry Cohen.

The families of both of my grandparents settled in Chicago, where they met, married and had two sons. My father was the younger of the two, and he idolized his big brother, Marty.

The family’s life was not easy. My grandfather was a union organizer for the necktie industry, and my grandmother was a laundress. They often struggled to find work of any kind to keep a roof over their heads and their sons fed, especially during the Great Depression. But my father was always consumed by books and learning, and his brother was his champion and protector. Both of these advantages stood him in good stead as he grew into a young man.

From childhood, Dad was the quintessential scholar, not only excelling in his schoolwork, but spending most of his free time independently studying topics he found interesting, such as obscure aspects of world history, politics, and the Dutch language, which he mastered to fluency. In addition, Dad took his personal spiritual journey very seriously. He developed strong personal ethics focused on honesty, integrity and justice. While still in high school, he became a pacifist and, for a time, a Quaker, and as the threat of war increased in the late 1930s, he joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Youth Committee Against War. Even the bombing of Pearl Harbor did not immediately deter him. Despite his extensive mastery of politics, which made him more knowledgeable about fascism than other kids his age – or, for that matter, most adults – he was so passionate and sincere about his pacifism that when the draft was instituted, he applied for and was granted Conscientious Objector status.

In early 1942, Dad was awaiting assignment as a CO while majoring in philosophy at the University of Chicago. He had a special interest in Ethics and Kant, and in particular the concept of “moral duty”. In May of that year, he decided to reconsider, through study, the actions of the Nazi regime, particularly in regard to its policies in occupied Holland. By the end of that very month, he concluded that his moral duty to help defeat the Nazis outweighed his pacifist convictions. As a result he requested that the draft board reclassify him as 1A and volunteered to join the Army.

To his surprise, when he reported for Army service, his physical exam revealed a hernia and, hence, he was classified 4F and rejected. Although the condition was correctable by simple surgery, the government would not pay for it and his family could not afford to do so. He eventually found a social service organization willing to fund the operation, and in June 1943 he was finally permitted to enlist in the Army.

Once the war was over, Dad returned to the US and resumed his studies at the University of Chicago. It was then that he made what he believed was “one of the best decisions of my life,” namely, to continue studying philosophy, but instead of focusing on ethics, he specialized in logic. With his prodigious aptitude in math, logic was a natural fit for him. In making this slight turn in his course of study, the breadth of his career options instantly ballooned, though he couldn’t have known how much at the time, from a professional life lived entirely in the halls of academia (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) to being instrumental in the creation of an entirely new field – computer science. This choice would give him a wide variety of opportunities in both industry and academia.

Later, Dad was awarded a Fulbright grant for the study of mathematical logic at the University of Amsterdam. There, he met my mother, a Dutch math student who was considering studying abroad in the US. A mutual friend suggested that she look him up to ask him about US universities, and she did. When they met, Dad instantly realized that he had met the woman of his dreams. Before long, the feelings were mutual, and they married 40 days after that first meeting. Their marriage lasted 66 years, until he died.

My parents gave their children a strong sense of security. I always knew, even through the ’70s when so many of my friends’ parents and family friends split up, that my parents would never, ever divorce. They both took their marriage commitment extremely seriously, and for both of them, to violate it would be a breach of their moral duty. More importantly, they both respected each other deeply, appreciating their partners’ strengths and accommodating weaknesses. They were openly affectionate, and when they moved to Westminster, they quickly acquired a reputation as “the cute couple” because they always walked hand in hand. My father was to be completely enamored of my mother from the day he met her until the day he died. He truly believed that he had won the lottery of love by capturing the heart of his Dutch beauty – and he was right. A few weeks before he passed away, my father told me that he had probably been a terrible father. This is not true. Especially by the standards of the times, when fathers were primarily expected to be breadwinners and mothers were expected to be É well, mothers, he wasn’t even a bad father. We knew that he loved us and was proud of us. He had a special activity with each of us – with me, my stamp collection. Though my interest in and patience for collecting stamps definitely waned before his did, I loved spending the time together and having his full, uninterrupted attention. My father enjoyed collecting things, especially facts about those things. Though I have to admit that I never quite shared Dad’s enthusiasm for his hobbies, through stamp collecting he taught me to identify many of the flags of the world, and I enjoyed learning to remember the flags and locating the corresponding countries on our globe. (I still question the usefulness of this knowledge – maybe it will come in handy some day, perhaps if I ever go on the reality show “The Amazing Race”. Who knows?) As I got older, we engaged in many spirited discussions, especially about religion and politics, and I always learned new things from him, even just a few days before he died. In spite of what you may think, Dad, you were a good father.

A little later in the memorial service, we will pay homage to Dad through another of his interests, national anthems. Dad loved national anthems, and these two anthems had special significance for him. The Marseillaies, the French national anthem, was one of his favorite songs, and he requested that we all sing it, to the best of our ability, at his memorial.

And we will hear the Dutch national anthem. It may seem improbable that a poor Jewish boy from Chicago would develop a fascination for Holland, but that is exactly what happened. And as things turned out, if one believes in such things, it would seem that he was merely living out the mysterious part of life that we might think of as fate. Dad’s father literally embarked on his journey to a new life from the Netherlands. My father decided, rather arbitrarily, to teach himself Dutch, and a few years later changed his deeply held ethical beliefs because of the political situation in Holland, resulting in the life changing experience of military service in wartime. And, finally, the Fulbright that enabled him to study in Amsterdam and meet my mother, his lifelong companion, proves that, whatever the cause, his enchantment with the country was well founded.

Dad, we love you and will miss you, but we will look to you as a model of a life well-lived.

 

Paving the road to Hell?

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

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Andy Gerhart
July 24, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

We know that knowledge is power, and in our UU faith we emphasize the free search for truth. But what does it mean when answers lead to new questions and new forms of ignorance? How do we cope with our ignorance and simultaneously act in good faith? We’ll discuss our current climate crisis as we explore how uncertainty might ground our theology to inspire us and offer a basis for moral action.

Call to Worship

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical.
It is the power of all true art and science.
He to whom this emotion is a stranger,
who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe,
is as good as dead.
To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists,
manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and
the most radiant beauty,
which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms-
this knowledge,
this feeling,
is at the center of true religiousness.

