UU Minister – Some dis-assembly required

by Posted in Guest Speakers, Nell Newton, Sermons

Nell Newton
July 28, 2013

The process of building a minister includes a certain amount of disassembling the person who wanted to become a minister. There are many ways this is done -countless personal essays, stacks of reading, somber committees that decide one’s fitness -but one of the most discombobulating assignments is Chaplaincy work. The experience is expected to upend a student’s certainty. And afterwards, they usually write at least one sermon about the experience. This is be one of those sermons! My CPE Sermon

Reading
Untitled Poem
by Theresa Ines Soto
posted on Facebook – used with permission

Jesus. Never had to go to seminary.
He was wunderkind.
He never had cerebral palsy; He died
Once though. Jesus never had a broken
scooter, but over and over, he had a
broken heart. Me too, once or twice.
Sometimes I think I won’t
Make it, can’t do it. About that, Jesus said:
It takes more than bread
to stay alive. It takes a steady stream
of words from God’s mouth.”
God’s words for me are:
the sunset, the boats on the lake,
the perfection of all the ways God
is reflected in Beloved Community.
Jesus. Did the work that fell to Him
Until It Was Finished. I don’t even
Have to die to complete my work,
But maybe I can hold on for one
More day. Maybe that would be good.

Theresa Ines Soto is 41, a Latina, a 3rd-wave feminist, a lawyer, a seminarian, and a woman who has cerebral palsy. She walks with a cane and uses a scooter to get around. The scooter she uses now is a cheap one that goes slowly and is prone to tipping. She had a really great, really expensive scooter, but it was stolen last year.

She was born prematurely and her parents were told she wouldn’t live. Then they were told that she would live, but she’d never walk or talk. Then they were told that she might talk or walk, but that she’d never have the mental capacity to be independent. Each time they heard this information, her parents said “Okay”. She appreciates their willingness to love their daughter no matter what.

For me, spending time with Theresa means slowing myself down a bit. I slow my pace to match her scooter as its battery drains during the day. It means that I slow my ears down to the cadence of her voice which is quite clear and articulate, but slower. It means that I have to slow down my brain to make it work more carefully to notice how it would automatically presume that because her body is different, that her mind must be different too. I am better for having slowed down with Theresa. She’s going to make a difference in our denomination.

When she prays, it is with a relaxed forthrightness that is startling to my ears.

 

Sermon

UU Minister – Some Dis-Assembly Required

In the few years that I’ve been paying attention, I’ve noticed that seminary students who are entrusted with a pulpit will inevitably trot out some predictable sermons. There will be a ponderous sermon on Unitarian history – complete with footnotes – it’s really just a summary of a recent research paper. There will also be a sermon or two on The Seven Principles, or The Five Smooth Stones. There will usually be a chirpy sermon along the lines of “Let’s not forget the Universalists!” And, there will be, should be, a sermon where the student talks about their chaplaincy internship. It’s in these internships where we get our heads out of the books and throw our bodies into the front lines of pastoral work, generally in a hospital setting. And this, dear kind people, this is my chaplaincy sermon….

I was warned by others who had already completed their chaplaincy programs: “You’ll get what you need to learn about from chaplaincy.” One friend told about a student who had been uncomfortable with death and dying and, naturally, while on call, he got lots of experience with death and dying patients. He had waaay more than any of the other students. And, by the end of their program he was much better equipped to deal with death and dying.

During chaplaincy, non-theists start feeling connected to something larger and theists start arguing with a god who allows so much suffering… Yep. Whatever you need to work on, it will find you during chaplaincy training. I knew this when I was assigned to work at Brackenridge hospital last fall.

What did I need to learn about? The chill of dread rose up as I contemplated where I might be harboring unspoken resistance or denial. Would I be faced with blood, trauma, sick kids, sick parents, or something so un-doing that I couldn’t imagine being able to handle it??? Each time I started an overnight or weekend shift, I was gripped with a quiet worry that THIS time I would be forced to confront my deepest fears. And, each time, I simply found myself going about the work that was asked of me – listening, crying, hugging, joking, praying, and filling out the paperwork afterwards. I never came home completely undone or unable to speak my own name.

Here’s the work we were doing – most of the time it was just visiting with patients who were otherwise bored, or lonesome, but often we were called to show up during times where people needed spiritual or emotional support. It seemed like the other students in my program had it much harder – their shifts were filled with fighting families, multiple trauma victims, and worse. My shifts weren’t exactly picnics – no sooner than I’d lie down to rest then my pager would go off. But I seemed to get easier nights, simpler problems, less complicated paperwork… What awful undoing was waiting for me?

Among the hospital workers you were never supposed to wish them a “quiet” night – that would jinx it for sure. So, instead I would wish folks a “boring” night. And, then, I found myself saying a small and private prayer. A friend of mine sends his prayers to the Great To Whom It May Concern, but I found myself asking a Great Mother to hold the entirety of the hospital with compassion and to support the caregivers as well as those needing care. I’ve never thought of myself as a Goddess worshipping sort, and I wasn’t trying to make a theological point, but it seemed like the right thing to do. The Great Mother just seemed to be closer at hand in the hospital.

You see, despite all of the training we went through to prepare for the work, once we were let loose onto the hospital floors and into patient’s rooms, we all reverted to instinct and improvisation. And each of us found that the only way we could serve was to be exactly who we already were. The title “chaplain” just gave us a bit more authority to do it well! We simply lived into what was expected and asked of us.

A nurse called late one evening. A patient needed surgery, but was nervous. Could I come? Sure. Outside his room the nurse pulled me aside – the patient was a young man whose leg was mangled in a wreck. He was all alone and scared. In the nurse’s opinion, he needed some Mama energy. Well… as luck should have it… He was only a couple years older than my own son — handsome, pale, and frightened. He had never had surgery before and was afraid that he wouldn’t wake up from the anesthesia. I held his hand, smoothed his hair, listened, and placed a blessing upon him. The tears that he had been fighting back spilled out easily and he finally relaxed enough to agree to go ahead. I walked alongside his bed as he was wheeled down to surgery. I gave his hand a little squeeze and promised him that I’d be up to see him later. Then as they rolled him into the surgery area, I placed another silent blessing upon him, the surgeons, the nurses, and the man who was cleaning the hall floor at 11:00 at night. Later on I stopped by his room. He was bleary from the anesthesia, but he recognized me and grinned when I congratulated him on surviving.

