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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 9, 2020
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Sometimes it’s when we fail or when we are limited that our creativity is brought to the fore. Agitation can bring transformation.

Chalice Lighting

At this hour, in small towns and big cities, in single rooms and ornate sanctuaries, many of our sibling Unitarian Universalist congregations are also lighting a flaming chalice. As we light our chalice today; let us remember that we are part of a great community of faith. May this dancing flame inspire us to fill our lives with the Unitarian Universalist ideals of love, justice, and truth.

Call to Worship

WHY I WAKE EARLY
Mary Oliver

Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who made the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and the crotchety –
best preacher that ever was

dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the uniiverse
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light –
good morning, good morning, good morning.
Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Meditation Reading

by Frederick Douglass

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation,
are people who want crops without ploughing the ground;
they want rain without thunder and lightning;
they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters.

The struggle may be a moral one,
or it may be a physical one,
or it may be both.
But it must be a struggle.

Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never did and it never will.

Sermon

Today we are talking about butter, and about creativity within constraints. When you use butter you have in your hands a substance with at least a 3,000 year history. According to The Butter Journal, a hunter could have made the first batch by accident. He may have tied a sheepskin bag of milk to his horse and, after a day of jostling, discovered the transformation: Churned milk fat solidifies into butter. Farmers in Syria still take a goat skin bag, fill it with milk and start shaking.

In ancient Rome, butter was medicinal – swallowed for coughs or rubbed into aching joints. In India, Hindus have been offering Lord Krishna tins full of ghee – clarified butter – for at least 3,000 years. And in the Bible, butter is a food for celebration, first mentioned when Abraham and Sarah offer three visiting angels a feast of meat, milk and butter.

A couple of weeks ago we talked about how salt enabled humans to travel, as they could take with them salt-preserved food that didn’t spoil on the journey. Milk spoiled quickly in transport, and travelers could take butter with them more easily and get to where they were going with those concentrated calories still appetizing and available to them.

Butter is made by agitating milk. You put the milk in a container and then shake it up for a time until you get butter. So I’ve been thinking about being shaken up. Our culture doesn’t change without agitation. As you heard Fredrick Douglass say, power never yields without a demand.

We may be the same. We’ve all been faced with challenges. Thrown off our horse by a bad diagnosis, the loss of a job, the death of someone we love, some of our normal comforts removed. Or we are sent on a journey, a quest. Sometimes we know we need this, and take off traveling to new places. We have felt ourselves getting too comfortable, getting sleepy, so we do something to wake ourselves up. More often, agitation happens on its own.

One of the things that agitated my life was reading feminist theology. I was raised in a pretty traditional protestant home, where God was the daddy. When you start thinking of God as the mother, things can change. My whole theology fell apart, because I knew no mother in the world would torture and kill her son because of some construction of sin and forgiveness she herself had set up. Then as I delved into neo-pagan theology, where Gaia, the living Earth, was seen as the divinity, I read things about how you can see god in nature, dolphins, sunsets, mountains….

I knew, as someone who had been camping, that there was more to nature than that. There were the endless forests of the Appalachians, where it got cold, and when the wind whistled through your tent and the bears ate the food you had put in the tree, you could die there and the forest wouldn’t really seem to care. Or else the woods and the moon had a completely different understanding of death than I did and saw it as much less of a big deal. Mother Nature was completely comfortable with death, indifferent, you could say. Praying to her for your child’s illness to be healed felt different from praying to a loving father god. But I had done both, when my mother was dying of cancer, and they had worked similarly badly.

Now I have a theology that feels creamy and nourishing. God is Love, and there is a river of love running through the universe. Every act of love by human or other adds to this river. The river has no hands, though, so the hands of love are ours. We are the ones who make love into action, and the river strengthens us. We can bathe in this river when we need forgiveness or grace, when we feel off track or dried up. The river of love is there for us. The God of my childhood makes no sense to me. Mother nature is too indifferent, but I seek the river of love, and that makes sense to me. Finally, a sweet buttery thealogy that makes sense to me after all that agitation.

The things that shake us can change us. You all have known people who haven’t had any trouble in their lives. They have never had someone they loved die, never been grievously sick or injured, never been completely without resources, never been at the mercy of merciless people. Sometimes it is glorious experiences that shake us, but most often it is the difficult ones. That’s life. It shakes the raw milk of our characters and we become more solid, sweeter, longer lasting, more nourishing to others.

Shaking makes butter, shaking within an enclosed space.

There is a good bit of research on how creativity thrives best when given constraints. Business journals talk about it. How it can be good to be limited in some ways, geographically, in your budget, in your human resources, in time constraints. The limitations agitate, and creativity is born in the situation. Maybe a football team like Green Bay is owned by the town it’s in, not by a rich person, and they have to make do with who they have, and they do well and inspire plenty of passionate loyalty as a side effect.

Some creatives give themselves limitations to spur creativity.

Tell a story in six words. I saw one in the want ads one day “Wedding dress for sale. Never worn.” Another way to impose constraints is to set a timer, try to do a job in 30 minutes. At least get part of it done and then rest.

Most of you know that I write books, stories about my life. Those of you who have tried to write know that facing a blank page, paper or on your computer screen, can be intimidating. If you sit down with the idea that you could write about anything, just anything in the world, it’s a lot harder than if someone gives you some constraints. Writers use prompts. They might be character prompts, like you spin a wheel and get “wears his father’s fedora” and an additional one “blinks rapidly.” Then you put those together and write about that character. The guardrails give you a place to go.

There are lots of examples, and you will now begin to see them everywhere, of how constraints enhance creativity. Lots of us are now watching a show called “Next in Fashion,” where 18 designers compete to win 250,000 dollars. They aren’t just told “make something.” They must make a military inspired look, or a sportswear look, or make something completely out of denim. One of them realizes he doesn’t have enough of the material to make the pants he had in mind because he started with the top and used too much there. What’s he going to do? Make shorts? Use another kind of material? He has to make it work, and you can see his creativity sparking as he looks around in desperation.

Almost all of us have constraints. Children need constraints in order to grow up well. There used to be a stock market commercial that showed a bull out in a field by himself and the song said “To know no boundaries…” It sounded kind of awful. A bull with no boundaries is a dangerous animal. The psychologists say that to leave a child with no boundaries is the same as abandonment. We need boundaries in order to be kind, in order to be patient and generous. We need to know that we won’t be intruded upon, have our agency taken away, or have someone lean on us far more than we are able to bear. We have limitations thrust upon us, but we get to set limitations on friends and family as well. The relationships may flourish, or they may disappear as we say “You can’t talk to me like that.” Or “I’m happy for you to be in my home unless you’re drunk.” Or whatever is important to you.

Most of us don’t need artificial shake-ups. Just know that when the agitation comes, when you experience constraints, know that they may come bearing gifts. When they happen, you may just say to yourself “Making the butter, we’re just making the butter.”

Most sermons during the past 20 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

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Text of this sermon is not available. Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 2, 2020
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

All Ages Service with our Annual Blessing of the Pets. There are several theories about how best to train horses and dogs. Might these theories work concerning humans as well?

Chalice Lighting

We light the fire of Truth and ask to be clear, wise, and humble enough to admit when we don’t know. We kindle the warmth of community and ask for open heartedness and patience. We are grateful to the Spirit of Life and ask to learn the secret to loving and being loved.

Call to Worship

A LITTLE PRINCESS
Frances Hodgson Burnett

How it is that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words, and everything in the world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything, and it can always speak, without even making a sound, to another soul.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Meditation Reading

THE POWER OF NOW: A GUIDE TO SPIRITUAL ENLIGHTENMENT
Eckhart Tolle

Watch any plant or animal and let it teach you acceptance of what is, surrender to the Now.

Let it teach you Being.

Let it teach you integrity – which means to be one, to be yourself, to be real.

Let it teach you how to live and how to die, and how not to make living and dying into a problem.

Most sermons during the past 20 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
Jamuary 26, 2020
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

The second in the sermon series inspired by the elements of baking, we will talk about everything from the history of salt in the shaping of civilization to the Christian scriptures’ admonition to be the salt of the earth.

Chalice Lighting

We light the fire of Truth and ask to be clear, wise, and humble enough to admit when we don’t know. We kindle the warmth of community and ask for open heartedness and patience. We are grateful to the Spirit of Life and ask to learn the secret to loving and being loved.

Call to Worship

Israelmore Ayivor

Don’t be a pepper on the eyes of people; Rather be the salt on their tongue and make a difference that influences their sense of belonging to the earth.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Meditation Reading

THE SWEETNESS OF SALT
Cecilia Galante

She reached for a tiny white dish on top of the stove. “Oops, and salt. I almost forgot salt.”

“Salt?” I wrinkled my nose, and then widened my eyes. “Is that your secret ingredient?”

Sophie laughed. “Salt isn’t a secret ingredient, doofus. Besides, you just add a pinch. Salt brings out all the flavors.” She paused. “It’s weird, isn’t it? How something so opposite of sweet can make things taste even better?” “How does it do that?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Sophie answered. “It just kind of brings everything together in its own strange little way.

Sermon

A few years ago I read a book called “Glass Paper Beans.” The writer, Leah Hager Cohen, was sitting in a coffee shop drinking a glass of coffee, reading the newspaper. She found herself wondering where the coffee beans came from, and what the process was by which they came to this place. The glass, too. How is that made? And the paper…. It’s made from wood pulp, we all know, but how is the wood harvested? How is it made into paper? The book was interesting. Here, years later, I was baking baguettes, whose only ingredients are water, flour and salt, and I thought I didn’t know much about any of the elements of baking. Heat and Transformation was the first one, two weeks ago, and this past week I’ve been researching salt.

Since I was raised in the Christian church, one of the things that came to mind was Rabbi Jesus saying “you are the salt of the earth, but if the salt has lost its flavor, it is good for nothing but to be cast out and trampled underfoot.” This saying has never made sense to me because there is salt in the earth, but where there is salt in the soil nothing will grow there. Enemies used to salt the fields of the people they conquered to ruin their ability to live in that place any more. Salt of the earth doesn’t sound like a good thing. Also, salt doesn’t lose its saltiness. It’s salt. So it tastes salty. So I started reading about salt.

Where does it come from? Dry lake beds, salt flats, the ocean, and mines. In some mines, people go underground to chop it out of the eart, and in others, a well is dug, fresh water is forced down into a salt deposit, and when it comes back up it’s salty. Then they evaporate the water. Most kosher salt is sea salt. Much of our table salt comes from the wells that force water into the ancient oceans’ salt deposits.

In ancient China, the history of salt can be traced back over 6,000 years. Salt was such a valuable commodity that many battles were fought for control of the area and access to the dry lakes’ salt flats.

The first known Chinese treatise on pharmacology, the Peng-Tzao-Kan-Mu, written more than 4,700 years ago, lists over 40 different types of salt and their properties. It also describes methods of extracting it and preparing it for human consumption.