Albert Einstein
(As quoted in Philip Frank, Einstein: His Life and Times, 1947)

Readings:

“Physical science has historically progressed not only by finding precise explanations of natural phenomena, but also by discovering what sorts of things can be precisely explained. These may be fewer than we had thought.”
-Steven Weinberg (Nobel laureate in Physics, and Austinite)

“If you’re a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience.”
-Al Gore, 2008

“Responsible action does not mean the certain achievement of desired ends but […] the creation of the conditions of possibility for desired changes… What improbable task, with which unpredictable results, shall we undertake today?”
-Sharon Welch, UU theologian, and Provost, Meadville Lombard

Sermon:

Good morning-

So, you all know our esteemed intern minister here at First UU, the honorable Susan Yarborough, right? And you also probably know that when she gives a sermon, often on a major holiday like fourth of July this year, she never fails to declare not only that it is a “seminarian Sunday,” but that they have brought out the B team. Well, I want to declare this a “pre-seminarian” Sunday! And I want to acknowledge the stark reality that if Susan is the B team, then I’ll be very lucky to be considered the C, D, or E team!

So… Shall we pave the road to hell? That is my question today.

Hopefully it brings to mind for you the popular maxim, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” This is the observation that the world is a far more complicated place than we generally imagine, and that a lot of bad stuff is done with the hope of improving it. Examples litter our lives. In fact just the other day, I had a moth breakout at home, and at a complete loss of how to protect my favorite sweater, I read that I could put it in the freezer while I went out of town, and that that would kill the wool moths. So I did, and when I returned, somehow my precious sweater had been pulled through the ice maker! Not only could I not extract it without cutting the sweater, but I broke the ice-maker.

Other examples are really familiar to us. We pour antibiotics into our agriculture in order to feed ourselves, yet in the end create new superbugs with antibiotic resistance. We burn fossil fuels to enable development that is supposed to increase people’s standards of living, but that same energy ends up trapping heat in our atmosphere. And now we are teetering on the edge of using very novel climate technologies, called geo-engineering, in emergency efforts; but these technologies may likely have even more disastrous consequences.

So we must underscore the amount of ignorance we confront whenever we try to do anything.

The photo on the cover of the order of service is of a courageous alliance of citizens putting themselves in front of bulldozers to protect Utah lands from a Canadian firm that the US has recently permitted to extract tar sands. And yes, we are literally paving ourselves, with fossil fuels, into the only type of hell I’ve ever been aware of, one here on earth. We just finished another record breaking June, which followed 13 months that each broke their respective month’s record. And it won’t stop. We are all drenched in oil, as our entire socio-economic system is built on it. We are heating our earth at a rate of 250 trillion joules per second, which is equivalent to exploding 400,000 Hiroshima bombs a day, 365 days a year. And in May, in Karachi, the Pakistani government began digging anticipatory mass graves to prepare for the deaths they expect from this summer’s heat wave.

We face incredible anxiety when we contemplate taking moral actions that may confront these seemingly impervious realities. And no matter which actions we are considering, we confront different types of despair that are commonplace in our society. There’s that we’ve just touched on, the fear of acting because you may make things worse, which underlies the precautionary principle. Another is what I’ll call existentialist despair: the near certainty that no matter what, all of humanity is one day destined for extinction. Either a superbug will get us in the next thousand years, or the sun will explode in a few billion; this is what Bertrand Russell called “unyielding despair.” And then there is a kind of despair, which is so common that I think I confront it in myself or others almost every day. This is perfectionist despair: that dread voice in our minds that dictates that unless we do something perfectly, there is no point in doing it at all. In the case of climate change and reducing carbon emissions, I can’t simply make a choice to do some action that seems good for the climate. Unless I stop eating animals, and stop driving a car, and then stop eating dairy, and then only adopt children who have already been born, and then raise them as vegans, and buy carbon offsets for their extra impacts, well, then there is no point.

I’m sure there are many more types of despair. But regardless of which type of despair you do battle with when you think of doing something inspired, and which type you lose your battle to, let’s face it, all forms of despair become a justification for inaction. And for many, including me, they are comfort. Bertrand Russell and all the existentialists love their despair. And I have at times as well. Despair lifts the burden of hope off of our shoulders, and what a burden that is! Despair frees us to worry about nobody, including ourselves. It helps us cope. In many ways, despair is a religion.

UU theologian Sharon Welch, in her book A Feminist ethic of risk, talks about how we can tackle these anxieties by working toward what she calls “the creation of the conditions of possibility for desired changes.”

But what are these conditions of possibility? For Welch, they are formed when we act in communities, which she believes tend to hedge against bad ideas and actions, but more importantly, have much greater resilience in the face of failure than individuals do.

I agree with Welch. But there is an individual step that must occur well before we build active communities. This is especially true in our increasingly more isolated and isolating culture.

We each individually must decide to join a community, before we can actually act as one. And this individual and radical decision to participate with others, in inspired moral action, for me, this is where the magic is. I don’t really feel like I understand how this happens very well at all, but for me the critical move begins by acknowledging our ignorance in the face of our uncertainty.

In his introductory essay to the new Norton Anthology of World Religions, Jack Miles states that “the discovery of ignorance” may have been the greatest human discovery of all time. As he puts it, “until our prehistoric but anatomically modern ancestors could tell the difference between ignorance and knowledge, how could they actually know they knew anything?”

Miles continues by noting that religions throughout time can be considered not as privileged forms of knowledge, as is commonly thought, but as “ritualized confessions of ignorance.”

Seeing religion in this way is, he writes, easily overlooked, for “the world harbors many a quiet believer and many a shy practitioner, reluctant to undergo cross-examination about a confession of inadequacy that defies ready articulation.”

“a confession of inadequacy that defies ready articulation”… Indeed, I feel that this is at the heart of religions the world over. And I feel that this is at the heart of inspired moral action.

I myself cannot make a special claim to religious knowledge, either affirming or disaffirming deities. I can however, confess my inadequacy, communally, and ritualistically.

I believe that science is a profoundly deep method for doing this. In fact I believe it is a religion. Science inquires passionately into the nature of reality, and confesses a great deal of ignorance, loving the questions it asks so much that it discovers kernels of reality along the way. Things literally become real through the scientific process. To me it is much like the story of the Velveteen Rabbit. As that wonderful straw-filled toy becomes real through the tried and true testing and constant love of a boy at play, knowledge is revealed to us by the scientific community’s persistent and rigorous inquiry into ignorance by the testing of our world. In this sense, science is a form of real and intense love.

And one of the great misconceptions of science is that scientists are perfectly rational dispassionate actors! Quite the opposite, they love mystery as much or more than any religious actor, and pursue their passions with irrational love and intensity. And thank the dickens that they do, for through such passionate exploration comes most of the knowledge we have to work with in our daily lives. Not just in our daily hum and drum, but as we confront realities like climate change.

And as we just heard in the readings, true science does a great job of acknowledging ignorance. Even Steven Weinberg, our local Austinite Nobel Laureate in physics, as we just heard, wrote that fewer natural phenomena can be precisely explained than physicists originally thought. And as Jack Miles puts it, “Scientific progress is like mountain climbing: the higher you climb, the more you know, but the wider the vistas of ignorance that extend on all sides. The result is that our ignorance always exceeds our knowledge, and the gap between the two grows infinitely greater, not smaller, as infinite time passes.”