And that was the Great Mother at work. I obeyed her imperative to soothe the children no matter what their age.

On another occasion I was called to visit a mother who was unraveling. She was almost vibrating with worry over her toddler whose head was wrapped with yards of tape to hold monitor wires in place. I helped him start a Thomas the Tank Engine video and then sat down to visit. The mom was exhausted not just with the worry over her son’s seizures, but with the dread of dealing with other family members who were emotionally more reserved. She felt like wailing and weeping, and felt judged and self-conscious. As we chatted I praised her beautiful child’s curiosity and appetite and listened to her fears and bravery. Finally I offered her the blessing that every parent needs to hear: “You are a wonderful mother and you are doing a good job raising this child.” She took a deep breath, nodded gratefully, and went back to patting her son to sleep.

And that was the Great Mother at work. I gave voice to her deep compassion for the terrifying work of parenting.

Caring for humans is messy, stinky, and funny. These bodies are the stuff of dirt and humor. Indeed, the word “humor” is rooted in the Latin for bodily fluids… And, often, what I brought with me into patient rooms was not just a readiness to witness the divine, but to also witness the absurdity and silliness of our selves.

One day I found myself offering a completely improvised prayer – actually all of my better prayers were spontaneous, jazz riffs created with whatever we had handy – and this prayer was with a woman who was stuck in bed, unable to walk because of pain in her hips, or, as she put it more delicately, her “backside”. The prayer included a desire to see her become unstuck and able to move easily into her future days. Our prayer was light and hopeful and not very serious. Two days later I visited and she had been up and done a lap around the nurses’ station! “It was that prayer!” She laughed, “I told my kids that you prayed for my BUTT and anyone who would do that is someone I can get along with!” I demurred, “Well… I figured that your butt is part of you, and you are part of all that is holy, so it made sense to me….” We laughed and the healing continued.

And that was the Great Mother at work. She is delighted by our laughter, as it bubbles up and lifts us into our creative moments!

So what was it that finally came undone during my chaplaincy work? What was that dark place that I had to look at and accept? Well… I had to accept that that elegant theologies only get you so far. After a point it’s your bodily presence and being that counts. And, more humbling, I realized that my mother was right all along.

And how was my mother right all along? My mother is a classic UU Church Lady. She wears sensible shoes, brings bean salads and an angel food cake to potlucks, and, yes she drives a Prius. My mother was the one who first tried to teach me about The Goddess. But, back then I smiled and nodded. Like so many daughters when their mother tries to pass along good advice, I dismissed it as simply a romantic personification. Perhaps that worked for her theology, but it wasn’t part of mine. Meanwhile, as I read the 18th Century German Liberal Theologians, and Lives of the Great Humanists, I bogged down. My eyeballs wearied and I felt as if there was really no place for me in this work of ministry. I should just go back into the kitchen and give up. How will I ever sound like someone who knows their stuff? As it turns out, I never will with any certainty. And, that’s okay. As a chaplain, I learned that it’s more important to show up than to be certain. The Great Mother showed this to me over and over. Does this make me a full-on Goddess Worshipper? I’m not sure.

“I hate this!” a man moaned. “I feel so bad that everyone has to work so hard to take care of me. I don’t want to be a burden to my family. They have better things to do!” How many times did I hear this from people who were ashamed of their vulnerability, pinned down by the weight of their infirmities, and feeling guilty of taking more than they feel that they deserve. In this world, in this culture, we are supposed to be upright individuals who create our own destinies as full agents. And when we wind up in a hospital bed, all of that is thrown upside down. We become needful and our agency is narrowed by the margins of pain. And, yes, we must depend upon others to care, and clean up, and help us to survive. We must turn to one another for support in walking and guiding the spoonful of food. And, often, those other people are complete strangers wearing drab uniforms.

When I heard that moan, I would assure a patient that this was their time to rest and receive. When it seemed appropriate, I would remind a patient that she is a child of god, and that god’s love guided all of the hands caring for her and to open herself to this love. And, for people who chafed at the indignity of the situation, or felt unworthy, or wondered why they should even bother to survive, I suggested that, truly, our highest purpose is to be with one another. That spilled out of my mouth one day, when tears were running down my own cheeks. It was completely unplanned, spun out of the thin air of that room. The work we are here to do is to simply be with one another. That’s all.

Now, if you also find time to fully and truly love your god and love your neighbor as yourself, then you might even have struck upon a religion worthy of attention! But in the meantime, take this simple observation, based upon experience: The work we are here to do is to simply be with one another. We are given instinct and intellect, and we will make use of whatever resources are at hand. We will find silliness and tears make it all easier, but how well we do that work – how well we be with one another — is how our lives will be measured. How do I know this? My mother, and the Great Mother, told me so!

© 2013 Nell Newton

 

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

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

That little four-letter word called Hope

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

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Chris Jimmerson
July 21, 2013

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

 

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

Reading
-Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace, 1986

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

Prayer

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

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

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

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

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

So may it be. Amen

Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By persistently seeking justice; and

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

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

The answer may lie in embracing this paradox:

Faith can exist only when there is uncertainty.

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

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

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

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

The family was Catholic and spoke both Spanish and English.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I asked him, “What is it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The poet, Adrienne Rich put it like this:

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

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

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

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

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

May hope abound. Amen.

Offering words

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

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

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

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

There is too much work to do.

Benediction

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

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

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

Blessed be. Amen.

 

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

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

Who or what is God?

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons

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Rev. Nathan Ryan
July 7, 2013

How do we understand the most holy in a church where there is no creedal test and not everyone is a theist? Guest minister Rev. Nathan Ryan leads us through this three letter journey. He is assistant minister at the Unitarian Church of Baton Rouge. He has also served as director of lay ministry for the First Unitarian Church of Dallas and director of lifespan religious education at Live Oak UU Church in Cedar Park.

 

I remember feeling very angry and I didn’t know why. It was the first year I was in high school. It was red ribbon week. This is the week when the school decks out in red ribbons in an attempt to dissuade students from using drugs. Each student group was responsible for putting up signs with an anti-drug message. Most groups didn’t do it, but the one that really got to me put up signs all over the school saying things like “Jesus loves you” and “Your body is a temple, don’t poison it with drugs.”

I remember feeling very angry, almost violated when I saw these signs. I turned to my friend in exasperation about it. I lashed out at the signs and said something like “They can’t do this. What if I put up a sign that said “don’t do drugs because there is no god.” ” My friend didn’t really understand my anger and just continued on with what he was doing.