It was widely traded in pottery jars which, according to ‘The Archaeology of China’, served as a form of currency and ‘standard units of measure in the trade and distribution of salt’.

Maybe you have a pink salt lamp, or pink salt for cooking. Himalayan rock salt was first laid down more than 500 million years ago, the history of Himalayan rock salt starts with Alexander the Great in 326 BC. Alexander was recorded resting his army in the Khewra region of what is now northern Pakistan. His soldiers noticed their horses started to lick the salty rocks in the area, a small surface part of what is now known to be one of the world’s most extensive underground rock salt deposits.

Today, the Khewra salt mine in Pakistan is the second largest in the world and famous for producing culinary pink rock salt and Himalayan salt lamps. The Egyptian salt trade, especially with the Phoenicians and early Greek Empire, contributed significantly to the wealth and power of the Old and Middle kingdoms of ancient Egypt. Furthermore, the Egyptians were also one of the first cultures known to preserve their food with salt. Both meat, and particularly fish, were preserved by salting.

Salzburg, a city in Austria, translates to ‘salt city.’ It was also an important center of salt trade in ancient Europe. Today, the Hallstatt salt mine near Salzburg is still open and considered the world’s oldest operational salt mine.

In the Iron Age, the British evaporated salt by boiling seawater in small clay pots over open fires. Roman salt-making entailed boiling the seawater in large lead-lined pans. Salt was used as currency in ancient Rome, and the roots of the words “soldier” and “salary” can be traced to Latin words related to giving or receiving salt. During the Middle Ages, salt was transported along roads built especially for that purpose. One of the most famous of these roads is the Old Salt Route in Northern Germany, which ran from the salt mines to shipping ports.

Salt taxes and monopolies have led to wars and protests everywhere from China to parts of Africa. Anger over the salt tax was one of the causes of the French Revolution. In colonial India, only the British government could produce and profit from the salt production conducted by Indians living on the coast. Gandhi chose to protest this monopoly in March 1930 and marched for 23 days with his followers. When he arrived on the coast, Gandhi violated the law by boiling a chunk of salty mud. This march became known as the Salt March to Dandi, or the Salt Satyagraha. People across India began making their own salt in protest, and the march became an important milestone in the struggle for Indian independence.

Salt production also played a significant role in early America. The Massachusetts Bay Colony held the first patent to produce salt in the colonies and continued to produce it for the next 200 years. The Erie Canal was opened primarily to make salt transportation easier, Salt continues to be important to the economies of many states, including Ohio, Louisiana and Texas. Grand Saline is the saltiest town in Texas, and it has the Salt Palace to prove it. Calling the visitors’ center a palace may be stretching it, but the Northeast Texas town is literally sitting on a mountain of salt, 20,000 feet deep, left there when Texas was a sea bed. Apparently you can’t lick the court house, but you can lick city hall.

OK, so what does being the salt of the earth mean? Since one of salt’s earliest uses was to preserve food, which enabled people to travel, not as they had traveled before, to find more food, but for other reasons, to go somewhere, to visit someone, to go on a sales trip to sell the salted food, or pottery or jewelry or grain or animals or people to sell. Salt enabled travel and trade.

Old time preachers seized on this and said what Jesus meant was that people who followed him were supposed to be a force to prevent moral decay and moral corruption.

I would love for us to be a force to prevent moral decay and corruption. I don’t think I share their views of what moral decay looks like. I think it looks like people in cages, treated cruelly, for-profit prisons, pay-for-play politics, super-rich people facing a completely different justice system than the poor. That’s what looks like moral decay to me. And corruption? Most of the governments of the world run on it. So maybe that’s one meaning. The old rabbis said that every passage in the Jewish Scripture has at least 300,000 meanings, and I think the same is true of the Christian Scriptures.

I think about salt, and I think we come from the sea, there is salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. If your body salt gets out of balance, you’re in trouble. In the hospital, you get a saline solution to restore your balance. Medicines are suspended in saline. You can help your cedar fever by squirting saline solution into your nostrils.

Another thing salt does is magnify the flavors of food. Your tongue has salt receptors along its sides, near your salivary glands, and close to the bitterness receptors. Sometimes you can put salt on something bitter, like coffee or grapefruit, and it occupies those taste buds so that it cuts the bitterness. A pinch of salt in cookies makes the sweetness deeper and more layered. You have to get just the right amount, though. They say, cooking pasta, that the water should be salted enough so that it tastes like the ocean. If you eat something that is less salted than you like it, it tastes bland and flat. If something is over-salted, it can be ruined. So, if you’re the salt of the earth, you have to spread that saltiness out. Too much salt of the earth on salt of the earth, it burns you. Tastes awful. How might salt “lose its savor?” By trying to stick to its own kind. Salt can’t salt salt.

Salt is essential for baking, for industry, for manufacturing, for preserving and cleansing and health. I still don’t really know what Rabbi Jesus meant, but here’s what I think today:

If we are salt of the earth we apparently need to spread out, to be about other people. If I’m sitting with you, and I’m in a good spiritual place, I’m going to be thinking “How can I enhance your flavors? How can I help you be a delight to this conversation, to yourself, to this group, to the planet?

Most sermons during the past 20 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
January 12, 2020
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

The first in a sermon series inspired by the elements of baking. Sometimes transformation takes heat, it takes trouble, agitation or discomfort. We will have just finished two days of talking about our religious education program with an interim facilitator. Telling stories from the past can turn up the heat, but as in baking, the results can be something nourishing.

Chalice Lighting

We light the fire of Truth and ask to be clear, wise, and humble enough to admit when we don’t know. We kindle the warmth of community and ask for open heartedness and patience. We are grateful to the Spirit of Life and ask to learn the secret to loving and being loved.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Meditation Reading

Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the parts of the world that is within our reach… One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, sends up flares, builds signal fires,…

Sermon

HEAT AND TRANSFORMATION

One of my spiritual practices is baking bread on Fridays or Saturdays. I love the smell of the yeast starting to come alive, the feel of the dough as I knead it and braid it, and the way it makes the house smell when it is baking. Yeast and bread are an upcoming sermon. Today it’s heat. And transformation. We all “feel the heat” sometimes, and it can change us, and we’ve all seen that transformation can be for the better, for the worse, or it’s hard to tell.

In cooking and baking, you are conjuring transformation. A set of ingredients comes together and then, with the application of heat, they become something completely different. The ancient Celts talked about the cauldron of the goddess Ceridwen. When you were in trouble, when you were sick, when you died, you were in Ceridwen’s cauldron, being boiled up into something else. A lot of the time things are going well. You have your job. You have some money. Your body’s working pretty well. Then life throws in some heat. You’re in the cauldron. You’re in the heat, in the stove. How do you hold up?

When you read about stress, the consensus seems to be that people need some stress, we need to rise to a challenge. We sign ourselves up for marathons, or 5k runs. We take classes, we set ourselves songwriting challenges or start new businesses. We take on a big project like dating someone with the goal of changing them. We know that it’s going to be stressful, but we enjoy the challenge.

My dad used to teach at the Institute for the Achievement of Human Potential, casually known as the Better Baby Institute. He learned that making the surfaces babies crawled on too soft didn’t lead to as much development as letting them get scuffed up a little by crawling on burlap. Even babies need challenges. My mother wouldn’t let us have Lysol in the house, because she said that killing germs led to the deterioration of building immunities, and she thought our immune systems needed challenging. She taught second grade, and was not a scientist with any credential whatsoever, and she was not in love with house cleaning. She’d grown up in India playing with dried cow patties in the village, and thought American obsessions with cleanliness were misguided. That was possibly a self-justifying theory!

In England and Europe the new thought is that playgrounds should be slightly dangerous, that children need to learn to navigate risk and danger. If children never have to navigate risk, learn how far it is from the monkey bars to the ground, if we always run up to catch them, they won’t learn some crucial things. Intermittent challenges are called good stress. You rise to it, or you learn something, or you fail. And learn something. Failure throws you into the cauldron, with a chance for transformation.

Sometimes the challenge goes on and on. You are living with someone whose way of doing things is a continuing misery for you, and they can’t or won’t change. You are working for a boss whose way of doing and being makes your life a misery, and they can’t or won’t change. This leads to what they call chronic stress, which transforms people like being left in the oven at 350 for ten hours would affect your dinner. In chronic stress, we get left in the oven too long. Or we leave ourselves in the oven too long. We even say “I’m burned out.” “I’m crispy.”

When the pressure is on, our centeredness becomes crucial. When someone is throwing clay on a potter’s wheel, they try to slap that mound of clay right in the center of the wheel. It takes practice and skill. If the clay isn’t centered, when you put the pressure on, when the spinning starts and you press your hands into the clay and start trying to shape it into a pot, it begins to wobble wildly. You have to scrape it off the wheel and start over. Our spiritual practices, our learning from our experience, our support system are what can center us.

We’ve been talking about spiritual practices. Kelly has articles about them on the Religious Education table. Chris and Lee talked about their personal practices at the end of December. Then we all did the practice of burning the old year in the burning bowl last Sunday. It can be our spiritual practices that help us, when the heat is turned up, to be transformed in a good way rather than transformed in a destructive way.

What makes heat for transformation? Anger is heat, indicating that your boundaries have been violated. How do you work with that heat to transform your situation? Desire is heat, when you want something very much and point yourself in that direction. The need to live authentically can make enough heat to lead people to come out as gay, even though that adds to trouble in their lives, or leads people to transition in their understanding of or presentation of their gender, inviting lots of concern from people around them. The desire to live authentically can lead people out of one career into another, or from one relationship to another.

When we feel the heat, we are in the cauldron. The chance of transformation is here. What do you do? You first say to yourself: I’m feeling the heat. This is a hot situation. What next?

The best thing to do, if you can, is to take yourself away and out of the stress from time to time. That is the way to keep it from being chronic. Learn to relax. As my counseling mentor used to say, “Don’t just do something, stand there!”

Celebrate your victories. Have a birthday party even if the eviction notice is on the door.

Take things day by day. Be grateful for what’s good. Change what you can. Ask for help, not to fix everything, but for someone to sit with you in the heat, the way the wise person does with those in their sweat lodge.

I would want a smooth life for you, with no trouble and no pain. That wouldn’t be the best for you, though. May we find a way to be in the heat and come out on the other side transformed with more compassion, more heart, and more understanding.

Most sermons during the past 20 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above. Text of this sermon is not available.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
January 5, 2020
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Is it possible to let go of grudges? Is it a good idea? We take things that we want to let go of from 2019 and we give them to the Burning Bowl. Then, from a second bowl, we will draw a word which can inform our intentions for the new year.

Chalice Lighting

We light the fire of Truth and ask to be clear, wise, and humble enough to admit when we don’t know. We kindle the warmth of community and ask for open heartedness and patience. We are grateful to the Spirit of Life and ask to learn the secret to loving and being loved.