Indeed, after so much physical inquiry, when we fit our mathematical formulas to find out that more than 90% of the mass in the universe is what we call dark matter, and is completely undetectable, our universe becomes a completely new mystery to us. And so do our lives within it.

The worst part is that we cannot even admit it. We are an arrogant species. And the last thing we want to do is relinquish our fundamentalist beliefs, whether they are quote unquote religious or, quote unquote scientific. The last thing we wish to do is admit how little we know.

The notion of ignorance has indeed taken on a very unique, and complicated, valence when it comes to climate change. This is because instead of acknowledging ignorance, many people today actually celebrate it when it comes to climate change. These days there are very few scientists that deny human-caused climate change, and those that do are paid handsomely to do so, as historian Naomi Oreskes makes very clear in her book Merchants of Doubt.

To my mind, the critical reason we must acknowledge our ignorance, is because it enables us to recognize what we actually do know. I do not know what God is, or who she, he, they, or it is or isn’t; I do not know what dark matter is, or whether what lays beyond our universe are parallel universes through infinite space. Just as I do not know how to speak the Basque language (or any other language other than English and some Spanish for that matter).

I don’t know the mystery of the world, and it terrifies me. But I do know that I am alive. And in the same instant that I recognize my vitality I also recognize that I am, simultaneously, grateful for my life. This is the essential recognition. Gratitude for living, to my mind, is the natural result of a confession of ignorance. And it is the seed from which grows inspired actions.

I don’t know exactly how climate change will play out in what remains of my lifetime, but I do know that it will play out most disastrously for those who cannot afford to cope with it, and that we will have many reenactments of what happened in the 9th ward of New Orleans during the flood that many call Hurricana Katrina. I don’t know all the places this will happen, but I do know that many, many more of them will happen in Bangladesh, in Vietnam, in China, in India, and along the coasts of Africa. For those who are impoverished on the coastlines of this world, I do know that sea level rise will mean refugee status. And I now know, that people in large cities in deserts like Karachi will be preemptively digging mass graves.

I don’t know who will set aside the money to help these people, and I don’t know how our energy economy will transition from fossil fuels. But I do know we need hundreds of billions of dollars set aside to help them, and I know that we need to change our fossil fuel lifestyles.

Those who deny climate change are not acknowledging ignorance. They are not loving anything. They are closing their eyes, and their hearts, out of tremendous fear for old livelihoods. They come in many forms, but all are putting their heads in the sand. But its not just sand, it is sand along a beach, at low tide.

Still, the problem isn’t so much them, it is the rest of us, standing right next to them. Our heads may be out of the sand, and we may see the tide rising. But we are in despair, and we are paralyzed.

So how do we act amidst uncertainty? How do we collectively pull our heads out of the sand? How do we open our eyes to inquire into mystery and ignorance? And once we have done that, how do we open our bank accounts, and our homes, to environmental refugees.

Well, I don’t know. I too tend to despair. And I don’t think that is going to end anytime soon. I just want to learn to do it with more humor. I’m going to seminary, as an agnostic, because I yearn to know, why exactly, do certain people act courageously in a world full of mystery and uncertainty, and often at great personal risk, in such inspiringly ethical ways? Because it does happen. I am particularly wondering about why a village in the Netherlands, called Nieuwlande, so courageously hid Jews during the Holocaust; and so quietly, without even talking about it. They just automatically began doing it, at exceptional personal risk. There are many other types of examples. Yet often folks who do these things describe their actions in a double negative, as having “acted when they simply could not not act.”

But what grounds such moral action? An article by the ethicist Bill Greenway recently introduced me to the Jewish philosopher Emmaneul Levinas. Levinas, a holocaust survivor, characterized these types of actions as being passionately taken hostage, by the “face” of the other through a type of love. This is the same love that Jews and Christians might call agape love. Seized by the suffering of another, we are compelled to act not out of some a priori dispassionate rationality, but precisely the opposite. Our moral response takes priority and comes first as we grapple with the reality of the suffering before us.

I know about the Karachi graves thanks to a direct action a few weeks ago that Tim DeChristopher and Karena Gore staged so that we would know it amidst the hell-on-earth we’ve had closer to home. Tim, a UU seminarian, and Karena, the daughter of Al Gore, and a bunch of other ministers were arrested for lying in a ditch being dug for a fracking pipeline in Boston. And as Tim put it in an interview with Democracy Now, when he heard of the anticipatory mass graves in Karachi, “…it just broke my heart in a whole new way… it just really weighed on me and wouldn’t let go…You know, it was one of those things that just settled deeply into my heart, and I felt really compelled to take action. Tim did not ask the question, “Why act morally?” because the question never even surfaced for him. And when we act, like mad scientists, we do not do it so rationally either. Often, we have either already acted, without free will, taken hostage by the faces of the other; or we have hardened our hearts and not acted all. It is only from this last place that that dispassionate question “Why act morally?” arises.

I agree with Levinas about the hostage taking that happens. Inspired moral action is indeed doing that which one cannot not do. If a confession of ignorance amidst mystery is the soul of religion, and that confession provokes deep gratitude, then simply living with your eyes open is at the heart of the religious experience. It really is a form of witnessing.

So what are the preconditions of possibility for inspired moral action that Welch talks about? I believe they begin with acknowledging our inadequacy, such that when the sensation of gratitude for our existence arises in juxtaposition with the uncertainty of our universe, we’ll see Levinas’ faces, and a few among us spontaneously, passionately, and rather irrationally will make risky and responsible moral actions.

As Jack Miles puts it, “even the most reasonable among us must close the gap between indecision and decision, paralysis and action, not with knowledge but with something else. I expect the darkness of ignorance to continue to surround me until my dying day. In a sense, that darkness is my enlightenment.”

True despair, or paralysis in grief or fear, is a severance from our acknowledgement of mystery and uncertainty. It is a rejection of the gratitude and awe that such uncertainty provokes. Frequently that rejection takes the form of certainties, of know-it-all fundamentalisms, built almost exclusively on fear, like those of some climate deniers. Fundamentalist certainties are the opposite of the kernels that make up the steps on our small mountain of knowledge. They are the opposite of inquiry, and of love. They are more like the Dementors in Harry Potter, sucking all questions, and with them, all reality and love, away from us.