If I wanted to find the easy explanation of my emotion, the intellectual part of me could say that I was offended because these groups violated the separation of church and state or that I was upset because these messages were exclusive to atheists, Jews, Muslims, agnostics and anyone else who wasn’t a believer in this specific brand of Christianity. And those thoughts and justifications aren’t wrong.

But didn’t explain why I had such an emotional reaction, a reaction out of anger and sadness, and it doesn’t explain why I still hold this story in my consciousness to this day.

I think deep down I was upset because I didn’t have the cultural or spiritual understanding I needed to fully comprehend God as a concept or as an experience. I didn’t grow up with an understanding of God, not one that was real and meaningful to me. I knew about the God described in popular culture, a god that had no resonance with me. But I never in a religious context had the opportunity to explore my own understandings of God.

I knew of “their God” – the old white man with the beard who orchestrates and judges. Because I didn’t believe in him, I knew that I must not believe in God. As I got older my understanding of and relationship with God has grown and adapted and shifted.

The experiences of God came first and it was only later did I come to identify those experiences as God. Let me say that another way. I had experiences and feelings but I didn’t have the words to describe them. It was only later, as an adult, when I started learning about an expansive description of God, not the constricted God of my childhood, did I start identifying these feelings and experiences as divine in nature.

Some of those experiences: My time as a Unitarian Universalist youth – a time when I felt fully embraced by a community of caring and loving peers who encouraged me to discover and embrace my true self. This was at a time that it didn’t feel safe in my day to day life to figure out who I truly was. There were there friends and family who grew up in awful circumstances, friends who were surrounded by neglect and mental illness and addiction, and yet they were able to explore and know themselves and thrive.

There was the incredible dedication of a chaplain and nurse when I worked in the hospital who gave up hours to sit with a patient whose family had already left him in his last hours declaring to me that no one deserves to die alone. There are those tectonic shifts, towards a more just world, like the one we are experiencing now with LGBT rights. There are people who work for greater dialogue, who work for justice, who love those who seem unworthy of love. All of these experiences I would have described as divine, but it took a shift in my understanding to ever see them as the work of God.

I wanted to explore this topic with you today for two reasons. First, God and our interpretations of God permeate our culture so much that we, as a religious institution are called to explore it. Second, I think a lot of religious insight can be opened up by further exploration.

The aha moment for me about understanding God came when I switched the agency. That is to say, I stopped looking at God as the initiator of events, the person who pulls the switch to make it rain, or make us love, or who allows people to live and to die. I flipped it and saw god as the descriptor of these larger things.

The words of poet Annie Dillard describe this what God looks like after this shift. I don’t like her dismissive attitude or one gendered description of god, but the imagery is so useful that I wanted to share it with you.

“God does not demand that we give up our personal dignity, that we throw in our lot with random people, that we lose ourselves and turn from all that is not him. God needs nothing, asks nothing, and demands nothing, like the stars. It is a life with God which demands these things.

Experience has taught the race that if knowledge of God is the end, then these habits of life are not the means but the condition in which the means operates. You do not have to do these things; not at all. God does not, I regret to report, give a hoot. You do not have to do these things- unless you want to know God. They work on you, not on him.

You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.”

This helped me greatly. Instead of seeing God as the cause of love, when I see love, I call it god. Just as when I see water fall from the sky I call it rain instead of saying that rain caused water to fall from the sky. Because God is such a powerfully deep and complicated metaphor, I think its ok to see God in many different ways (or not at all) and that strengthens the concept for me. Here are a few and I’ll ask you to try some on.

The early 20th century Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams says God is “that which ultimately concerns humanity” or god is “that in which we should place our confidence.” Unitarian Universalist minister Forrest Church from the reading earlier says that god is “that which is greater than all and yet present in each.” I see god I as the culmination of all of our understandings of something larger.

Take the lesson from earlier. How many of you found the words of people inadequate to describe art? Our best means of communication can pale in comparison to the fullness of experiencing art. And art is just an abstraction of something larger. Art is an attempt to communicate a feeling, an experience, a way of being that is indescribable. That is why often the artistic depiction of real life fail to fully embrace life’s the majesty and mystery. So here is the trajectory: Words are inadequate to describe art. Art is inadequate to describe life. Life is inadequate to describe our own musings and worries and ways of making meaning. If you carry this continuum all the way through to its conclusion, to the infinite most point, that is where I would call God.

Another way I see God, came out of our earlier reading by Emerson. What was so revolutionary about Emerson’s sermon to the Divinity School students at Harvard was that it took God out of the scriptures, out of the past and the books, and it located God squarely within each person. He put the obligation of knowing the divine and understanding revelation into our very existence.

I see God as the culmination of all of our understandings of the world, our understandings of good and evil and fun and suffering. But it is larger than that. It is all of the understandings of everyone and everything that has ever existed – including those who can’t make meaning.

So one conception of God, lets put on the horizontal axis, is the grandness and majesty of life. The culminated God concepts of everyone who has ever existed could go on the vertical axis, and you could continue adding dimensions to this. It is easy to poke holes in someone else’s conception of God and their beliefs. Beliefs are just our attempts to make sense of our experiences. To argue with someone’s beliefs is to argue with someone’s experiences.

We are all making two-dimensional representations of a concept that is three dimensional. When you do that, like when making a map, you aren’t going to get all the proportions right. If you are mapping on a piece of paper a round world either South America or Greenland is going to be the wrong size.

If we were to view God as the culmination of all of our experiences and beliefs, what is implied by that? First it implies that God is not out there. God is not some foreign substance or entity. We are a part of the great makeup of all existence. It also implies that revelation and the ability to change the world is no farther than right inside of us. It implies to borrow the concept from Howard Thurman in our invocation that each of us has an altar deep in our souls, guarded by an angel with a flaming sword and that is our link to the eternal. Second it implies that what we say and do matters. This is where I depart from Forrest Church in our first reading. I don’t know how many of you know Reverend Church’s story. He did some great things, he grew a Unitarian Universalist Church in New York from a small church into one of the largest congregations in the country. He spoke words, and wrote many books that gave hope to countless people. His book Love and Death may have helped me understand death better than anything else I’ve read.