Call to Worship

By Maya Angelou

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive, and to do so with some passion, compassion, some humor, and some style.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Meditation Reading

BURNING THE OLD YEAR
Naomi Shihab Nye

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.

Sermon Reading

By Ralph Waldo Emerson

Write it on your heart
that every day is the best day in the year.

He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day
who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.
Finish every day and be done with it.
You have done what you could.

Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in.
Forget them as soon as you can: tomorrow is a new day;
begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit
to be cumbered with your old nonsense.

This new day is too dear,
with its hopes and invitations,
to waste a moment on the yesterdays.

Most sermons during the past 20 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
December 24, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Come join our annual Christmas Eve worship service of Lessons and Carols. We will read, from the Christian texts, the story of Rabbi Jesus’ heralded birth as well as sing Christmas carols and hymns for the holiday.

WINTER TREES
by William Carlos Williams

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the dis-attiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold

Chalice Lighting

On this night of anticipation, we raise our voices in story and song to greet Christmas. May the lessons of compassion, trust, and generosity alight within us and lead us into the new day, renewed.

Opening Words

The Persian poet Rumi wrote,

God’s joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box
From cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flowerbed.
As roses, up from ground.
Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish,
Now a cliff covered with vines,
Now a horse being saddled.
[God’s joy] hides within these,
Till one day it cracks them open.

Reading

“COME INTO CHRISTMAS”
by Ellen Fay

It is the winter season of the year
Dark and chilly
Perhaps it is a winter season in your life.
Dark and chilly there, too
Come in to Christmas here,
Let the light and warmth of Christmas brighten our
lives and the world.
Let us find in the dark corners of our souls the
light of hope,
A vision of the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Let us find rest in the quiet of a holy moment to
find promise and renewal.
Let us find the child in each of us, the new hope,
the new light, born in us.
Then will Christmas come
Then will magic return to the world.

Reading

“THE SHORTEST DAY”
by Susan Cooper

So the shortest day came, and the year died,
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive,
And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us-Listen!!
All the long echoes sing the same delight,
This shortest day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, fest, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!

Reading

“ON ANGELS”
by Czeslaw Milosz

All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe you,
messengers.
There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seams.
Short is your stay here:
now and then at a morning hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.
They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for the humans invented themselves as well.
The voice – no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?),
girdled with the lightning.
I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:
day draws near
another one
do what you can.

Reading

Luke 2: 1-7

1. And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.
2. (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.)
3. And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.
4. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:)
5. To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.
6. And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.
7. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.

Reading

A GENTLE KIND OF MADNESS by Anthony F. Perrino

A gentle kind of madness
Comes with the end of December
A winter solstice spell, perhaps,
When people forget to remember –

The drab realities of fact,
The cherished hurt of ancient wrongs,
The lonely comfort of being deaf
To human sighs and angels’ songs.

Suddenly, they lose their minds
To hearts’ demands and beauty’s grace;
And deeds extravagant with love
Give glory to the commonplace.
Armies halt their marching,
Hatreds pause in strange regard
For the sweet and gentle madness born
when a wintry sky was starred.

Reading

“EACH NIGHT A CHILD IS BORN”
by Sophia Lyon Fahs

For so the children come
and so they have been coming.
Always in the same way they came-
Born of the seed of man and woman.

No angels herald their beginnings.
No prophets predict their future courses.
no wise man see a star to show where to find
The babe that will save humankind.
Yet each night a child is born is a holy night.
Fathers and mothers
Sitting beside their children’s cribs-
Feel glory in the sight of a new beginning.
They ask “Where and how will this new life end?
Or will it ever end?”

Each night a child is born is a holy night
A time for singing-
A time for wondering
A time for worshipping.

Reading

Luke 2: 8-14

8. And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.
9. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.
10. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
11. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.
12. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.
13. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,
14. Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

Reading

“IN THIS NIGHT”
by Dorothee Solle

In this night the stars left their habitual places
And kindled wildfire tidings
that spread faster than sound.
In this night the shepherds left their posts
To shout the new slogans
into each other’s clogged ears.
In this night the foxes left their warm burrows
and the lion spoke with deliberation,
“This is the end revolution”
In this night roses fooled the earth
And began to bloom in snow.

Reading

Luke 2:15-20

15. And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.
16. And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger.
17. And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child.
18. And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds.
19. But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.
20. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.

Reading

“THE CAMELS SPEAK”
by Lynn Ungar

Of course they never consulted us.
They were wise men, kings, star-readers,
and we merely transportation.
They simply loaded us with gifts
and turned us toward the star.
I ask you, what would a king know
of choosing presents for a child?
Had they ever even seen a baby
born to such simple folks,
so naked of pretension,
so open to the wind?
What would such a child care
for perfumes and gold? Far better
to have asked one born in the desert,
tested by wind and sand. We saw
what he would need: the gift
of perseverance, of continuing on the hard way,
making do with what there is,
living on what you have inside.
The gift of holding up under a burden,
of lifting another with grace, of kneeling
To accept the weight of what you must bear.
Our footsteps could have rocked him
with the rhythm of the road,
shown him comfort in a harsh land,
the dignity of continually moving forward.
But the wise men were not
wise enough to ask. They simply
left their trinkets and admired
the rustic view. Before you knew it
we were turned again toward home,
carrying men only half-willing
to be amazed. But never mind.
We saw the baby, felt him reach
for the bright tassels of our gear.
We desert amblers have our ways
of seeing what you chatterers must miss.
That child at heart knows something
about following a star. Our gifts are given.
Have no doubt. His life will bear
the print of who we are.

Reading

A RITUAL OF THE WINTER SOLSTICE FIRE”
Rev. Meg Barnhouse

Let us take into our hands a Christmas candle, a Solstice candle
this is a night of ancient joy and ancient fear
those who have gone before us were fearful of what lurked
outside the ring of fire, of light and warmth.
As we light this fire we ask that the fullness of its flame
protect each of us from what we fear most
and guide us towards our perfect light and joy.

May we each be encircled by the fire and warmth of love
and by the flame of our friendship with one another.
On this night, it was the ancient custom to exchange gifts
of light, symbolic of the new light of the sun.

Therefore make ready for the light!
Light of star, light of candle,
Firelight, lamplight, love light

Let us share the gift of light.

Reading

“THE WORK OF CHRISTMAS”
by Howard Thurman

When the song of angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are
home,
When shepherds are back with
their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
to find the lost,
to heal the broken,
to feed the hungry,
to release the prisoner,
to rebuild the nations,
to bring peace among the brothers,
to make music in the heart.

Extinguishing the Chalice

We extinguish this flame but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we hold in our hearts until we are together again.

Closing Words

“KNEELING IN BETHLEHEM”
by Ann Weems

It is not over, this birthing.
There are always newer skies
into which God can throw stars.
When we begin to think
that we can predict the Advent of God,
that we can box the Christ in a stable in Bethlehem,
that’s just the time that God will be born
in a place we can’t imagine and won’t believe.
Those who wait for God
watch with their hearts and not their eyes,
listening, always listening for angel words.

Most sermons during the past 19 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
December 22, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Our Annual Christmas Pageant with costumes provided for Angels, shepherds, and more as we hear and perform the famous story and sing beautiful carols.

Chalice Lighting

Through the longest night we waited for the sun to rise once more. This first morning we kindle the flame of Courage, the fourth of the five values of our congregation. May the light of Courage strengthen us as we tend to our roots in the winter darkness.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Christmas Pagent

The season of the winter solstice has been celebrated in one form or another for thousands of years. A hundred different cultures have told stories about how the birth of their gods took place at this time of year. In the Northern Hemisphere, we tell of how light, hope and life are returning to the world and to our lives. Darkness is good for rest and for root growth, but it’s harder to see where you are going and what is coming when you’re in the dark, so humans like to celebrate light. Today we will present the Christian faith story, as Christianity is one of the sources of our UU faith. It is the story of a special baby, a child of God as all babies are, a child called Jesus.

THE CHRISTMAS STORY

Here is the Christmas story. It happened a very long time ago in a land faraway. A man and a woman named Joseph and Mary had to make a journey to the city of Bethlehem, because there was a new law that said everyone had to return to the city where they were born to pay their taxes. Joseph was worried about Mary taking this trip as she was going to have a baby very soon, but Mary wanted to be with her husband for the birth of their first child. It was a long trip to Bethlehem, three full days of walking. Mary was glad when they saw the rooftops of Bethlehem in the distance. “Joseph,” she said, “let’s stay at the first inn we come to. I think our baby is almost ready to be born.” But when they got to Bethlehem, they found the little town crowded with people. They stopped at the first inn they came to and knocked on the door. But the innkeeper told them, “I’m sorry, there is no more room here.” At the next inn the innkeeper said, “We’re full. Try the place three streets over. It’s bigger.” Joseph tried another place and another place, but everywhere it was the same story: “Sorry, no room for you here.”

Finally, when it was almost night time, they saw a house at the edge of town with a light in the window. Joseph knocked at the door, and told the innkeeper, “Please help us. We need a place for the night. My wife is going to have a baby soon and I don’t think she can travel any farther.” And the innkeeper said, “There’s no room in the inn, but don’t worry, we’ll find someplace for you.” The innkeeper showed Mary and Joseph to a quiet little barn where the animals were. It was clean and warm and smelled like sweet hay.

And on that very night in that barn in Bethlehem, their little baby was born. It was a boy and they named him Jesus. Mary and Joseph wrapped him in the soft swaddling cloth and made a little bed for him in the hay.

That night, like every night, there were shepherds in the fields outside Bethlehem, watching the flocks of sheep. The shepherds were surprised and amazed by a very bright light in the sky and a strange song coming from nowhere and everywhere, all at once. It was angels and they were glorious! After sharing the joyous news, the angels went to see the baby born in a stable in the city of Bethlehem to tell him hello. What a beautiful baby!

After the angels had gone away, the shepherds remembered what they had said, that a wonderful baby had been born and that they could find him by following the brightest star in the sky. So the shepherds all said to each other, “Let’s go look for that baby.” They had no trouble finding the stable, because of the bright star, and sure enough, there inside were Mary and Joseph, watching over their little baby, Jesus. And the shepherds saw that Jesus was just stunning. “Oh! What a beautiful child!” Then the shepherds went away and told everyone what they had seen.

On this same night, three wise ones saw the bright star and said to each other, “Look at the amazing star! It must be shining for something very special!” The wise ones loaded up their camels with treasures and traveling supplies and followed the star all the way to Bethlehem. Jesus was only a few days old when the wise ones found him, but they knew he was special. “What a wonderful child. This child will be our teacher.” And they gave the baby gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

Mary and Joseph wondered for a long time about all of these things that happened when their child was born. “It’s astonishing that all these people would come to see our baby and give us presents for him. They don’t even know him.” When Jesus grew up, he was a courageous teacher, just like the wise ones said. And one of the most important things he tried to teach people was to love each other and to treat all people, even strangers, with kindness and care. And people who have tried to follow his best teachings have become better people, and have spread light through their world, which is what we are here to do.