A huge problem with the way climate issues are discussed is through their negativity, through their apocalyptic tones. Talking about it in apocalyptic tones doesn’t help us address it. Hearing that it will make humans go extinct only creates an incredible amount of fear, despair, and more paralysis. Humans are like deer in the headlights in front of these kinds of headlines. And the denial these headlines produce is exactly the same denial that climate deniers have. David Sobel calls this ecophobia. The inability to psychologically process the dread.

I am not interesting in dread, or apocalypse, or hell at all. Instead, let us acknowledge what we do, and what we don’t know. We don’t know that humans will go extinct from climate change, in fact, it seems very unlikely since we do know that the rich are very likely to adapt with little trouble. We do know that the poor are the ones who will bear the brunt, and may experience massive devastations. So let’s own up to it, and take the attitude of David Byrne of the Talking Heads, the writer of the song our musicians just rocked out to, and find some joy amidst doom on our Road to Nowhere.

Instead of being paralyzed by grief, let us acknowledge our grief-stricken state while we come up with good ways to cope with our changing climate. Let us actively grieve, and listen amidst our uncertainty, refusing to deny what we do know.

There are many good avenues available to us. If you want to empower our youth, the ones who face the greatest burden amongst us, and are often willing to take the greatest risks, support the UU Young Adults for Climate Justice, organized by Aly Tharp based here in Austin, and join Commit2Respond. They are on fire. If you are interested in affecting policy, get involved with the Citizens Climate Lobby. If you might like to take direct, peaceful actions, which are often the most powerful: join Peaceful Uprising, Karena Gore, Tim DeChristopher.

But whatever you do, please don’t do it perfectly, and please do it in community.

I’ll conclude with the question Sharon Welch so brilliantly asks us to consider: “What improbable task, with which unpredictable results, shall we, shall we, undertake today?”

“Will you join me in paving the road to hell?”

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.

Who’s Calling, Please?

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons, Susan Yarbrough, Video available

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Susan Yarbrough
July 3, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

“Who’s Calling, Please?” These are the words I always use when I don’t recognize the caller ID number or the name of the person on the other end of the line. This Sunday, let’s think together about what we have been called to do as individuals and as a congregation, who or what is calling us, and the fact – yes, the fact – that we are all called and are all ministers.

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

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

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

 

It ain’t broke…but we can still fix it

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Nell Newton, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Nell Newton
June 26, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

So much around us seems fragmented and unsustainable, like the world around us seems broken. But is it? We will look at theology and possible responses to the idea that our world is a broken mess.

Reading:
The Truth About Stories; A Native Narrative pages 21-22
by Thomas King

Reading:
Adrienne Rich

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
So much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
Who, age after age,
Perversely, with no extraordinary
Power, reconstitute the world.

Sermon

One of my favorite bumper stickers asks “Where are we going? And why are we in this hand basket?!” To some it would seem like everything is falling apart and changing for the worse at every turn. The alarmists in our midst assure us that we are facing End Times.

The revolution will NOT be televised, but Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo.

Even for us Universalists, this hand basket seems to be heading someplace hot. But what everything is not falling apart? What if this is just business as usual and it’s up to us to reframe our response?

In some religious circles, people have expressed a desire to “heal our broken world”. This sentiment is usually couched as part of a mission statement – along the lines of what the Salvation Army has as its mission: “The Salvation Army – a growing, loving community of people dynamically living God’s mission in a broken world.”

This language is pretty popular among justice-seeking Christians. You can find it in colleges, mission trip groups, and from folks who are working to improve the lives of the poor. It generally can be summed up as “Together we share a quest for justice, peace, reconciliation and healing in a broken world.”

(Honestly, they lifted the term from the Judaic concept of “tikkun olam” which translates as “world repair” but they took some liberties in the translation and theology.)

So there are people who see our world as broken. These are good and loving people, and they want to make things better. But something about it just sticks in my craw…

What is it? Why does that language make me itchy? That’s what’s happening… I’m getting itchy.

I really don’t have a problem with people who are motivated by their understanding of the holy to go out and do some good work. I deeply respect people of any faith tradition who are called to address injustice.

So why the itch over this language? Our Broken World…

What’s wrong with recognizing that things are messed up and we can become a blessing to our world by walking humbly and doing justice?

It’s the “broken” that sets me on edge. Casting our world as “broken” irks me.

I find myself growling – that’s how I know something is serious – growling: “It ain’t broke! It was built this way!”

Built this way – in our natural world and our human society.

Rockslides and typhoons are part of the entire system of Nature. They cause disruption of human activities – even death and illness – but they are how this whole system works. It’s not broken. It’s complex but not broken.

But scientists are pretty much in agreement that global climate change is directly caused by human activity. Wouldn’t that show that we’ve broken our world? Yes and no. Yes, our activities have changed the system. But it’s not broken, just different. Not very comfortable for us and many other species, but still a full system. No missing pieces, nothing removed, just all of the interlinked parts responding to the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels. The natural world is not broken… it’s working quite well. And with or without us it will continue following its deep, old laws.

So, if anything, it’s not that we need to fix anything but we do need to get things back into balance if we, and all of the bears and bees and beavers are going to survive.

So what about our human society? What do I mean by “It’s not broken – it’s built that way?”

Well, our brains are hardwired for xenophobia. As a species we are inherently mistrustful of people outside of our immediate clan. We’re built that way.

But when it becomes institutionalized and rationalized, it moves from being a residual part of our lizard brain, to becoming racism that prevents us all from accessing the richness of life. Both the oppressor and the oppressed are limited by institutionalized racism. And our laws and financial practices have been built to hold groups of othered people away from resources like education, work, or medical care.

Why did so many people of color wind up in foreclosure during the Great Recession? Because of a complex system of practices, all legal, that kept them hemmed into certain neighborhoods and then made a lot of money off of them through predatory lending. It wasn’t that anyone said “How can we engineer a system to perfectly oppress people we are uncomfortable with?” But that’s pretty much what happened.

It’s what happens when we don’t examine prejudice or the way our brains work. Nothing was broken. The system worked quite well. In fact some systems work better when they are unexamined.

And that’s how evil moves about in this world, buried so deep into our normal that we don’t notice it until a person close to us cries out.

Many of the worst parts of our human society are not really broken, just unexamined prejudice. Any fixing to be done is the hard work of unpacking and naming and trying to do it better it over and over until there’s less unexamined stuff around to trip us up.

Okay… deep breath…

So that’s what I mean when I say “It ain’t broken.”

Now, here’s another reason why the phrase “broken world” just irks me: It implies that there is a more perfect, more preferred state that has been broken. It presumes that there is a norm that is better than a variation. Which is okay as long as you fit the norm….

And, here’s the real reason I get itchy: it is based upon an underlying theology that is problematic.