In his reading, though, he dismissed his critics by saying “To think that I, who will never be guilty of committing a best-seller, could strike anyone as being sufficiently powerful to set back liberal religion even a decade.” Well, the shadow side of Rev. Church’s ministry was that because of his alcoholism and an affair, he hurt a lot of people. He hurt a lot of people partially because he didn’t understand the power of his own words and actions. If we are part of a larger conception of God, then our thoughts are significant. Our experiences, our insights are holy plasma.

I make paper cranes. This practice for me lies somewhere in between a deep spiritual and meditative practice and a way to manage my fidgety hands. I take a sheet of paper, a two dimensional sheet of paper. I fold it over and over until it turns into a crane, into something with depth.

This is a great practice for me, but with one unforeseen side effect. I have hundreds of these cranes all over my house. Because I am so used to them I forget that other people can treasure these.

The spiritual challenge of a god that is the culmination of everyone’s meaning and present in each is similar to the challenge of folding cranes. Your life is a life worthy of study a life worthy of hanging in a museum. Your years of experiences and insights and attempts to make meaning is each a fold in the paper. All of your work trying to learn to walk, and talk, and love, and experience life give this life depth and dimension and complexity.

Eventually you might reach a point where your gifts, your insights, your way of being in the world are so plentiful that they might stop feeling like gifts that other appreciate, and they just seem to you like hundreds of cranes all over your house.

If I had a better understanding of God when I was in high school, I may not have been so angry when I saw those signs at red ribbon week. I’m still not sure I’d be happy they were up, but I could process them with a better understanding. That sign that said “Your body is a temple, don’t poison it,” I wonder how that idea would have changed my life if I could receive it. I mean that idea is basically what I’m espousing, that our bodies hold great and meaningful pieces of God, that we are made up of star dust, particles that have existed since the beginning of time.

If I was more at peace with God, I might have opened me up to more people I knew in high school. And then they might have found the life changing and healing message of our faith – I know of at least three who are now Unitarian Universalist.

I wonder how many people who walked past those signs wished they could hear that their doubts and their questions made their faith stronger not weaker? I wonder how many would have been eased to know that they were worthy of love and kindness and that they were a blessing to the world. In the most concrete of senses, I wonder how many of my peers in high school could have had their lives transformed if I were able to share this church with them.

I’ll close this sermon with maybe one of my favorite definitions of God. It comes straight out of the Christian scriptures. It’s from 1 John Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God….No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and love is made complete. Let us go out and live a more loving more caring life. Amen.

 

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Joseph Priestley: The most hated man in Britain

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Luther Elmore, Sermons

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Luther Elmore
June 23, 2012

Joseph Priestley was a scientist, philosopher, educator, and Unitarian minister. His positions forced him to flee his homeland for America. We will look at his life and contributions to our Unitarian history.

 

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Youth Service

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The Youth of First UU Austin
Audrey Lewis, Max Wethington
May 19, 2013

The Sr. High Youth Group holds its annual youth service and holds a bridging ceremony. Bridging is a rite of passage celebrating the movement of our high school seniors into adulthood.

 

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We’ve come this far by faith

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Marisol Caballero
March 10, 2013

We are living in an extraordinary time and many of us will see significant social progress within our own lifetime… struggles for justice have not been easily won. Join us as we look back in order to move forward.

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Large is beautiful, too

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Rev. Stefan Jonasson
February 24, 2013

Rev. Jonasson is a Unitarian Universalist minister, historian, and the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Director for Large Congregations.

 

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This new thing called Universalism

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

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Marisol Caballero
January 20, 2013

Evangelical minister Rob Bell, in his book, “Love Wins,” articulates the concept of God’s unconditional love, and he has been widely condemned for it by the evangelical community. Join us as we explore Universalism’s history and delve into why this idea still causes such an uproar.

 

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Is there a place for God in Unitarian Universalism?

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Andrew Young
December 30, 2012

Welcome to First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin. Whether this is your first time or you’ve been coming all your life, we welcome you.

My name is Andrew Young. I have been a member of this church for five and a half years and for two and a half of those years I have been the Youth Programming Coordinator, which means that I am in charge of our middle school and high school youth programs. Although I am still in this role, I am entering into a new role as well. This Sunday marks the end of my first semester at Starr King School for the Ministry where I am pursuing a Master of Divinity degree in preparation for ordination as Unitarian Universalist minister.

Today’s service is a part of my final project for a class aptly named “History of UU Religious Practices” in which we’ve studied how our liturgy has evolved since the Puritans arrived in North America. The word liturgy refers to the rituals of the church, especially the structure and format of the Sunday service since that is the primary ritual of our church. As such, this service diverges somewhat from our normal Sunday service in both format and content and I apologize in advance for any confusion this might cause.

The elements of today’s service and the selection of its hymns are rooted in our Unitarian and Universalist traditions. The hymns are from a hymnal published in 1955 that was used by both the Unitarians and the Universalists before the two denominations merged. Our responsive reading is taken from a Unitarian hymnal published in 1907.

It is sometimes said that the work of religion is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. Today’s service is sure to do both. We will deal with topics that may be uncomfortable for some of you due to your past experiences, and my intent is not to make light of or invalidate your feelings on these topics. We each bring our own experiences to the conversation and all I ask is that you keep an open mind and reflect on how each element of the service today affects you. Pay special attention to the words and phrases which trigger strong emotions for you, either positive or negative.

Now, as we begin our sacred time together, please join me in reading the words for lighting our chalice which are printed in your order of service.

Love is the doctrine of this church,
The quest of truth is its sacrament,
And service is its prayer
To dwell together in peace,
To seek knowledge in freedom,
To serve human need,
To the end that all souls shall grow into harmony with the Divine —
Thus do we covenant with each other and with God.

Invocation / Prayer

Please join me in an attitude of prayer.

La Eternulo estas mia paŝtisto; mi mankon ne havos.
Sur verdaj herbejoj Li ripozigas min, Apud trankvilaj akvoj Li kondukas min.
Li kvietigas mian animon; Li kondukas min laŭ vojo de la vero, pro Sia nomo.
Eĉ kiam mi iros tra valo de densa mallumo, Mi ne timos malbonon, ĉar Vi estas kun mi; Via bastono kaj apogiĝilo trankviligos min.
Vi kovras por mi tablon antaŭ miaj malamikoj; Vi ŝmiris per oleo mian kapon, mia pokalo estas plenigita.
Nur bono kaj favoro sekvos min en la daŭro de mia tuta vivo; Kaj mi restos en la domo de la Eternulo eterne.