Tonight we shared the Christmas Story about one special baby. But this baby isn’t the only special one. Every child is a treasure, is a wonder and a miracle. And as they grow up, they are always and forever a treasure, a wonder and a miracle.

Excerpted from “Each Night a Child is Born is a Holy Night”
by Sophia Lyon Fahs

For so the children come and so they have been coming.
Always in the same way they come
Born of the seed of man and woman
Each night a child is born is a holy night.
Fathers and mothers sitting beside their children’s cribs
feel the glory in the sight of a new life beginning …
Each night a child is born is a holy night, a time for singing, a time for
wondering, a time for worshipping.

Sermon

There is no Batman at the manger,” one person said later. “Probably not,” I answered, “but there is a lot we don’t know about what actually happened. Historically, we barely know Jesus lived, much less whether he was born in Bethlehem, or whether he was married to Mary Magdalene, or whether he went to India to study in the ‘lost years’ between being a twelve-year-old talking with the teachers in the temple and beginning his ministry as an adult.” I saw her eyes glaze over with this much information, and circled back to the point. “Right. Odds are against there having been a Batman.”

The baby in the manger is a soul story, if not an historical story. Soul stories are as likely to be true as stories from history, but they are perhaps a different sort of true, and you approach them differently. Before and after doing historical research, biblical study, and the kinds of work on context and language one does when looking at a story from scripture, my inclination is to interact with the story as I would with a dream.

Holding the image of the Divine as a baby in mind and heart, I invite myself to let go of my hold on the Abrahamic God, the ideas about the Divine I can live with or not, the elements of the concept of a God I believe in and those I don’t believe in. A soul story is a dream from the depths of a culture, not an individual. This is bigger than my squeamishness or my history.

When God is a baby, no one has to be afraid of God. No one has to tremble before God’s wrath. No one has to wonder what they have done wrong, how they have disappointed God. A baby God isn’t mad at you — in fact, he needs you to coo over him, hold him close, smell her head, curl her tiny fingers around your pinkie, protect him, and visit her with presents. No wonder Christmas is a well-loved holiday: We get to coo over the baby God, and feel the aching openness of a heart at its very beginning.

Among the ways to understand the Divine is as the spirit of love, the spirit of light, the spirit of life. A baby love, a baby light, a baby life would carry within itself all that it will become, like an oak within the acorn, like a mighty river that starts as a spring seeping out of the earth in a high and quiet place. The light starts as a tiny spark. A new baby love has all the possibilities in the world; it carries all the hopes and dreams. Later on, as it grows and matures, it becomes more real, and if you are skilled and lucky, it grows richer and deeper. As life starts you care for it and nurture it. You are careful with it. You delight in it. A baby is full of possibility.

What if this is a story about the soul entering the world of the body? The light of spirit and wisdom, the Divine seed planted in a human being? Some of the founders of our free religion believed that the seed of God, a tiny sliver of the light, was in each of us.

I think about the Divine seed, the wise baby, within me, containing the whole of divinity in itself, yet needing to grow. Antoine de Saint-Exupery writes in Flight to Arras: “The seed haunted by the sun never fails to find its way between the stones in the ground.” Is my soul the seed, or is it the light? I say it is both. Do we long for the Divine, or are we divine ourselves? Both. Do we search for God or is God within us? Both.

In times of confusion and doubt, I see myself able to visit my soul like the magi, the wise magicians, and kneel before it with gifts of quiet, respect, and love. I can nurture the light, the seed of God within me. I can protect it from the forces of power over, which show up next in the faith story-the forces of fear and control, the Herod power, the light-killing, love-killing power of the outer world and of my inner world as well.

I wish for each of you at this time of the rebirth of the light that the light be reborn in you, that love be cradled in your heart, that you be a seed haunted by the sun, finding your way from the nurturing darkness, past all obstacles, stubbornly and rapturously breaking through to live in the light.

Most sermons during the past 19 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
December 15, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

What can we say about miracles? Are they supernatural interferences with the laws of nature? Are they proofs of divine power? Are they everyday beauties and interactions we can see if we have an eye for miracles?

Chalice Lighting

As we await the return of the light, we kindle the flame of Compassion, the third of the five values of our congregation. May the light of Compassion brighten our own spark of the divine, guiding us to treat ourselves and others with deep love.

Call to Worship

Albert Einstein (attributed)

There are only two ways to live your life. One is a though nothing is a miracle, the other is a though everything is a miracle.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Meditation Reading

MIRACLES
Walt Whitman

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with anyone I love,
Or sleep in the bed at night with anyone I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown,
Or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.

Sermon

PERFECT MIRACLES

The choir this morning is singing about the conversation Mary had with the angel, when he brought her God’s message that she was to be the mother of the divine baby. In the faith story, this is a miracle. In my mind the bigger amazement is that in that time when women were seen almost as property, the angel, and God, waited for her to say yes. The church, as it evolved, made the miracle of Jesus’ birth a centerpiece of the faith. In most religions of that time, a miraculous birth was part of the story of their prophet, or their divinity. The Roman Christian church didn’t cement it in time, though, because the gospel of Matthew begins with the list of the ancestors of Jesus, and the lineage goes back through his father Joseph. You may not want to point this out to Uncle Hollister at Christmas unless you want to start a fight.

The Transcendentalists, our Unitarian forbears in the 19th century, were scornful of the thought that the Divine would have to show their power by miracles. Most people think of miracles as events where God disrupts the laws of nature for the purpose of helping, healing, or showing power. Ralph Waldo Emerson saw it as almost insulting of God, that the creator of this wondrous world with all of its laws and patterns, with falling rain and crashing waves, with buds that bloom and then make seeds, with the Fibonacci series, with our bodies, and most of all our minds, would have to interrupt those laws in order to show the people, whom they created, their power.

If we don’t retain our sense of wonder and awe at all of these things around us, we could get into an overly dry and linear place where we say “there is no such thing as a miracle. Everything is chemistry and physics and everything is understandable.” Or we might stubbornly hold on to a desire to live in a world where monks can levitate and make themselves warm sitting in the snow on the mountain. People flock to evangelical and Pentecostal churches where the Spirit is called down for healing and guidance. The miracles advertised by these churches are like the ones in all religions, faith stories, up to and including people being raised from the dead. My suspicion is that most of that is fake, or it’s the placebo effect (which I take to mean “great! You are healed for some reason we don,t understand. That’s wonderful. Your mind/spirit/body did that.”) Any scientist, any person working in medicine, will tell you there are factors in healing and sickness that can surprise and astonish everyone involved. There are mysteries. Most of us, if you get us in a talkative and trusting mood, will talk about something inexplicable in our lives that could be considered magic, or a miracle. The poets, the mystics of all religions remind us that there are things beyond our ken. Almost any traveler will tell you how their minds were opened, broadened.

I live in the tension between what I can believe and what I experience. I don’t believe in Reiki, but I have experienced it and it has been helpful, and when I do it for others they sometimes find it helpful. When I say I don’t believe in something what I mean is I can’t find a rational scientific way to understand it, and that it works sometimes and not other times. I don’t believe that there are Saints who can help us find things, but, as I confessed to you a couple of years ago, I sometimes pray to St. Anthony to help me find something I’ve lost. I was not raised with saints, but when he seems to agree to work with a UU, who am I to argue?

I saw a medicine man from Surinam offer to show a group of us how he could walk in fire. “Oh yeah, I thought. He’ll be like those folks who walk fast across coals, and the distribution of their weight and the speed at which they move keeps their skin from burning.” He left to meditate for fifteen minutes. Walking back to us, he said “There are many of you, so I will choose a burning log and hold it to my foot as I move around the circle.” I was disappointed, as I pictured him holding it to his foot for a second, then moving on. Then I watched him go choose a log. By which I mean he walked into the fire and stood there as he picked up first one log then another to find just the right one.

I saw a man who teaches mentalism at the New School in NYC bend keys at my father’s wedding reception. He didn’t touch the spoons himself, he asked us all to hold one of our own keys in our hand. Then we were to concentrate on them and try to make them bend with our minds. I wanted mine to bend, but it didn’t. When he asked the assembled crowd to open our hands, my Uncle Rob, a conservative Episcopalian Pathologist from Squirrel Hill and his daughter who was teaching English in China gasped in a chorus of two. Their keys, as they held them up, were nearly bent in half. We were astonished, even as Gabe the mentalist said “Please let me remind you that this is an illusion.”

I also saw a fortune teller in India run up to a friend of mine on the street, and say “your mother’s name was Ruth and your father’s name is Greg. Your mother died when you were 38. If you want to know more, come into my shop for a reading.” My friend, a Franciscan friar in his brown robe with its white cord, lost all the color in his face. “That was right! How did he know!” We were both – what’s a word – nonplussed.

My Aunt Ruth, who was with us on that trip, a medical doctor as well as a doctor of divinity, said “Of course. He was reading the Akashic record in your aura.”

What I think as a neo-Transcendentalist is that just because there is no current scientific understanding of all of those mysteries doesn’t mean they are supernatural. What a bunch of arrogance, to draw the trajectory of human scientific understanding as if we were at the pinnacle. If anyone were to give it more than a moment’s thought, they would know that we are somewhere on the trajectory, but nowhere near its peak. Here is what I think. Surprising things happen. The rules of nature as we currently understand them may be disrupted, and that just means there are things in nature we don’t yet understand.

And speaking of miracles Mary’ s Magnificat says

The Magnificat
My soul magnifies the Lord…
He hath showed might with His arm: He hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the lowly.
He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away.

May this world she dreamt of come to pass. May the heavy-footed be thrown down, their scepters broken, their hearts healed. May the proud, conceited and heavy-footed within each of us also be scattered and our hearts healed. This would be a miracle indeed.

Most sermons during the past 19 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 24, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

In time for Thanksgiving, we will talk about family dynamics, focusing on “cut-off”, when someone decides they can’t be around the rest of the family.

Chalice Lighting

We light the fire of Truth and ask to be clear, wise, and humble enough to admit when we don’t know. We kindle the warmth of community and ask for open heartedness and patience. We are grateful to the Spirit of Life and ask to learn the secret to loving and being loved.

Call to Worship

May we be reminded here of our highest asperations and inspired to bring our gifts of love and service to the altar of humanity. May we know once again we are not isolated beings but connected in mystery and miracle to the universe, to this community, and to each other.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Meditation Reading

THE LEGACY OF CARING
Thandeka

Despair is my private pain
Born from what I have failed to say
failed to do, failed to overcome.

Be still my inner self
let me rise to you, let me reach
down into your pain
and soothe you.