That theology – the one where our world is “broken”. It comes from an interpretation of the Judeo-Christian creation story. You know this one:

In the beginning there was perfection…
(Except that actually, if you read Genesis you find two beginnings…)
In The Beginning There Was Perfection in a Garden.
And eventually two humans, who were somehow too human, not perfect, despite having been made in God’s image…
(Do you sense a set up here?)
The two humans transgressed a rule…
(Really, this was a set up – eat anything and everything except THAT.)
And perfection was broken.
Because humans were not perfectly obedient.
Because they were too human.
Despite having made their god in their own image…

This break, this rupture, this banishment and punishment… this is the underpinning of what many Christians interpret as Our Broken World. Inherent human sinfulness broke God’s perfect world. And it continues to break this world.

This suggests that they have some assumptions about what Perfection would look like. They are trying to fix something they perceive is broken, and restore it to what they would consider whole or mended.

So, the problem with presuming that our world is broken is that it is based upon a theology that casts us as inherently bad children who broke something, and now we’re trying to fix it, but, of course, we can’t because there is an omnipotent god who is really in charge but seems to be waiting for us to live up or down to his expectations.

Can you see why I get itchy here?

So… here’s where a different kind of theology might change our response.

What if, instead of a single omnipotent, omniscient, judging sky god, what if there was a theology that accepted that perfection includes things that are outside the norms, things that appear imperfect? We’ve all seen leaves that simply grew asymmetrically or trees that have been misshapen by terrain or weather and yet they still grow and photosynthesize and bring beauty.

We’ve all seen imperfection and loved it more dearly because of its uniqueness. Think of a beloved – is it their perfection, their adherence to a norm that you love? Or is it their crooked smile – the way the left eye crinkles more than the right eye when they grin and laugh?

So, what if our understanding of perfection included some things that appear broken, or imperfect? And what if our understanding of the divine included our having to help create and recreate this perfect imperfection? Rather than always failing at restoring Eden, what if we are actually tasked with joining in as a part of Nature to create with wild diversity? Our job becomes less about fixing and more about participating!

Whew!

Okay, now I’m going to recognize that brokenness is real. There really is brokenness in our world. More specifically, covenants can be broken, and people can be broken.

You’ve known people who were broken. Most families have someone who isn’t quite okay. Maybe it was trauma or odd neurological wiring, or both, but there’s someone in the family who wound up broken. And that old judging sky god doesn’t seem interested in helping.

How we respond to broken people is how I’ll measure our gods.

Here’s an example – Cousin Guido. In one branch of my extended family one of our broken ones was Cousin Guido. He wasn’t really my cousin. He was my step grandfather’s second cousin but in an Italian American family, for better or worse, everyone is family.

When I was a little kid I really couldn’t tell how old Guido was. He seemed like a young man right up until the moment he became an old man. That was because when he was a young man, he was sent over to fight in World War II. He was a poor Italian American kid who was probably a little neurologically vulnerable but had no one to speak up for him or assign him to non-combat work. So, like too many poor young men, he was issued a pair of boots and a gun and sent to fight. And, when the bombs started exploding and guns firing all around him, his mind snapped. It was all over. It was what used to be called “shell shocked.” He got stuck in the middle of that terror and stayed there for the rest of his life.

Guido’s father finally found him in a hospital. Back then there was no real treatment for that kind of trauma, so his father simply brought him home and resigned to care for his son. In fact, Guido’s father married a young woman with the understanding that she would care for his son after he died. And she did. And the rest of the family cared for him too. My step grandparents always included Guido in the big family dinners and took him places. They’d include him exactly as he was – not leaving him in a back room, not waiting for him to get better, not expecting him to change – just including him and loving him as the rocking, moaning, terrified person that he was.

Have you ever seen that kind of love? The love that keeps loving someone even in their brokenness?

What makes it astonishing is because it means finding the holy in the spaces God seems to have deserted.

If we’re going to live and love brokenness, it’s going to take a different kind of theology that asks us to just live into what is, not in guilt or as punishment, but in a steady renewal, over and over again of what family and love and connection can look like.

It took the rest of Guido’s life, and he did have tranquility and kindness in his later years. He knew he belonged. It became the work of a family to hold his brokenness, his fragility. It showed us, the younger members of the family, that we didn’t have to be perfect to be loved; we simply had to be present.

This is the work of creative people who take what is imperfect and add to it with their love. Not to fix it, but to simply keep creating alongside their god.

And such is a god that I will measure us by.

Rev. Nell Newton was ordained by the San Marcos Unitarian Universalist Fellowship this past June. A lifelong Unitarian Universalist, she lives in Central Austin with her husband, assorted teenagers, too many cats, a mess of chickens, and one sweet dog.

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.

Revolutionary Love

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

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
Phil Richardson, Nicole Meitzen, Julie Gillis
June 12, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Rev. Chris Jimmerson and leaders from the Austin Area UU White Allies for Racial Equity will examine how, in the words of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

Call to Worship
by Steve Ripper

Che Guevara once said, “At the risk of sounding ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.”

It begins and ends with love. If there is one lesson, one key to being all you can be – and I don’t mean being a soldier, I mean being a warrior – it’s learning to love. But just what does that word, love, mean? It has become so fraught and loaded with double meanings and empty promises that many are justifiably cynical at the mere mention of love. I’m not talking sentimental love, I’m not talking hallmark love, I’m not talking ‘luv.’ I’m talking about a fierce love, a revolutionary love, a true love, a love beyond illusion, a love that is not afraid to freak you out with the truth, even when it hurts like hell. This Big Love is agape love, it’s a universal love, and it is, I believe infused in all of creation.

Meditation Reading
by Steve Ripper

When I asked Archibishop Desmond Tutu one of my favourite questions, “what is the meaning of life”, he replied, “The God in whose image we are created, is a God of love. We are the result of a divine loving. Ultimately we’re meant for love… we’re meant as those who will communicate love and make this world more hospitable to love.”

You don’t need to believe in God to feel the power of this truth – somewhere deep inside us all, is a bonfire of love, that we are here to embody, to unleash, to liberate from captivity.

Take a moment and send your awareness down to your heart, and see if you can feel a little taste of this vast love which is hidden there, like a shining diamond – your diamond heart. Can you feel it burning within?

Homily 1
by Phil Richardson

We were challenged by Dr. King to find a Revolutionary Love that could defeat the hate of racism. The inter-racial love that Michael and I share is an example of such a love.

I don’t know why I fell in love with Michael 36 years ago. I knew that I was attracted to men of color but the deck was stacked against us. … According to 1970’s social norms and our respective parents … Our age difference was too great ( ageism), we were both men (homophobia) and especially we were of mixed races (racism.) … My mother pleaded: Couldn’t you please pick someone less ‘obviously controversial?’ Thankfully we stayed together overcoming pressure from culture, family and friends … our Love prevailed.