Language is powerful. And yet, language is arbitrary. The words we use have no inherent meaning, only the meaning that we give to them. And yet, the words we use are still powerful because of that meaning. Dr. Zamenhof knew this well. In the 1880s he invented a language now called Esperanto, which you have just heard a sample of. Dr. Zamenhof grew up in a community that spoke four different languages, each with its own cultural heritage, and he saw how the differences in language created walls between members of the community. This was why he invented a language that didn’t belong to any single country or culture. He hoped that this language, with its lack of cultural and linguistic baggage, could help bring people together by lifting up their commonalities and rejoicing in their differences.

How does language affect the way you see the world? This is what I would like you to meditate on for the next few minutes whether you sit quietly or come to the window to light a candle. Take a moment to reflect on how you react differently to the Esperanto verse and its English equivalent.

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.
Amen

Sermon

Like many members of our faith, I am a relatively recent convert to Unitarian Universalism. I was raised in a non-religious home, the son of freethinking parents who were the product of the cultural revolution of the 1960s. As a child I attended Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopal, Methodist, Baptist, Mormon, Pagan, and Jewish services with friends and extended family, but I was always only an observer and never a believer because I couldn’t subscribe to the central ideas of these groups. I didn’t believe in magic or in a God that would condemn so many of my friends to eternal damnation despite how much good they did in the world. After high school I discovered Buddhism and I embraced its teachings because they didn’t require me to believe in a deity or in superstition. By the time I found the UU church I considered myself a staunch atheist and skeptic. When I say that I was an atheist, I mean literally an a-theist, that is one who does not believe in God. This is subtly but importantly different from one who believes there is not a God. I had no proof one way or the other, and I knew for sure that I didn’t believe in the God of the Christian fundamentalists.

When I began attending here I didn’t realize was how much negative baggage I had attached over the years to many of the words associated with the church. Words like God, divinity, ministry, faith, spirituality, salvation, and grace made me bristle, and in the UU church I found a place where I could be in ethical and moral community with others without the need to use such terms. I remember that soon after joining the church a friend of mine was explaining his Pagan religious beliefs to me. He told me that he used to be an atheist, but he had realized that there was more to life than that. He felt that there was something that connected all of us together, and he had found an expression of this belief in Paganism. I remember that at the time I thought his beliefs were silly and superstitious and I was glad that I had found a church that was more enlightened. His use of divine language, such as god, goddess, and even ritual, had built up a wall between us. If you asked me then if I believed in God, my immediate answer without hesitation would have been “no”. Not only that, I thought that discussing the idea of a god or goddess was silly superstition. What I didn’t know was that my own journey of faith was only just beginning and I was yet to learn the underlying theology and history of Unitarian Universalism.

You see, Unitarian Universalism is a faith with deep theological roots. We can trace our direct lineage to the colonial era when English dissenters journeyed to America in search of religious freedom. The church of England considered them heretics because they believed in ideas such as universal salvation – the belief that all people will be saved – and unitarianism – the idea that Jesus was not God, only a man. And even though the dissenters were a product of the enlightenment, the ideas they supported were much older, almost as old as the Christian church itself. For the majority of our history the members of our denomination have considered themselves Christians and have been at home with the language of divinity. However, for the last hundred years our vocabulary has shifted to the language of philosophy and morality. This shift began, to some degree, in the early 19th century with the transcendentalists and their focus on the inherent goodness of both people and nature. It continued in the late 19th century with the translation of the great religious texts of the world into English. But it didn’t really pick up speed until the late 1940s with the introduction of the Unitarian fellowship movement.

At the time the American Unitarian Association was trying to find ways to increase growth. They found that there were some people who were interested in Unitarianism who weren’t comfortable in a traditional church, so they began to sponsor Unitarian fellowships as alternatives to churches. Fellowships could be started with as few as 10 members and without any ordained clergy. They could also meet in people’s homes or in rented space. To increase the likelihood of their success, the American Unitarian Association targeted largely white communities which also had universities in them. Add to this the popularity of humanism among this particular demographic sparked in part by the release of the Humanist Manifesto in the 1930s and the result was a boom in small groups which were lay led, often highly educated, and largely humanist in nature. Hymnals written at the time began to include readings and hymns which lacked the traditional language of divinity. Over time these fellowships became larger and either merged with existing churches or became churches themselves. This led to a large increase in humanism in the Unitarian church as a whole as well as a steady decline in the use of religious language. So complete was the removal of religious language from the denomination that our statement of principles and purposes, often pointed to when someone asks what we believe in as Unitarian Universalists, contains no divine language at all, except for the word “covenant”.

This is why, when I joined the church, I felt so at home, so comfortable with the language used here. However, things changed as I began to apply what I was learning in church to the rest of my life. As I attempted to truly live my UU principles each day I noticed two interesting side effects. The first one was that I was less and less defensive when other people used divine language in my presence. My understanding of words such as “God”, “ministry”, and “faith” began to change and take on new meanings, thanks in part to a large number of younger UUs who were adopting this language as their own. I came to think of God as the best hopes and dreams in all of us and when others would speak about God, I realized they were speaking about the same basic ideas. This led directly to the second side effect: Other people began to comment on what a good Christian I was. The first time this happened it took me completely by surprise. For a split second I was insulted, but very quickly I recognized the comment for what it was: not a slur, but a compliment on how I lived my life. I came to realize that there was an entire group of Christians, really the silent majority, who cared more about doing good in the world and following the teachings of Jesus than about commandments, sin, and hell. I also realized that many devoutly religious people were speaking of God not as a literal man in the sky – like the one on the order of service today – but as a metaphor for that something greater that connects us all. My ability to tolerate the use of God language had changed my entire outlook not only on Christianity, but also on religion as a whole. The walls which I had built up began to be broken down.

What I came to realize is that I had been doing the same thing that the religious fundamentalists had been doing. I had been taking words such as “God” and “faith” and putting them into little boxes of meaning instead of letting their meanings expand to meet me where I was in my personal journey. I thought that “God” had to mean a physical being, and that “prayer” meant talking directly to that physical being. I thought that “faith” meant blind trust of what you’ve been taught and that “salvation” meant that you would go to heaven after you die. I’m sure that if I asked a group of UUs about these words, many of them would have similar reactions. Many of us have attached the baggage of our previous religious experiences to these words. We hear the word “sin” and we think of angry signs at a protest. We hear the word “ministry” and we think of groups giving bibles to villagers in other countries. But to many these words mean much more.