I turn to you to renew my life
I turn to the world, the streets of the city,
the worn tapestries of brokerage firms,
drug dealers, private estates
personal things in the bag lady’s cart
rage and pain in the faces that turn from me
afraid of their own inner worlds.

This common world I love anew;
as the life blood of generations
who refused to surrender their humanity
in an inhumane world,
courses through my veins.

From within this world
my despair is transformed to hope
and I begin anew the legacy of caring.

Sermon Notes

WHAT HAPPENS IN FAMILIES

Some of us are going to gather with family at some point during the holidays. It’s likely that there will be someone missing, maybe because now they live too far away, or they have to work, or they are with another part of the family. At some tables, though, there will be one, maybe even more, who are absent because they aren’t choosing to be part of the family right now. Family therapists call this “Family cut-off”.

I want to talk all about gratitude today, and I’ll get to it, but I do also want to talk about the reality of families.

Families.”are lovely, and they can be hard. Fault lines exist within all families. For thoseá of us in this sanctuary, religion is often a big one. Our families may hold different views, more conservative beliefs. Some of their understandings of faith say that their God demands that they attempt to convince us of those beliefs. If our beliefs aren’t correct, they have to try to save us. Hopefully they won’t do it at the holiday meal. Our faith invites us to stand up for what we believe, but we don’t have to stay in the debating society.

For those of us in this sanctuary in Texas, sometimes what shows up as a fault line is politics. It’s going to be hard to focus on the turkey instead of saying “Do you see it now?” You might be able to find common ground by saying “Boy, I sure do miss the GOP of fifteen years ago.” Common ground is usually easy. What TV shows you’re enjoying, what the kids are up to. Babies, travel. Common ground doesn’t mean that you meet in the middle, that you have to compromise your values. Common ground just means things everyone cares about.

Money is another fault line. Someone borrowed money and didn’t pay it back. Someone pays for things all the time and is starting to resent it. Some family members went into business together and it didn’t work out.

Styles of child rearing are another fault line. Some members of the family may not approve of others’ methods of discipline, or lack of discipline.

Maybe a new spouse is jealous of the children, or the ex. Maybe a spouse hates one of their in-laws, and something blows.

Pressure on any of these fault lines can cause arguments. Arguments can be survived, can pass. Arguing, in fact, is the style of communication in some families. A cut off can happen because of an argument, for sure. Or it can happen because people get exhausted with a difficult person. You put up with their behavior for so long, and then you decide “no more.” You might phase them out, little by little, or cut them off suddenly.

Some people cut themselves off from their family because the family knows their past, knows them before they started their new life, and they just don’t want to see that past in their family’s eyes. Maybe they are transitioning, and their family keeps using their old name, dead naming them in an effort to get them to be their old self. Maybe they just want a total new start for some other reason, and they don’t want reminders of their former life.

Clashes in loyalties can cause a cut off. As I said, if someone hates your new spouse, your new spouse isn’t going to want to go to the family. Then you have to choose. Cut offs can happen when someone feels they’ve been slighted. Insulted or belittled. Sometimes alcohol is involved. When someone feels slighted, an apology is in order. I’ll talk about that in a bit.

Abuse tears families apart. There is so much pain, violence, chaos. Who knew about it? Who reported it? Were they believed? Was the abuser believed instead? Who got to stay in the family?

Lastly, it happens so often that caring for a sick or elderly parent or for a sick child can Cause someone to get thrown out, or to leave the family. Especially if there is money involved. Death is a crazy time, and people can fight instead of feeling their grief. Lots of families pull together and handle these times well. More often, they try to handle them well, and they do, mostly. They have to get over the cracks that occur as the stresses multiply.

Life in families can be hard. Being cut off by family members is one of the greatest sources of pain. Especially when you’re not sure why you’re cut off. People feel shame, confusion, depression, stress, and a sinking feeling of disempowerment. What do you do?

One of the greatest sources of pain is being cut off by family members. Regardless of the reasons, people who are cut off feel shame, confusion, stress, and sometimes even depression and a feeling of being disempowered. This is particularly the case if no explanation is provided for the cutoff. Relatives may cut each other off for months, years, and sometimes even a lifetime with little to no explanation.

How do you stop the pain of being the one who is cut off? Usually, you have one big chance to make a good apology. What is that? Let’s talk about that.

A good apology is all about the other person’s feelings and they experience. It doesn’t matter what you actually said, or what you meant. What matters is what they heard. You have to be slow and wide as an ocean. Patient. Even if they are unreasonable, if you want to reconnect with them, you stand in their shoes, in their feelings.

You say something like “I’m so sorry that what I said felt awful to you. Can you help me understand how it was for you?” You don’t self-justify, you don’t let your emotions of being sorry overwhelm whatever emotions they are having. The focus is on your actions, not on the other person’s response.

For example, “I’m sorry that you felt hurt by what I said at the party last night,” is not an apology. Try instead, “I’m sorry about what I said at the party last night. It was insensitive and uncalled for.” Own your behavior and apologize for it, period.

A good apology does not have the word “but” after “I’m sorry.”

Even if you are only 23 percent at fault, you can make a good apology for your part in the break.

After a good apology, you try to take corrective action, and try not to have that happen again.

A true apology should not serve to silence another person (“I said I’m sorry at least 10 times, so why are you still bringing up the affair?”).

Nor should an apology be used as a quick way out to get yourself out of a difficult conversation or dispute.

A true apology should not be offered to make you feel better if it risks making the hurt party feel worse.

Not all apologies are welcome. Making amends may be part of your healing process, but find another way to heal if the other person doesn’t want to hear from you.

Your being right or righteous doesn’t matter. Their being unreasonable doesn’t matter. Be right or be happy.

Now, gratitude. Be grateful for the family you do have, bio family or chosen family.

There is great pain in families, and there can also be joy and strength. We are grateful when someone attempts to make a real apology, or when someone is willing to listen to ours. We can be grateful that our faith does not put the soul burden on us to convince others of our beliefs. I am grateful for this community, and I will be here Thursday afternoon to have a holiday meal with any of you who would like to come.

Most sermons during the past 19 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 10, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

“How to Comfort Someone Who is Suffering” Lessons from the recent “Lunch with Meg” study of the book of Job from the Hebrew Bible.

Chalice Lighting

We light the fire of Truth and ask to be clear, wise, and humble enough to admit when we don’t know. We kindle the warmth of community and ask for open heartedness and patience. We are grateful to the Spirit of Life and ask to learn the secret to loving and being loved.

Call to Worship

Thich Nhat Hanh

Water flows from high in the mountains.

Water runs deep in the Earth.
Miraculously, water comes to us,
and sustains all life.

Water and Sun
green these plants.

When the rain of compassion falls,
even a desert becomes an
immense, green ocean.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Meditation Reading

EARTH TEACH ME
From the Ute Indians of North America

Earth teach me stillness
as the grasses are stilled with light.

Earth teach me suffering
as old stones suffer with memory.

Earth teach me caring
as parents who secure their young.

Earth teach me courage
as the tree which stands all alone.

Earth teach me limitation
as the ant which crawls on the ground.

Earth teach me freedom
as the eagle which soars in the sky

Earth teach me resignation
as the leaves which die in the fall.

Earth teach me regeneration
as the seed which rises in the spring.

Earth teach me to forget myself
as melted snow forgets its life.

Earth teach me to remember kindness
as dry fields weep with rain.

Sermon

HOW TO COMFORT SOMEONE WHO IS SUFFERING

I’m going to talk about being present with someone who is suffering, and we’re going to talk about the sufferings of Job, from the oldest book in the Hebrew Scriptures, and we’re going to talk a little about how the way Christians have read the book of Job shapes their thinking about Jesus’ suffering, and how all of that has shaped the way people around the world talk to those who are suffering. So that’s the map for today. Job to Jesus to how to comfort (and how NOT to comfort) people who are suffering.

Let me start by reminding you of the plot of this book, which is, as I said, the oldest one, and it deals with the oldest question of humanity: why do people suffer bad things?

The opening scene is in the heavenly realms, where Satan strolls in to where God is watching his good man Job. Job is the richest man in the East, he has ten sons and daughters, sheep, cattle, health and regular family parties. “Look at that man,” says God. “He loves me and blesses me.”

“Well, of course he does,” says Satan, (whose name translates to “The Accuser,” like the prosecutor in a trial. “He’s got everything! Just take all that goodness away and he won’t love you so much.” So God does that. All the children killed, all the crops ruined, the cattle stolen, and his health gone. All the way gone.

Then for the next 30 chapters, Job wrestles, struggles, strives with God over this completely undeserved suffering. Three or four of his friends come to comfort him. For the first week, they sit in respectful silence while Job cries out to God that he is a good man, and he doesn’t deserve any of this. That is a good way to be a comforter. To sit with someone in respectful silence, not defining their suffering for them, not comparing their suffering to others ( Hey, it could be worse,) not trying to explain it or minimize it.

Then they start talking. They say all the things that people say to folks who are in pain and loss.

“No one’s really good, you probably did something you’re being punished for.” “Maybe you are good, but maybe your children did bad things.”

“Maybe you are being tested, to see if your faith in God is strong enough.” “Life is like a school, and there are lessons we must learn.”

They skipped the one I’ve heard, which is “I wonder why you wanted to attract this kind of suffering into your life?”

They did not talk of past lives and karma, which is how some people deal with suffering.

You may have heard the phrase “the patience of Job,” but he wasn’t that patient. He yelled at God, questioned God, defended himself and demanded an in-person answer to his question of why this was happening to him when he was such a good person.

For thirty some chapters the argument rages, as the comforters insist he must know he deserves this in some way and he holds his ground. They suggest that his very self-defense and protestations of righteousness are themselves sinful, and that his questioning and anger at God are sinful too. The words of Job’s comforters could be said from any Jewish or Christian pulpit in the world. Their poetry is beautiful. Then, in chapter 39, God comes and says to the comforters “Who are you who obscure my plans with words without knowledge?…… where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand, who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know….” The voice goes on to say things like “are you friends with the water-spurting whale? Do you know how to open the storehouses of the snow?

God lays out credentials as the creator of all things, but he doesn’t answer Job’s question. Job gets ten new children, and his cattle are replaced. He gets his health back. But there is never any admission that what happened to him was the result of God trying to prove that he could take all Job’s good things away and Job wouldn’t abandon God. Which he did not. He yelled and demanded, but he never turned his back. God doesn’t look that good in this old book. Its message should be that yelling and demanding answers is a faithful act, and that no one has the answer to why bad things happen. We’re. All. Wrong.

People can’t live with that, though, so they talk about Job’s patient suffering. Christians talk the same way about Jesus, who really was killed by the military and religious leaders of an empire, but it’s a lot better for the empires of this world to say he was killed by his father, who needed blood in order to forgive sins. This makes the violence an intimate violence instead of state violence. They say Jesus went willingly to be tortured and killed because it was God’s will. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist, says Jesus was God’s answer to Job, along the lines of “I made you suffer for no good reason, so here, I’ll come suffer too. You were righteous, I’m righteous, and we both suffer.” This is not widely taught.