In our 36 years together we’ve lived together, raised children together, shared intimate hopes and dreams together, practiced medicine together, vacationed together and grieved together as we lost friends to AIDS. Michael is my ally, friend, companion and now legal husband after four very public wedding-like commitment ceremonies.

Is Michael Really Black?
The short answer is yes. His skin color is a rich tan. That said, I see Michael more as a friend, lover, husband and confidant who happens to have darker skin. Our Revolutionary Love transformed black Michael into Michael who happens to be black. … Close proximity, frequent interaction, mutual trust and respect, (elements of our Revolutionary Love), caused me to see Michael’s character rather than his skin color … that was Dr. King’s dream. This Revolutionary Love transformed us both to see each other as our true selves, rather than what we looked like.

A telling anecdote occurred several years after Michael and I got together. We were at a large social gathering when Michael whispered to me “We’re the only black people at this party.” It took a minute for Michael’s Freudian slip to sink in … We had become to each other, members of the same human race.

The take away in this example is that our initial recognition of our racial difference caused our relationship to begin. As love drew us closer, we each became less aware of our skin colors, seeing more each other’s true essence. This pathway of first acknowledging, then accepting racial and cultural difference followed by long lasting mutual admiration, compassion, and trust defeated the very meaning of racism.

Road Blocks
Two major roadblocks to defeating racism are White Privilege and an unequal Race Based Justice system. Understanding these roadblocks has been the focus of our White Allies studies.

We’ve discovered that most white people, myself included, are totally unaware how we exercise White Privilege … unless it’s pointed out. In our Allies group we regularly share White Privilege scenarios we’ve observed in ourselves and others.

Race based inequality under the law has been publicized by the Black Lives Matter movement. … “Stop and Frisk,” “The War on Drugs” and supposedly “non-existent” racial profiling all claim to be race neutral but with implementation are racist.

Loving Away Racism

– I believe that the pathway to a tranquil diverse society must first start with a full awareness and acceptance of race and cultural differences. With purposeful proximity, genuine friendship, admiration, and trust we can defeat racism.

– We need to learn to recognize and condemn White Privilege wherever we find it.

– We need to be prepared to change ourselves whenever we discover our own exercise of White Privilege.

– We must insist upon truly equal enforcement and justice under the Law.

– We all need to accept, respect and follow leaders who happen to be POC. As Victor Hugo wrote … “To Love another person is to see the face of God.”

Homily 2
by Nicole Meitzen

Through my experiences in the racial justice movement in Central Texas, I have seen that revolutionary love is a verb, the act of choosing everyday to meet the world, each other, and our activism with an open heart and a consciousness of whether the impact of our actions is upholding white supremacist systems or dismantling them. Activist, scholar and author Angela Davis said “walls turned sideways are bridges.” The conscious choices inherent in revolutionary love are what turn the walls between us into bridges so we can embrace our shared humanity.

Revolutionary love is the choice to show up for racial justice everyday even when it feels scary, hard, and overwhelming. It is a love that grows through our presence and connection… putting our bodies on the line for our black brothers and sisters and declaring with them that Black Lives Matter. Racial justice activist Reverend Hannah Adair Bonner wrote “what’s a solidarity that doesn’t break? When you’re tired, when you’re scared, when you’re heart hurts: you’re still there.”

Revolutionary love is recognizing that David Joseph, Gyasi Hughes, and Sandra Bland are not “their” children but our children. It is choosing to stand with the families of these young people and demanding justice… demanding a society where young black people will be safe, respected, and loved not just at home but when they are in the midst of one of their most vulnerable moments, when they are walking the halls of their school, and when they are driving down the road. A society where black people will see their inherent worth, dignity, beauty, and power reflected back at them by the people and institutions they encounter in daily life.

Revolutionary love is the choice of white folks to explore white supremacy, its impacts, and our part in perpetuating it whether we claim to be anti-racist or not. It is taking the time and effort to read articles, blogs, books, and to engage in tough conversations without expecting peoples of color to take on the burden of educating us. It is challenging racist comments, actions, and systems and pushing through the discomfort of doing so. It is realizing our impact matters more than or “good” intentions and apologizing, making amends, and doing better next time when we are confronted for racist remarks and/or behavior. It is also remembering to offer ourselves and others a bit of grace because unlearning a lifetime of socialization in a white supremacist culture is a daily challenge. We will make mistakes along the way and these are the points where we learn and grow and develop the ability to engage with each other and the world in a way that supports racial justice rather than oppression.

Revolutionary love is the choice to raise a race conscious, rather than colorblind, family. It is white families realizing that while discussing race and racism is challenging, black families have no choice but to talk with their children in order to prepare them to safely navigate a world designed to treat them as less because of the color of their skin. It is white families teaching their kids that racism is systemic and that people have different life experiences and face striking inequities because our society is shaped by the violence inherent in white supremacy and racism. It is demonstrating with our actions and words that black lives matter and reminding our children that their actions and words can either support their black friends or endanger them physically, emotionally, and/or mentally. It is teaching our children that racism and slavery are not gone and that there is a vast history excluded from textbooks… especially in Texas. It is taking the time to teach our children this history to put the injustices they and their peers will encounter in true context. It is living our lives and engaging with our families in a way that our youth know their voices matter and that they are capable of challenging racist systems and creating a more just and loving world… and that they deserve nothing less.

Racism dehumanizes us all and the choice to love is what will reconnect and heal us.

As social activist bell hooks said, “When we choose to love, we choose to move against fear, against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect, to find ourselves in the other.”

Homily 3
by Julie Gillis

Looking back over my life, my activism has always had to do with the body. I’ve been a staunch supporter of reproductive justice, of LGBT intersecting rights, of worker’s rights, and of ability rights, anti-racism work. It is often frustrating work, and it can feel hopeless at times, especially in a state like Texas. Love, and its revolutionary power are vital to that work and for those who do that work.

I believe it’s revolutionary to love the body. The body gets complicated in our culture. From Original Sin to Pauline Theology to Dualism (and even other religious paths aiming to free to soul from its earthly form, the physical body gets a bad rap). I can admit to feeling fear when I share some of the storytelling work I do (it’s about the body and sexuality and pleasure) because our culture is so shaming, about what bodies should and shouldn’t do. But I do it anyway. I often feel fear when I confront my own racism, because I know it is a poison in my body, and in our larger cultural body. I wonder how to heal any of it while suffering from it and being, even inadvertently, a cause of it.

We may not always think of it that way, but racism is completely tied up in the body – people, centuries ago, decided that black and brown bodies should serve white bodies. The body itself was supposed to be a mirror of god, or we created god as a mirror of the dominant body at the time. In our culture it was a Christian, white, able bodied, straight, cis gendered men.