As a religious educator and a parent I have seen another side of this issue as well. Many UUs want to spare our children from the negative effects that words such as “sin” had on us when we were their age. We want to shield our children from closed minded zealots who spew hate and intolerance in the name of religion. But in doing so, we often rob our children of the power that comes from having a language to describe that which is so difficult to describe in our lives. If we taught our children that “God” refers to the great mystery of life or if we taught them that “grace” refers to those gifts that we receive simply by being alive, then they would be equipped with those words when events in their lives moved them to use language which embodied the awe and wonder of life more directly than our everyday speech does. Instead we have given that power to the fundamentalists by making sure that their definitions of these words are the only ones that our children will ever learn.

I’m not trying to influence you one way or the other about your personal belief in God. Instead, my goal is to make you think about why the word itself is so problematic for Unitarian Universalists. I think that one of the reasons is that many times when we are asked “Do you believe in God?” we are expected to give a yes-or-no answer to a very complicated question. I think another reason is that many of the popular concepts of God are so simplistic and confined that we resist forcing the indescribable spiritual intuitions of our minds and hearts into such a simple and narrow description. The real question is not “what do you believe?” but “In what do you have faith?” When all seems lost and darkness is everywhere, to what do you pray for salvation from the darkness? If you put your hopes out to the universe, then perhaps the universe is God. If you rely on the inherent goodness of all people, then perhaps that is God.

I knew that my understanding of God, and especially of the word God, had changed significantly when I was asked by a high school youth if I believed in God and I was able to honestly answer “yes”. Although I don’t believe in a personal God whom I am able to interact with, I do believe in a wonderfully complex universe and in the spark of the divine in every living thing. To me, this is God. My belief in God hasn’t really changed since I became a UU, but my participation in this church has helped me define it as something more than “I don’t believe in the God they believe in.” I still consider myself a rational skeptic who doesn’t believe in superstition, but what has changed is my relationship with the word God. Instead of shrinking away from it I embrace it as my own. And I am beginning to see the fruits of my labor.

This year my 9 year old daughter began attending Redeemer Lutheran School, a local private school that is a part of Redeemer Lutheran Church. When we first started looking at private schools for my daughter I was concerned because many of them are very conservative. We chose Redeemer because of its rigorous academic program, but it came with some possible drawbacks. Two of these are the weekly chapels and bible verse memorizations, but the more serious one is that the church which runs the school is a member of the Missouri Synod. For those of you who have never heard of them, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod is the fundamentalist branch of Lutheranism in the US. It is balanced out by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. Whereas the ELCA ordains gay clergy, the Missouri Synod doesn’t even ordain women. They hold to the fundamentalist stance of strict biblical inerrancy. I’m sure you can imagine why this concerned me.

When we interviewed the principal we were assured that they taught evolution and that they were tolerant of other faiths at the school. The principal told us that a Muslim girl had even been student body president a few years ago. When we spoke to my daughter’s teacher he told us that they had an atheist student the year before and enjoyed having conversations with him about religion, so we signed my daughter up and hoped for the best. All of my fears were swept away on the very first day of school. The kids all put together bags with objects in them which represented who they were. The idea was for the kids to try and guess which bag belonged to which child based solely on the things in the bag. Among the things my daughter placed in her bag was a chalice. When they made posters that told other students about their interests and hobbies, my daughter wrote “I’m a Unitarian Universalist” as the very first thing on the poster.

So far our experiences have been very positive. Even though I’ve attended every chapel service to make sure I can explain to my daughter any theological bits that I disagree with, so far I haven’t needed to. She is so completely grounded in her faith and so at home with words like God and prayer and salvation that she has instead often come to me to tell me how she disagreed with the sermon topic before I even had a chance to bring it up on my own. We often discuss how we as Unitarian Universalists can apply the teachings of Jesus to our daily lives while maintaining our own beliefs about God and the spark of the divine within all people. She even asked her prayer leader at school to pray for me when I was traveling on a business trip, not because she believes in a personal God who answers our prayers, but because she wanted to express her desire that I come home safely.

So what is the point of all of this? My sermon is titled “Is There a Place for God in Unitarian Universalism?” I believe that the answer to this question is yes, there is a place for God. There is at least a place for the word “God” regardless of what your personal beliefs are regarding the existence or non-existence of one or more particular deities. We need to bring the religious language of our predecessors back into our daily experiences and embrace that language. It isn’t the words themselves that we have a problem with, it is the meaning that others have assigned to them. If we take back these words we will regain a descriptive vocabulary which we desperately need in these trying times. My challenge to you today is to reevaluate your relationship with the language of divinity. I realize that many of you have been hurt by religious zealots using these words to spew hate, but I ask that you try your best to embrace these words and to make them meaningful in your daily lives. Doing so will rob those same zealots of the power that these words have given them.

Benediction

I will leave you today with a quote from the book, Fluent in Faith: A Unitarian Universalist Embrace of Religious Language.

“God is the voice or impulse calling us toward goodness, beauty, creativity, love, justice, growth. God is a mysterious impulse available to us, a too-often unheeded voice within me and you and all of life. This god calls and invites, prompts and lures, but it is up to us whether to respond. We are a part of an interconnected web of life in which each affects all. There is a sacred spark, a spiritual energy and power, in each of us. It matters what we do with our lives. The great, ultimately unnameable mystery of life is a call to goodness and love. As we choose love, decide for love, stand on the side of love, we are part of the growing god in the universe.”

I implore you to find ways to embrace religious language in your daily lives and to teach your families and others about your faith by using the language of divinity. Words only have meaning because we give them meaning. If we don’t give these words a deeper and broader meaning, if we aren’t comfortable using them to describe our faith, then they will always be used to rail against us and the walls between us and those of other faiths will continue to stand.

Go now in peace until we meet again. Amen.

 

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The lovers, the dreamers, and me

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Marisol Caballero

November 25, 2012

Kermit T. Frog’s famous ballad, “The Rainbow Connection,” has had a profound impact on my life, my theology, and my call to ministry. As I age, I have begun to recognize that Jim Henson’s words and characters have helped form so many of us in similar ways. This sermon will celebrate the wisdom of this unexpectedly prophetic man, who together with his puppets, continues to help change the world more than 20 years after his death.