What is widely taught is that God has a reason, and that we should suffer whatever we suffer with patience and humility. This translates, unfortunately, to intimate violence within families being given an almost religious meaning. Suffer patiently and God will reward you. You will be like Job and Jesus. What is widely taught in Christianity around the world is that the father did violence to his child to pay for your badness. Submission to the violence, obedience to the situation is seen as love, is held up as virtue. Fathers have their reasons.

“What happens when violent realities are transubstantiated into spiritual teachings? “You’ve heard it or said it yourself. A mother loses her son to suicide. In an effort to comfort her you say, ‘God has a purpose in this. He sends pain to make us strong. You may not feel it now, but you will learn to give thanks for this experience, because through it, God will strengthen your faith.’ “These words take the grieving mother away from the reality of her lost child. Tragedy is renamed a spiritual trial, designed by God for the mother’s edification. God becomes the sender of torture, who injures us then comforts us — a perverse love.”

Rita Nakashima Brock, Proverbs of Ashes

And in personalizing this violence, the role of the state and its violence is smoothed out and hidden, where, if it were help up, Christianity might have always taught that resisting the violence of the state was an act of faith and love for the world and its people.

How do we comfort those who suffer? Presence. That’s the biggest thing. Be there. Do something useful if they need it done. Listen to them talk if they want to. Don’t explain their suffering, or ask them what they are learning from this lesson, or compare it to something that happened to you. Everyone is living their own life, and even if the exact same thing happened to you, their experience of it will be different from yours.

Further notes

From its language, the oldest book in the Canon. The story of an epic battle, not between God and Satan, but a battle of a person within themselves, theologically, wanting to love God and yet haven’t gotten attacked at all as he expected God to act.

C.S. Lewis puts his wages on a God who holds goodness and pain in a paradox. The Problem of Pain demonstrates a more distant, less emotional reaction to humanity’s situation, while A Grief Observed reads like a psalm of lament from within pain itself. The two texts compliment one another by identifying parts of our struggle, the intellectual and physical difficulty life will bring, and how pain can bend us toward a loving God if we let it.

The Problem

From the loss of his mother at a young age to the untimely death of his wife Joy, Lewis experienced pain as God’s megaphone, as he says, to rouse a deaf world. Pain leads us somewhere – to something. That something is a life of faith. Just as there is importance placed in a strong rope when you’re dangling from a precipice, faith is the only way to pull ourselves out from a life of desperation, a life of anxiety and need, a life of doubt and insecurity. But how can faith be present if we don’t realize we need something beyond our own person? How do we believe unless we recognize how frail our efforts have become to maintain everything just so?

Lewis says that we must understand our fallenness. He interprets the fall of humanity not only as an opportunity for evil to thrive, but also the choice to ignore the purpose of pain. Christianity creates the problem of pain because it provides hope for righteousness and love. Without the revelation that God loves us, the painful world would make sense. Pain would have no cause. Let’s face it: it’s much easier to dismiss God or to regard him only as an airman regards his parachute, as Lewis says, there only if he needs it but he hopes he never does. When we run headlong into God, Lewis contends that pain is demanded. Why? “How impossible it is to enact the surrender of the self by doing what we like,” he says. The truth is that at the heart of God’s love is a suffering Messiah and followers who take up crosses and follow in like fashion.

“If I knew any way of escape I would crawl through sewers to find it,” Lewis writes. “I am not arguing that pain is not painful. Pain hurts. That is what the word means. I am only trying to show that the old Christian doctrine of being made “perfect through suffering” is not incredible. To prove it palatable is beyond my design.”

PROVERBS OF ASHES

I counsel some of the religious kids, and the more attached they are to traditional ideas about Jesus, the more likely they are to think of their abuse as ‘good’ for them, as a trial designed for a reason, as pain that makes them like Jesus. They are often in denial about the amount of pain they live with. Violence denies presence and suffocates spirit. Violence robs us of knowledge of life and its intrinsic value; it steals our awareness of beauty, of complexity, of our bodies. Violence ignores vulnerability, dependence and interdependence. A person who acts violently disregards self and other as distinct, obliterating the spaces in which spirit breathes. We can resist and redress violence by acting for justice and by being present: present to one another, present to beauty, present to the fire at the heart of things, the spirit that gives breath to life.

We show how theological claims about Jesus’ death have become proverbs of ashes. We turn our faces toward a different theology.

“Pat,” I said, “the only way you could have helped Anola more is if the whole Christian tradition taught something other than self-sacrificing love. If it didn’t preach that to be like Jesus we have to give up our lives in faithful obedience to the will of God.”

“This is how I feel about the church. I love the church. It’s my home and has been my family’s home for generations. And I love the liturgy in all its beauty. At the same time, I feel something is dreadfully wrong. When I preside at the Eucharist, am I not reenacting images and ideas that tell people God wants them to sacrifice their lives? Am I right to do this? Does this give them life? Now when I pray in the church before the congregation arrives, I ask God to forgive me for performing the Eucharistic rite.”

P. 21 went to my priest twenty years ago. I’ve been trying to follow his advice. The priest said I should rejoice in my sufferings because they bring me closer to Jesus. He said, ‘Jesus suffered because he loved us.’ He said, ‘If you love Jesus, accept the beatings and bear them gladly, as Jesus bore the cross.’ I’ve tried, but I’m not sure anymore. My husband is turning on the kids now. Tell me, is what the priest told me true?” Lucia’s deep black eyes searched my hazel ones. I wanted to look away, but couldn’t. I wanted to speak, but my mouth wouldn’t work. It felt stuffed with cotton. I couldn’t get the words to form. I was a liberal Christian. I didn’t believe God demanded obedience or that Jesus’ death on the cross brought about our salvation. I hadn’t forgotten Anola Reed, though I thought of my theology as far from hers. But just that past Sunday I had preached a sermon on the willingness of love to suffer. I preached that Jesus’ life revealed the nature of love and that love would save us. I’d said that love bears all things. Never breaks relationship. Keeps ties of connection to others even when they hurt you. Places the needs of the other before concern for the self. In the stillness of that moment, I could see in Lucia’s eyes that she knew the answer to her question, just as I did. If I answered Lucia’s question truthfully, I would have to rethink my theology. More than that, I would have to face choices I was making in my own life. After a long pause, I found my voice. “It isn’t true,” I said to her. “God does not want you to accept being beaten by your husband. God wants you to have your life, not to give it up. God wants you to protect your life and your children’s lives.”

I could see that when theology presents Jesus’ death as God’s sacrifice of his beloved child for the sake of the world, it teaches that the highest love is sacrifice. To make sacrifice or to be sacrificed is virtuous and redemptive. Do we really believe that God is appeased by cruelty, and wants nothing more than our obedience? It becomes imperative that we ask this question when we examine how theology sanctions human cruelty. “If God is imagined as a fatherly torturer, earthly parents are also justified, perhaps even required, to teach through violence. Children are instructed to understand their submission to pain as a form of love. Behind closed doors, in our own community, spouses and children are battered by abusers who justify their actions as necessary, loving discipline. ‘I only hit her because I love her.’ ‘I’m doing this for your own good.’ The child or the spouse who believes that obedience is what God wants may put up with physical or sexual abuse in an effort to be a good Christian. “Theology that defines virtue as obedience to God suppresses the virtue of revolt. A woman being battered by her husband will be counseled to be obedient, as Jesus was to God. After all, Eve brought sin into the world by her disobedience. A good woman submits to her husband as he submits to God.

“When Jesus’ crucifixion serves as a metaphor for spiritual processes of transformation, or a mystical illumination of God’s abiding presence, violence is justified as sacred. In this mode, the infliction of pain can be re-inscribed as a holy action. Violence can be justified as a disciplining of the spirit.

But Nelle took a different tack. She spoke about the power of listening. She said there is a quality of listening that is possible among a circle of human beings, who by their attentiveness to one another create a space in which each person is able to give voice to the truth of her life.

I was haunted by Sylvia’s conviction that God was letting her be hurt, the passivity and resignation it elicited from her. I heard such ideas from youth struggling with the violence in their lives, pain inflicted by the deliberate cruelty of their parents or others they loved. Believing in the benevolent protection of a powerful God, they interpreted violence as divine intent, pain for their own good. And the Christian tradition reinforced this impulse by upholding Jesus as a son who was willing to undergo horrible violence out of love for his father, in obedience to his father’s will.

When the Christian tradition represents Jesus’ death as foreordained by God, as necessary to the divine plan for salvation, and as obediently accepted by Jesus the Son out of love for God the Father, God is made into a child abuser or a bystander to violence against his own child. The seal of abuse is placed on their relationship when they are made into a unity of being. If the two are one, Jesus can be selfless, can give himself totally to God, a willing lamb to slaughter. I thought of this system as cosmic child abuse.

Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much comfort, how much soul and transcendence there might be in a well-made taco and a cold bottle of beer are called at certain moments to comfort people who are enduring some trauma.

Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

Many of us don’t know how to react in such situations, but others do. In the first place, they just show up. They provide a ministry of presence. Next, they don’t compare. The sensitive person understands that each person’s ordeal is unique and should not be compared to anyone else’s. Next, they do the practical things–making lunch, dusting the room, washing the towels. Finally, they don’t try to minimize what is going on. They don’t attempt to reassure with false, saccharine sentiments. They don’t say that the pain is all for the best. They don’t search for silver linings. They do what wise souls do in the presence of tragedy and trauma. They practice a passive activism. They don’t bustle about trying to solve something that cannot be solved. The sensitive person grants the sufferer the dignity of her own process. She lets the sufferer define the meaning of what is going on. She just sits simply through the nights of pain and darkness, being practical, human, simple, and direct.

David Brooks, The Road to Character Tags: comfort, sensitive, sensitivity

Most sermons during the past 19 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 3, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

“Jedediah Morse and the Battle for Harvard.” Another juicy slice of Unitarian history. What about this story from the 19th century might still be affecting Unitarians and Universalism?

Chalice Lighting

We light the fire of Truth and ask to be clear, wise, and humble enough to admit when we don’t know. We kindle the warmth of community and ask for open heartedness and patience. We are grateful to the Spirit of Life and ask to learn the secret to loving and being loved.

Call to Worship

A PERSON WILL WORSHIP SOMETHING
Ralph Waldo Emmerson

A person will worship something have no doubt about that.

We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts-but it will out.

That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and character.

Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Meditation Reading

IT MATTERS WHAT WE BELIEVE
Sophia Lyon Fahs

Some beliefs are like walled gardens. They encourage exclusiveness, and the feeling of being especially privileged.

Other beliefs are expansive and lead the way into wider and deeper sympathies.