Thus we had bodies that were superior and other bodies to serve them. We had bodies with uteruses serving bodies without. Poor bodies made to work for rich bodies. Bodies to be sold. Or impregnated and given away. Or locked up in facilities for not being perfect. Laws were passed delineating who gets to pee where, who gets to decide when or if to stay pregnant. Who gets to ride a bus, who gets to drink out of a water fountain.

And if those disuniting decisions were being made by individuals, what happened next was that those isms solidified into institutions like the church body, which then reinforced personal beliefs in a toxic mobius strip effect. It’s also revolutionary love to confront the body politic.

I do this work because of the body. I have one. You have one. We all have one and they are precious. If our body as a church isn’t in alignment with the bodies of its people, we are going to have a hard time sustaining our mission statement of gathering together in community to nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice.

To stay in communion and complete that mission requires the revolutionary love that only our bodies can bring. Can you imagine what it would be to live in a world that LOVED each body? That loved the body of earth? Really LOVED it, like a parent loves a child or a lover loves the beloved? We wouldn’t hurt each other. We wouldn’t destroy our water, our air. We wouldn’t sell each other, or use each other like products based on gender, or melanin, or age.

We’d take delight in our differences. Take joy in shades of skin, textures of hair, wrinkles, sizes of bodies. Celebrate romantic unions of various genders happily and with grace. Honor choices. Share food and resources and lift each other up. We’d look back and be ashamed and heartbroken over what’s such disunity. We must wake up to that revolutionary love and real communion.

Our larger human body is only as healthy as our individual ones. The more we can heal and support the individual, the more impact on the institution, leading back to cultural bodies that truly support individual ones. That’s what nurtures me, this vision of love reversing that mobius strip into a healing cycle that support human beings and back again. It starts with love and with us.

Homily 4
by Rev. Chris Jimmerson

Text of the homily will be posted as it becomes available.

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.

Finding the divinity in the Mundane

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The Youth of First UU Church of Austin
May 15, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

“Youth Sunday: Finding the Divinity in the Mundane” with the Senior High Youth Group. Our annual youth-led Sunday service. The wisdom of adolescence will share their particular insight into the topic of discovering the divine within the routine of our daily lives.

Call to Worship: “Finding the Divine in the Mundane” by Rae Milstead

Reading: “What is there beyond knowing” by Mary Oliver
read by Bridget Lewis

Homily: Kira Azulay

Homily: Alica Stadler

Homily: Alex Runnels

Homily: Theo Moers

Benediction: Abby Poirier

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

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

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

 

The fire of commitment

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons

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Susan Yarbrough
March 13, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

This Sunday, let’s think together about how we can avoid personal and congregational burnout, stir the embers, encourage each other to spiritual growth, and warm ourselves to the continued work of repairing the world.

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

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

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

 

Community

by Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Nell Newton, Sermons, Video available

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

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

Call to Worship

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

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

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

Compassion
To treat ourselves and others with love

Courage
To live lives of honesty, vulnerability, and beauty

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

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

Sermon

Rev. Nell Newton

“We Gather In Community”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Rev. Chris Jimmerson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It can be difficult. It can feel very vulnerable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benediction

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

Christmas Pageant

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse, Rev. Marisol Caballero, Gillian Redfearn, Vicki Almstrum
December 13, 2015
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

We present our annual Christmas pageant in an intergenerational, all-ages service. Our children perform in costumes of their choosing.

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

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 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.

 

Saying Grace, Being Gratitude

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

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Susan Yarbrough
November 29, 2015

Beyond focusing on gratitude once a year, how can we do more than simply be periodically grateful? How can we practice gratitude so consistently that we not only live into it, but actually become it?

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

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 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.

 

Give me your tired, your poor, your harmed

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

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Susan Yarbrough
August 9, 2015

U.S. asylum-seekers and refugees have their faces pressed up against the glass of something they want with every cell of their being. When we remember the times of alienation and longing in our own lives, we begin to have compassion for ourselves and to understand the heartfelt joy of listening to and welcoming strangers.

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 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.

 

Spiritual Ambivalence

by Posted in Audio available, Nell Newton, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Nell Newton
August 2, 2015

We’ll sing that we need to “Do when the Spirit says Do,” but what about all those other moments in life when spirit or Spirit is not a big factor in our decision making or dinner making? This Sunday we’ll take a short tour of the history of our concept of “spirit” and examine the ambivalent ways that spirit might move or remain inert in our daily living.

Sermon: Spiritual Ambivalence

Spiritual Ambivalence… How’s that for a provocative sermon title? As I remember it, I had previously committed to writing about spirituality and there was a newsletter deadline looming but I was feeling tired or cranky, and groused to a colleague that at that moment I didn’t really care one way or the other about Spirituality. “Oh, so you’re experiencing Spiritual Ambivalence?” he asked. And really that was a better title than something like “Spiritual Indifference” or “Spiritual Apathy” because those sermons would get too grim too quickly. So let’s give thanks that he offered Ambivalence.

Valence has several different usages, all rooted back to the same Latin root as “value”. Ambivalence has both antique and contemporary uses. The “ambi” refers to being able to go in at least two different directions. So being ambivalent don’t mean simply not really caring one way or the other, it’s more about being able to consider the value of two different things or ideas. So, as I talk about Ambivalence, it’s not to say that I don’t really have much interest in something, it’s that I am willing to consider the value, the upside and downsides of multiple competing, and exclusive ideas.

So, what am I ambivalent over? Spirit. Spiritual. Eternal and everlasting spirit. Soul. Unseen and unmeasurable. Maybe that spark of the divine that animates us and connects us to something. And, when it comes time to really consider the concept, I wind up ambivalent. I suppose, compared to some folks, I’m a fairly spiritual person. At times it seems like a very important aspect of my life, well worth placing at the center of things. But other times, I really figure that my spirit probably knows what it’s up to and to just to trust that it’s fine wherever it is or isn’t without my mind trying to micro-manage and scrutinize and fuss over what or where or if spirit is a valid construct to work with.

So what do I mean when I’m talking about “spirit”? We’ve all heard the term and we probably share some common assumptions of what we all mean with the concept. The word we use is rooted in the Latin for “breath”, but the concept itself needs a little unpacking.

The concepts of spirit go back well before Socrates and Plato, but we’ll start with the Greek’s take on an unseen human soul and the notion of a world of the eternal spirit – separate from the physical world. Plato was explicit in his dualism – the body is of the physical world, material, and finite, while the soul is on loan from the unseen spirit world, to which it returns upon death to face judgment. So, according to Plato, in one person is the temporary flesh and the eternal spirit. And, as he saw it, education involved coming to recognize that the spirit was superior to the flesh and that this fleshy life should be spent preparing the soul for its eternal destiny.