 

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Our Religious Imagination

by Posted in Audio available, Brian Ferguson, Former Ministers, Guest Speakers, Sermons

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Rev. Brian Ferguson

November 4, 2012

Albert Einstein was one of the great thinkers of the 20th century and knew a lot but said “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Our Unitarian Universalist religious tradition places great emphasis on the use of reason to interpret our experience to derive meaning in life. But the solutions to some of the most difficult intractable problems in our lives seem to lie beyond our experience and reason. This worship service will explore what possibilities could be open to us if we make imagination a bigger part of our religious life.

Rev. Brian Ferguson is currently serving in his third year as the Consulting Minister to the San Marcos Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. Prior to serving at San Marcos, Brian completed a year of chaplaincy training at Seton Family of Hospitals in Austin, specializing in the areas of Intensive Care, Trauma, and Mental Health. He was honored to serve as the ministerial intern here, at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin, in 2008 and also the Live Oak Unitarian Universalist Church in Cedar Park. Brian earned a Masters of Divinity degree from Starr King School for the Ministry, the Unitarian Universalist seminary in Berkeley, California. His ministry is driven by the desire to explore and improve the human condition in an interdisciplinary and holistic way.

He is a native of Scotland but has lived in California since 1986 prior to moving to Austin in August, 2008. In his previous life, before attending seminary, he earned an applied physics degree from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, and worked for 24 years as an electronic design engineer and project manager. Brian is joined on life’s journey by his partner and our office manager, Natalie Freeburg, and nine year old daughter, Isla Ferguson.

 

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Day of the Dead

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons

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Marisol Caballero

October 28, 2012

The Day of the Dead (El Dia de los Muertos) is a Mexican holiday that celebrates the lives and personalities of our loved ones who have died. In this inter-generational worship service we celebrate and remember loved ones (pets included) who have died. A congregational ofrenda (altar) honors their memory. We briefly share the name of the deceased and our relationship to them. We bring items to place on our ofrenda, such as a favorite food, drink, photograph or another item that represents who they were and what they loved in life.

 

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Coming Home

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

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Marisol Caballero

September 30, 2012

We pride ourselves in being open and affirming toward all, yet it seems many people still do not know of our existence. Why are UUs so shy about talking about where we attend church? This sermon challenges us to be more willing to share our faith.

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.

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Becoming an Ally

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons

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Marisol Caballero, M.Div.

Interim director of Lifespan Religious Education

August 26, 2012

There has been much dialogue within our congregations and within our movement about working to become a more welcoming and a more multicultural/multiethnic faith. This is both exciting and challenging work that grows the humanity of all those who venture to undertake it with an open mind and in humility. What will this work require of those of us who are already here, in order to better welcome those who we’d like to join us? What will we gain and what must we sacrifice? What does it truly mean to be an ally to those who live as members of less dominant groups?

 

Sermon:

Good morning. I cannot express how thrilling it is to be in this pulpit! Each time I stand here, I remember standing here and delivering my first sermon as a twenty-year-old member of this congregation. It was part of a lay-led gay pride service that focused on the coming out process as a means of celebrating one’s authentic self. I remember using the then-recently released film, Pleasantville, as my text, of sorts, and compared shamefully hiding away parts of ourselves that we should be proud of to living in a black-and-white world, rather than in Technicolor. Through this experience, and with the encouragement of this congregation, I was able to listen to that still, small voice within me and uncover my call to ministry.

I first heard that whisper many months before, when I attended my first service here. One of the two Interim Co-Ministers, the late Rev. Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley, was leading service that day. Having grown up in conservative northern West Texas, I had never before laid eyes on a woman minister, let alone a woman of color minister! In fact, my little fellowship was too small to even have a minister, so I had no idea that Unitarian Universalists ordained anyone, and before me stood a role model whose existence was proof that I could bring my whole self into service of this faith that I love in a way I had never before imagined.

As I got to know Marjorie better over the years and she took me under her wing, she told stories of her difficult journey as a UU minister of color. She experienced sexism and racism within our ranks, most often in the form of the less tangible microagressions, than the easy-to-recognize acts of bigotry that make levelheaded, compassionate people recoil.

Microagressions are small acts that are done, often without thought or malicious intent, which serve to remind others that they exist outside of what is considered normal or acceptable. We have all born witness to various microagressions and, most likely, have uttered them ourselves without realizing it. A boy is told, “Stop being such a girl!” A woman, “Wow, who knew you could fix a flat tire!” A plus sized woman, “You know, you have a very pretty face.” A lesbian couple, “So, I guess she’s more of the man, right? And you’re the woman?” Or, “that’s funny, I couldn’t tell you were Chinese on the phone!” Or, “It’s so rude when you say things in Spanish with others when you’re hanging out with me.”

We would be hard-pressed to find a soul in this room that hasn’t had such an experience that made them feel diminished in some way, which made them feel as if they did not matter. When someone fails to see us as an individual person of worth, it has the effect of isolating everyone involved from recognizing our inherent connectedness. Just as we all can recall feeling diminished, we all have experienced pain. We all yearn to feel loved. We’ve known the joy of friendship and the agony of loss. We’ve all had hard days that we cannot wait to close the door on with a good night’s sleep. We all have known what it feels like to laugh so hard or to worry so much about someone that it hurts.

And yet, we have all been enculturated since birth to fear and judge those who are different from ourselves. I become so frustrated when I hear otherwise progressive folks lifting up the word “tolerance.” In my youth, I was so proud to be a member of the UU Fellowship of Odessa, TX, as its sign read “Freedom, Reason, and Tolerance.” But, as I grew into adulthood, & I began to notice more & more that the majority of Unitarian Universalists don’t look like me, tolerance sounded less and less appealing. Those who are tolerated do not fully have a place. Sure, blatant name-calling and the like are frowned upon with tolerance, but does that mean that tongues are being bitten? Maybe, maybe not. One who is tolerated is never certain.

As the “good liberals” who we are, we would like to think that we have moved beyond tolerance to acceptance. But have we, truly? It may be safe to say that many if not most or all of us would like to have greater diversity in our UU congregations. Most congregations, this one not withstanding, have a smattering of ethnic, gender, ability, and sexual diversity, but by and large, ours is still a predominantly a White, heterosexual, upper middle class, highly educated denomination. If we are accepting, why is this the case? Why are we not more diverse?