Some beliefs are like shadows, clouding children’s days with fears of unknown calamities.

Other beliefs are like sunshine, blessing children with the warmth of happiness.

Some beliefs are divisive, separating the saved from the unsaved, friends from enemies.

Other beliefs are bonds in a world community, where sincere differences beautify the pattern.

Some beliefs are like blinders, shutting off the power to choose one’s own direction.

Other beliefs are like gateways opening wide vistas for exploration.

Some beliefs weaken a person’s selfhood. They blight the growth of resourcefulness.

Other beliefs nurture self confidence and enrich the feeling of personal worth.

Some beliefs are rigid, like the body of death, impotent in a changing world.

Other beliefs are pliable, like the young sapling, ever growing with the upward thrust of life.

Sermon

“JEDEDIAH MORSE AND THE BATTLE FOR HARVARD”

The opening scene in the birth of American Unitarianism as an organized denomination took place in 1805 in the halls of Harvard University.

I love reading church history. We need a Donimick Dunn or Emily Jane Fox to write about it for Vanity Fair magazine. There is intrigue and the clash of personalities, vanity and ambition, integrity and the clear sense that what is obvious to one group seems dangerously misguided to another.

In 1803 the man who had been Hollis Professor of Divinity died, leaving the post open. Ministers were trained by the Divinity professor. There was no Divinity School before this. Ministers were trained during their college years. Many went on for further study in Germany. At Harvard, the Hollis Professor of Divinity had been a moderate Calvinist. If it strikes you that you aren’t completely clear any more about what Calvinism is, I’m about to remind you. John Calvin, in the 1550’s, revived theological ideas of Augustine of Hippo, who was an Ethiopian Bishop of the Christian church in the early 400’s.

“TULIP” is the mnemonic device by which students remember the Calvinist precepts:

• T Total depravity of human nature
• U Unconditional election of the saints
• L Limited atonement
• I Irresistible grace of God
• P Perseverance of the saints

Total depravity of human nature: the belief that humans are basically bent, and we choose to do destructive things more easily than we choose to do good. No amount of peace education will take the warring out of us, no amount of coddling or challenging in school or at home will take the crime and stupidity out. Mostly we are inclined to choose selfishly, and it is mainly the fear of punishment that keeps us between the lines. This has been the most difficult of my Presbyterian beliefs to give up. I find it a moderately cheerful and relaxing doctrine. If we’re bent to the extent that it’s easier to choose to do destructive things than creative and live-giving things, we’re pretty amazing whether or not we’ve built hospitals or cured cancer. We’re doing well to have gone this long without knocking over a gas station, we’re doing amazingly well to be pretty good people most of the time. Now I try to believe in the basic goodness of people, but it opens one up to more episodes of disappointment.

Unconditional election of the saints: God, for his glory, chose some from the beginning of time to be saved. It follows logically that there are some who are chosen to be damned to eternal punishment. This is the “double predestination” that they somewhat sheepishly teach in Calvinist seminaries. Predestination does NOT mean that everything is foreordained by God, fated, only that the end of things is foreordained. Free will can operate in-between. Your end is the only thing that is predestined. Over the centuries, many Christians shrank from the harshness of this doctrine. After Augustine proposed it in the 5th century, a church council met to declare it “anathema” which is Greek for really really icky and not true.

Limited atonement: Also following logically from the election of some to be saved: that Jesus died, then for those who are chosen to be saved, and NOT for those who weren’t chosen.

“Irresistible grace of God,” If God chooses you to be among the elect, the saved, you will be, because God’s will is always done. If you get saved, it is because you were one of the ones chosen. Don’t worry that you are getting saved all for nought, acting right even though you are doomed to damnation. If you are saved, you are one of the elect. If you refuse to believe, if you don’t act right, if you don’t believe, it is because God’s grace isn’t reaching out to you. If it were reaching out to you, you would “get it.” Since you don’t get it, it’s because, sadly, God doesn’t care whether you get it or not.

Perseverance of the saints: Once you’re saved, you’re always saved. You may struggle, but God will not let you go.

That is traditional Calvinism. There were a hundred years in New England where that was the only brand of Christianity taught by the churches. That is what counted as orthodoxy, right belief. The society in New England was fairly homogeneous. All the Quakers were in Pennsylvania. The Baptists were in Rhode Island. There were Catholics, some Quakers, some Baptists, but most of the citizens of Massachusetts were Congregational Calvinist.

Every town had a church whose minister was paid with tax money. This was called the Standing Order, and it had been in effect since the Puritans. Attacked now and then as unfair, it had gone through several versions. By 1805, ministers were paid with tax dollars only if their church didn’t make its budget, and if you were a Quaker, a Baptist or a Catholic, you didn’t have to pay the tax. The Congregational ministers, by this time, were varied in their theology. Some were strict Calvinists, others were more moderate Calvinists. Some had become Liberals. Liberals did not believe or preach the doctrines of Calvinism. Some of them did not believe that humans were born in Sin. They had begun to believe that God had created human beings basically good. They did not see God as demanding blood to forgive sins. Jesus was a savior who saves by his teachings, and by awakening the mind and heart, not by his death on the cross. William Ellery Channing, likened the doctrine of the crucifixion as to having a gallows at the center of the Universe, and that the spirit of such a god, “whose very acts of pardon were written in such blood, was terror, not love.

Enter the Bad Guy. There was a Calvinist named Jedediah Morse, who had moved to Massachusetts. He was amazed that the Liberals and Calvinists got along together there so well. He did not approve of this ease, and felt that ministers should be asked to take a stand, to be counted and categorized by where they stood on the TULIP principles. Morse began hinting that the Liberals were tainted with the “Unitarianism that was being preached in England.” Those Unitarians, most notably Joseph Priestly, a scientist and minister whose most well-known discovery was Oxygen, were preaching that Jesus was just a man, possessing no divinity at all. Dr. Morse was troubled that the lack of controversy came from differences not being voiced or pointed out. People were being too nice, and it was getting in the way of knowing who was who. Who could be trusted to preach correct doctrine and who could not.

Before the controversy of 1805, most Liberal preachers doubting Calvinist doctrines did not preach these Liberal thoughts from the pulpit. To avoid controversy and keep peace in the congregations, they did what many Liberal preachers do today. They just preached around the Calvinist doctrines, choosing to preach instead about social responsibility, ethical behavior, and the loving kindness of God. The ministers in Massachusetts, as a rule, got along peacefully and well together. At the ministerial association meetings, they avoided speaking of their Liberal beliefs. No one really stood up to be categorized as strict, moderate or liberal. The ministers in the association were in the habit of pulpit exchanges. A minister would be in his own pulpit about half the time. The other half he would preach at other churches. This provided relief to the congregations, who got to hear other voices and other points of view. It also provided relief to the ministers, who had to write fewer sermons, since they could repeat their better ones when they visited another pulpit. The Standing Order of tax-supported worship and the pulpit exchanges were what gave what happened at Harvard the importance it had.

The Hollis professor who died and left his Chair vacant was a moderate and well respected Calvinist. These things were written about him at the time: “In him, never were orthodoxy and charity more closely aligned. and “He was desirous of correcting his own errors, and was willing that others should enjoy their sentiments. “That is the kind of man who can get along with both liberals and conservatives. Those people are hard to find, like a treasure when you come across them”

Here’s where academic politics come into the story. The President of Harvard procrastinated in suggesting a candidate because the most obvious candidate was a Liberal Boston minister named Henry Ware, and the President was a Calvinist. He didn’t want the controversy. The President just never brought up the subject of a replacement at meetings of the Harvard Corporation, and for two years the post was left vacant. By 1805, a candidate had to be found soon. The Boston papers were making trouble, even intimating that the money in the endowment for the Hollis fellowship was being used for purposes other than that for which it was given. Then that President exited the fray by dying.

A professor. named Eliphalet Pearson took over the acting Presidency, and was widely understood to want the permanent job very badly. In the writing of people who knew him at the time, he was characterized as an “ultra-Liberal before the President’s death, and a staunch Calvinist after. Hm. Why the switch? Some thought he was playing a part for political expediency. He was disliked by the students as a bully, and he tended to alienate even those who agreed with him.

Eliphalet Pearson and five other men made up the Corporation that governed the university. There was one other staunch Calvinist, two liberals, and two moderates. One of those was Judge Oliver Wendell, a liberal whose daughter was married to the conservative Calvinist Abel Holmes. (She was the mother of Oliver Wendell Holmes.) The selection process began with each man in the Corporation writing down two names. The two Calvinists each wrote down names of two Calvinist candidates, the two Liberals each wrote down the names of two Liberal candidates, and the two Moderates each wrote down the names of one Calvinist candidate and one Liberal candidate. Within a few weeks the choice was narrowed to two:

Jesse Appleton (a moderate Calvinist) and Henry Ware. The meetings were sour due to the personality clash between Eliphalet Pearson and Dr. John Eliot, a Liberal minister. It was said that Eliphalet Pearson’s personal attacks on Eliot were school boyish and mean.

Finally Judge Wendell proposed a compromise. How about Appleton for professor and Ware for President? No, they answered. Henry Ware was not suited for the position of President. How about Appleton for President and Ware for professor? NO from John Eliot, who was concerned that Jesse Appleton had an unpleasant and dissonant voice, unsuited to conducting public worship for the community, which as President he would have had to do. Appleton could have won in spite of Eliot’s “no vote if Eliphalet Pearson, wanting the presidency for himself, had not voted against the compromise. Judge Wendell’s compromise failed. Finally, several months later, Henry Ware was elected by a margin of one vote. There was no candidate settled on for President.

The appointment then had to be okayed by the Board of Overseers of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, made up of ministers and politicians. The Calvinists were understandably distressed that the professor of Divinity would not be orthodox. All the ministers that would come out of Harvard now would be taught by a a man they all thought of as a Unitarian.

The only point open for discussion was whether Ware fit the stipulations of the Hollis grant. Dr. Jedediah Morse, who was an ally of Eliphalet Pearson, saw this as an opportunity to show the people how sneaky and deceitful the Liberals were, not wanting to declare outright their position. Here was a chance to cross-examine and bring the Unitarianism to light. With 45 of the 47 members of the Board present, he attacked. What procedure had the Corporation followed to satisfy itself that Ware’s views were in accordance with the terms of Thomas Hollis’s gift. Hollis had written that the professor should be “a man of solid learning in divinity, of sound and orthodox principles. ORTHODOX, said Morse. SEE? This man doesn’t fit! He will not adhere to the Calvinist Westminster Confession. Hollis was not an Arminian (someone who believes that everyone can be saved) or a Unitarian, and he would NEVER have countenanced the election of a man who had departed from sound doctrine. The Liberals’ position was that Hollis, as a Baptist, had already departed from the Westminster Confession, whose doctrines the Baptists did not believe. Baptists believed in Jesus death being for everyone. Hollis himself had written that the only article of belief to be required of his professor should be that “the Bible was the only and most perfect rule for faith and practice, and that it should be interpreted “according to the best light that God shall give him. The election of Ware was no breach of trust, as Morse and Pearson were accusing, but was in keeping with Hollis’s intent. Ware was elected.