Yes. If all that sounds familiar, Jesus and his followers picked up that construct, merged it with some of the Jewish theology and ran with it – partly to make their ideas easier for the average Greek to recognize and adopt. Because, thanks to Alexander the Great, common Greek was the lingua franca of the early Christian era, so if you wanted to spread the word you did it in Greek.

Now, to contrast Plato’s notion of spirit, we should look at another Greek who came along shortly after Plato. Epicurus modified the whole dualistic view of humans and took the stance that flesh AND soul were physical and both ended with death – and both body and soul dissolved back into nothingness upon death. Life was for living; it wasn’t just a preamble to eternity.

It was this dissolving into nothingness that fit nicely with the atomic theory of the philosopher Democritus. He was the first who theorized that all things are made up of tiny particles that bounce around temporarily forming things, disintegrating, and reforming things. When you mashed together Democritus and Epicurus, you wind up with a universe where humans are merely a chance collection of atoms, destined to arrange, dissolve, and rearrange. Because human life and souls were temporary, Epicurus felt that reason should be used to live well and lie low and not draw too much stress into one’s life. It wasn’t so much that he felt you should eat dessert first, but he would have recommended that you avoid politics and heated arguments that could turn nasty.

Perhaps folks didn’t like the idea of dissolving into nothingness, or perhaps the Christians really got some traction with their emphasis on souls, but either way, we all have a shared understanding of spirit and/or soul and it generally is understood to be ongoing, eternal, not-of-this world. We’ve all heard of your everlasting soul, and some of us have even picked up on the Hindu notion of a soul that is reincarnated over and over before finally being reunited with the eternal. But very few of us have a common, shared idea of soul or spirit as something compostable, something that might degrade and have its bits rearranged. And Epicurus is now known more for his appreciation of a good meal rather than for his finite soul.

Is it ego or the love of self that makes us prefer the idea that some part of us will go on indefinitely? Perhaps. In any case, one version of “spirit” is more popular, than the other. When people say they don’t really believe in souls, they typically are referring to Plato’s and not Epicurus’.

And plenty of folks have rejected Plato’s separate, unseen, and eternal version of soul. Because why would a universe have two sets of books with two sets of physics- one for the material and physical and one unseen and unmeasurable? Just to keep us on our toes? That’s the kind confounding that prompts some of us to just quit worrying about spirit, souls, and anything else that is unmeasurable. It’s hard to fix dinner while contemplating the eternal. Water gets burnt that way. It’s just easier to get like Epicurus and focus on the living of the here and now and live fully and well. Avoid politics and loud arguments. Just fix a nice simple supper and eat it slowly and with appreciation for the way your body takes those atoms and rearranges them into energy and tenderness.

But, perhaps you have had a moment where you could sense the largeness and interconnectedness of all things. Maybe you’ve had a sense of transcendence – that which transcends time and body and even the laws of physics. Those are the moments when the spirit seems to be saying Pay Attention. And when the spirit says “do”…. It’s hard to ignore such a commandment.

So where does that leave us? Well… if you’re ambivalent, or uncertain which approach to follow, let me assure you that it’s okay. Our religious tradition doesn’t insist on a belief in an unseen soul or eternal spirit, and even when we do recognize a soul or spirit, we aren’t asked to make it the most important part of ourselves. We’re cool with bodies here. Some of my best friends have bodies…

I’ll even offer that this ambivalence towards spirit is actually a legitimate theological response, steeped in history, and reflective of our values.

If we are ambivalent on spirit, it’s because we refuse to be certain. We know that with certainty comes complacency and a tendency to be smug. When it comes to the most vital details, like if we have an eternal soul or are simply a random collection of atoms, we’d rather be uncertain and open to see new truths, than to be stubbornly fixed and unresponsive. If we are ambivalent, it means that we feel that revelation is not sealed, it is ongoing.

Can you see how that is a different theology from one that tells us that everything is fixed and predetermined? We’d rather have a messy uncertainty that might bring us to something new than a certainty that will keep us pinned in place, unable to respond to change.

To wrap all this up, what is my advice to the Spiritually Ambivalent and those of us who tend more towards certainty?

Well if you truly don’t hold with notion of soul or spirit, please know that you have plenty of company. But I would invite you to do some honest examination of what you’ve thought about spirit, spirituality, soul, and anything eternal, and figure out where you learned to think like that, and be able to state clearly what it is that you might be uninterested in.

And, if you’ve had a sense of soul, a presence of spirit, here’s what I’ll invite you to consider: look at what you know verrrry closely. Are you keeping the idea of an eternal spirit as simply an extension of the self through eternity, or are you willing to consider that it might follow the same laws as atoms and redistribute over time? What if the soul is not about the self, not about your acts or actions, not about judgement, but entirely about your letting go and reuniting with the All That Is? What I’m asking you to consider is a totally non-self version of spirit. No ego, no personality, no person at all. Quite simply, what if it is a spark of the divine that is returned to the source when you’re done with it? That follows closer to the laws of physics AND the teachings of the mystics.

This is a tough order because really, right now we’re pretty busy just living and learning and loving and leaving in these bodies. It’s a full-time job – this being alive. So, it’s hard to think about not being alive, even if it is trying to contemplate something eternal.

But, perhaps after you’ve had a simple supper, you can reflect on the eternal Now of a life well-lived.

©2015 Nell Newton

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.

 

 

On the dancefloor

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Carolina Trevino
June 28, 2015

Looking at mystical poetry, we’ll explore how to keep our spirits alive in the modern world. Carolina Trevino is a Christian educator for children and youth at Central Presbyterian Church. She received her Master of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary in New York City (Rev. Mari’s neighbor and classmate in NYC). She grew up in Austin and enjoys walking around Lady Bird Lake, perfecting her chili recipe, practicing Spanish, and will eventually fulfill her lifelong desire to learn the fiddle. Carolina is excited to be preaching at First UU for the first time!

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 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.

 

Concepts of the Divine

by Posted in Chris Jimmerson, Guest Speakers, Sermons

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
April 25, 2015

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

Chris Jimmerson’s Homily

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

Nell Newton – Homily on understanding the divine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meditation – Drops of God
Tess Baumberger

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

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

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

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

That Which Holds All
Nancy Shaffer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

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

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

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.

 

Building the world we dream about

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Marisol Caballero, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Marisol Caballero, Ann Edwards, Rob Feeney, Barbara Abbate
April 19, 2015

Rev. Marisol Caballero and members of the “Building the World We Dream About” Class have been participating in an anti-racism course for the past two years. The worship service is delivered by its participants.

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

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 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.