Acceptance is a tough place to come to. It requires intention and deep soul work to become a reality. We do not simply become accepting because we wish ourselves to be or because we believe ourselves to be. Because we are all taught racism, to varying degrees, (either by our families of origin and/or by our society that values as the norm European influence and culture and Whiteness as the standard of beauty and intelligence) as well as all of the other “isms” (sexism, heterosexism, ableism, ageism, classism, etc.) it takes deliberate time and energy to unlearn all that we have been taught, much of which has been buried deep in our wiring, where we keep the less cute parts of ourselves. We don’t usually expose these parts to the light of day for fear of judgment by ourselves & by others. Without taking the risk and doing this work in faithful community, of engaging in a remedial education of love, an increase of diversity will be a faade and we will be engaging in tokenism. We may gain the appearance of an accepting denomination but we will, in essence, be merely tolerant of difference.

Robert W. Karnan, UU minister to a church in Portmouth, New Hampshire that was able to grow in diversity through multiculturalism, writes similarly about the experience, “Inclusive Congregational membership means intentionally opening the doors and pews with a genuine welcome to all who come in goodwill. It means a natural concomitant fear among the existing members about the many unknown people who begin to sit next to and join them in worship with those who have been there a long time. We found that this is the frontier for confrontation with racism, class phobia, ageism, genderism, homophobia, and all other prejudices that we hold mostly privately just under the surface of our daily lives…”

How will we go about achieving an authentic celebration of difference? The answer must begin by stating that diversity, in and of itself, cannot be the ultimate goal absent from working toward ending oppression and becoming allies to one another. We have a spiritual imperative to end racism and other forms of oppression, to become allies to the marginalized. Doing this work helps us to grow more fully into our humanity. It recognizes the worth and dignity of every person and embraces our interconnectedness. Anti-racism and anti-oppression work, in general, requires us to look directly at ourselves and at others and do away with rhetoric which values “colorblindness” and ignoring difference. Joo Young Choi, a lifelong UU and friend I met through DRUUMM, a UU people of color organization, once addressed a 2005 UU youth conference with the following,

“Friend, if you wish to love me, do not be blind to my color, my sexuality, my abilities, my class. If you wish to love me, do not be blind to systemic oppression, and do not be blind to the oppression that has affected me. My color is beautiful.”

I have certainly experienced my share of racism in my life, not to mention my experiences of sexism, homophobia, and whatever the “ism” is called by which people from elsewhere negatively judge Texans. Within UU congregations, I often hear comments such as, “you don’t look like a Unitarian! You look like you’d be a Roman Catholic.” Or, “Wow! That was powerful! Do you write your sermons yourself?!” Or, “So, what part of Mexico were you born in?” (To that one I answer, “Texas- the northern part of Mexico.”) I’ve been mistaken for the Latina childcare worker after preaching and while standing in my robe! The list can go onÉ But, in doing this work, I have found that my stories are not unique. We have all been damaged by the continued existence of oppression. Our humanity has been tried and lessened. Our work begins by undoing these lessons and learning to become an ally, to be a community of allies to the historically marginalized, among us and outside of these walls.

There are many ways to begin this crucial work of becoming an ally. By increasing our awareness of culture and difference, we become more mindful- more mindful of our “attitudes, values, and assumptions.” We must examine our cultural “norms” and begin to become curious about how they came to be. I have a funny story about this from seminary: we were placing our snacks out before a Student Senate meeting when my friend, Dominique, a black woman, and I began teasing two of our white friends, Margaret and Jessica, about their dish. They had brought hummus and baby carrots. We pointed out the fact that at every meeting there was always sure to be a white girl who brought baby carrots and hummus. After the four of us had a good laugh, Margaret and Jessica gained an awareness of the reality and existence of white dominant culture and planned a seminary chapel service that explored whiteness further, calling it the “White Girls’ Chapel Service”. What began as a joke between friends, ended up bringing some healing and opening the eyes of all who attended the worship service.

So, to achieve the goal of diversity begins in anti-racism/anti-oppression but it must end in working toward multiculturalism, for diversity on its own is not sustainable without multiculturalism and multiculturalism cannot be built without the foundation of anti-oppression. The journey toward becoming truly welcoming to all, of becoming allies, is tough work, but it’s soul-feeding work. These subjects are easier not to talk about. This is work that requires courage to move beyond denial, guilt, shame, and apathy.

But, I wonder, what will our congregations look like when we arrive? How will we measure our success? Is there truly a destination, or should we view the journey as an ongoing process, forever growing our humanity? Rev. Paul Rasor says, “Liberals want to create a strong and inclusive community, but we often want to do it without giving up anything, without letting down the barriers we erect around ourselves in the name of individual autonomy.” Change can be a scary thing. But, if our church culture changes to more fully embrace multiculturalism, we need not change our core values, which is what makes us Unitarian Universalists. We won’t throw out all of the great old hymns or traditions, we will simply add to our repertoire. True multiculturalism does not recognize one culture as normative over any other, be it heterosexual culture, English-speaking, two-parent households, white, upper middle-class, gender normative, or able-bodied cultures, but it does embrace each as a rich and valuable member of the human family.

What do we have to gain? Karnan admits that, “An inclusive opening brings discomfort. The discomfort exists for those who are already members and it exists for the newcomer, tooÉ[but] the journey has meant that we speak more honestly & listen more carefully. It has meant the growth of the heart and the spirit of love to encompass more than the congregation has previously been willing to see & know. It has meant becoming a close friend to someone who ten years ago might have been avoided because of their identity or looks or presumed status. We have begun to remake our world, beginning with ourselves, and the transformation has been as liberating as it has been demanding.”

I look forward to engaging in this transformative, community building, justice ensuring; this holy work with this congregation this fall. We will laugh, cry, discover, and grow in spirit together as we strive to become better allies. May it be so.

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

The least of things

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

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Chris Jimmerson

August 19, 2012

 

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

 

CALL TO WORSHIP

Come into the circle of caring,

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

Let the healing power of this people penetrate you,

Let loving kindness and joy pass through you,

Let hope infuse you,

And peace be the law of your heart.

In this human circle,

Caring is a calling.

All of us are called.

So come into the circle of caring.

PRAYER

by Dr. Davidson Loehr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

SERMON

Chris Jimmerson

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

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

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

I found out this summer that I didn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I suppose it was the least I could do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think that it has everything to do with love.

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

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

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

Amen.

OFFERING

We all have so many needs-

A thousand prayers-a thousand needs–

That really need only one answer:

Let the world not be indifferent.

And may we live and be with

each other in the way that

shows this truth whatever the day brings:

That neither are we indifferent to each other.

BENEDICTION

As we go forth today, I wish you love.

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

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

All blessings upon you and yours.

Go in peace and love.

Amen

 

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