Within a matter of weeks, Morse had written and published a pamphlet complaining about the election of Ware. Then, months later, another Liberal was chosen for President. Eliphalet Pearson resigned and went to be head of Phillips Academy. Morse and Pearson founded Andover Theological Seminary, now closed, and within three years, in response, Harvard Divinity School was founded.

The ministers in the Standing Order, at Morse’s urging, started organizing. Trinitarian orthodox congregations made their own associations, refusing to exchange pulpits with liberals, accusing them of “Unitarianism.” Jedediah Morse in 1815, published a pamphlet called “American Unitarianism”, accusing the liberals of, well, believing what they actually did believe. The Standing Order broke down as the Congregational churches split into Orthodox Trinitarian and Liberal churches. The liberals increasingly felt pressure to defend themselves against charges of English Unitarianism, since they held a higher view of Jesus as savior than the English Unitarians. “Unitarian did, however describe their view of the Oneness of God, and finally in 1819, in Baltimore, William Ellery Chaning preached the sermon that was the manifesto of American Unitarianism. In it he asked why God would created us with free will and then punish us for using it. Why he, as a supposedly loving father, would choose some of his children to go to eternal damnation. Weren’t his listeners all better parents than that? Why should we be better parents than God?

Our task from the beginning has been to define ourselves other than as against Calvinism. We still struggle with that. Many UU’s are most comfortable saying what we DON’T believe. At the beginning of our movement, we were pushed into declaring ourselves, “outed” by the attacks of the opposition. We still have a legacy of hiding, not wanting to make a fuss, not wanting to be right out there with our faith.

Unitarian means we believe in the unity of God, that there is only one. Or, as some agnostic UU’s put it, “at MOST one God, and Universalist, meaning we believe everyone is saved. No one dies into eternal damnation. This, to me, is truly good news, and I would like to join William Ellery Channing in his passion to proclaim that truly good news.

Most sermons during the past 19 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 27, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

This is a child friendly service. We bring photographs of those we would like to claim as our ancestors and teachers.

Chalice Lighting

This is our circle of chalice light,
where peace and love are burning bright.
A place of wonder, a place for fun,
Welcome, Welcome, Everyone!

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Most sermons during the past 19 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 13, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

With the help of some folks at the church with Judaism in their heritage, we will have a traditional “booth” in the courtyard that reminds us of the story about how the people were protected on their long journey through the desert. What protects us on our journey?

Lighting the Chalice

May the flame we now kindle light the path back to our center, back to that place of belonging again to our deepest self. And may our chalice remind us that we are held and welcomed whole, without the need to hide a single piece or part of who we are.

Call to Worship

John O’Donohue

You travel certainly, in every sense of the word. But you take with you everything that you have been, just as the landscape stores up its own past. Because you were once at home somewhere, you are never an alien anywhere.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Meditation Reading

A NEW HEART
Chaim Stern

Who can say: I have purified my heart, and I am free from sin?

There are none on earth so righteous that they never sin.

Cast away all the evil you have done, and get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit.

A new heart will I give you, a new spirit put within you. I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh, and give you a heart that feels.

For thus says the Eternal God: I, Myself, will search for My sheep, and seek them out.

As a shepherd seeks them out when any of the flock go astray, so will I seek out My sheep.

I will put My spirit within you, and teach you to live by My laws.

For I desire love and not sacrifices, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.

Sermon

SUKKOT Protection in the Desert

Tonight at sundown those among and around us who are of Jewish heritage begin to celebrate Sukkot, a festival of returning to temporary shelter to remind yourself of how you were protected in times of being lost, in times of wandering, of transition. Those whose holiday this is to celebrate build a hut, a sukkah outside. It has to have three walls and a roof made of natural materials that used to be growing in the ground. You have to be able to see the stars through it, so you have some shade and some openness to the sun and rain. It’s a temporary shelter. Obviously not ideal. Some of our congregation with ties to the Jewish tradition have made a Sukkah out in the courtyard. The sukkah is decorated with fruits and vegetables. The family eats meals out there for seven days.

The layers of symbolism range from “this is the kind of hut the harvest workers used out in the field, so they didn’t have to go all the way home when night felL” To “this is the kind of thing we built in the desert while we were wandering for 40 years.”

Rosh Hashannah, the birthday of the world, comes first. Then, on the tenth day of the new year, comes Yom Kippur, a day of fasting and confession.

Sukkot always comes 5 days after Yom Kippur, when the community has fasted for a day and thought about wrongs they’ve done. They’ve made an apology where it’s needed.

Maybe there is a connection. When you strip yourself out of your routine, let something else drive other than your ego, doing ritual with your people, when you confess, face your wrongs, when you do a “searching and fearless moral inventory,” you can start again, in a way. You might want a ritual that reminds you of how your people started. Maybe the holiday comes right after Yom Kippur because you have fasted and stepped out of the regular day to day, and maybe that gives you a lightness of being. This festival of Sukkot embodies this lightness of being, this acknowledgement that you only need a few things.

It can also remind you that your body is a tiny fragile shelter. Sometimes you are temporarily strong. Other times you get sick, and we all get old.

The Jews are reminded by these sukkot that they were at one time a wandering people, looking for their place to settle and grow things. They were migrants. What they had they carried with them. They didn’t belong back in Egypt where they had been enslaved. They didn’t have a land of their own (although their faith story says God had promised them a land, but it already had people on it, and they killed some of those people and took the land. This is a whole other sermon) If you remind yourself of the story of your people, that leads to a sense that you don’t belong to one place, but rather you belong to the people with this story.

Many of our families have stories about the family: the story of when we came over through Ellis Island. The story that this is the land we’ve been on and fought for for the past 600 years, remember when our great grandparents owned all of that over there. Remember when the dust blew and the whole family got in the old car and moved to Bakersfield, and they called us Okies even though we were from Arkansas? Remember our grandfather and his three sisters who had a band that played at all the dance halls. Unitarians have stories of our people too. Remember when a minister in SF did a civil union between two men in 1957. Remember when our press, Beacon Press, at great risk, published the Pentagon Papers. Remember John Quincy Adams and John C Calhoun, both Unitarians but with bitter political differences, built All Souls Unitarian Church in DC ? Remember Elliot Richardson, the AG who refused to fire Archibald Cox, the Watergate Prosecutor, was a Unitarian Universalist. We tell the stories of our people and feel those stories resonate within our spirits.

For the Jews, building the Sukkah outdoors, near your sturdy house or apartment, eating meals out there for 7 days, interrupts your daily routine enough to invite thoughts like “What is enough? What do we really need in life? How grateful I am for the sturdy walls where I can have books and be dry and cool or warm and watch TV, but life at its most basic can still exist, and it is the people who are in the sukkah with you who are part of your heart, you support and sustain one another, just eating outside together, that is enough.

The sukkah reminds us of how fragile our shelter, our bodies, our life plans, our mores and institutions are, and how vulnerable others may be, and what it feels like to be vulnerable. Knowing how little you need can help you be brave, to stand up, even though it means you might get fired in the Saturday Night massacre, to resign, even though it means there might be a mean tweet coming your way. Knowing the fragility of shelter, having just a kind and gentle reminder of what people have lived with and without, makes you strong in the world. That is what makes a mighty spirit.

Let’s turn it around, too. Maybe we are meant to be shelter for one another when we’re see our siblings wandering. This church is now being a shelter for our guest in Sanctuary. Maybe this week your heart, your voice, your stories have been a shelter for someone who is lost. Maybe at a time when you were lost, you felt a protection come from the Mystery, by whatever name you call it. This is a day to be grateful for the protections and the shelter in our lives, and to look for ways to be shelter for one another.

Dr. Brene Brown says people who have the deepest sense of true belonging are those who also have the courage to stand alone when called to do that. They are willing to maintain their integrity and risk disconnection in order to stand up for what they believe in.

Most sermons during the past 19 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 6, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

A Juicy Slice of Unitarian History: Transcendentalism & the Concord ‘Genius Cluster’ We sometimes forget that our forebears in this faith were human. Thoreau, Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne. How were they all in relationship to one another?

Chalice Lighting

We light the fire of Truth and ask to be clear, wise, and humble enough to admit when we don’t know. We kindle the warmth of community and ask for open heartedness and patience. We are grateful to the Spirit of Life and ask to learn the secret to loving and being loved.

Call to Worship
Black Elk

That which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that its center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Reading

THE OVERSOUL
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let us learn the revelation of all nature and thought; that the Highest dwells within us, that the sources of nature are in our own minds.

As there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so there is no bar or wall in the soul where we, the effect, cease, and God, the cause, begins.

I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.

There is deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is accessible to us.

Every moment when the individual feels invaded by it is memorable.

It comes to the lowly and simple; it comes to whosoever will put off what is foreign and proud; it comes as insight; it comes as serenity and grandeur.

The soul’s health consists in the fullness of its reception.

For ever and ever the influx of this better and more universal self is new and unsearchable.

Within us is the soul of the whole; the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One.

When it breaks through our intelect, it is genius; when it breathes through our will, it is virtue. when it flows through our affections, it is love.

Sermon

Sometimes there is a cluster of people who make things happen, who influence one another, build on one another, challenge and inspire and complement one another until each is greater than they could have been alone. In the eighteen thirties, forties and fifties such a group of people lived in Concord MA. It could not have happened without Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Emerson was born to a Unitarian minister and his wife in Boston MA in 1803, as Beethoven was writing the Eroica Symphony, as Napoleon was considering invading England, and the Louisiana Purchase is made, doubling the size of the United States. Emerson’s father died when he was almost eight, and his mother struggled to make ends meet. His aunt Mary Moody Emerson became the one who paid for Waldo’s education at the Boston Latin School, then Harvard, where his academic career was undistinguished. He was class poet his senior year, but only after six others had turned down the offer. Mary Moody is said to have been a curmudgeon, having the questionable gift of being able to say more unpleasant things in half an hour than anyone else living.

Waldo became a Unitarian minister and fell in love with a delicate young woman named Ellen Tucker. They married as soon as she turned eighteen. She was from a wealthy family, and had a great deal of money coming to her when she turned twenty-one. Unfortunately she died before that birthday, leaving Emerson heartbroken, crazed with grief. He visited her grave often, even opening her casket a year after she died because he missed her so terribly. His belief in God began to fall apart, or it began to evolve, from my perspective. The members of his congregation were not so supportive of these changes.

Then there was the obscure little lawsuit that changed everything Waldo was a young man, grieving over his beloved wife. Emerson’s brother-in-law felt he should not get the money that had been coming to Ellen, but an angry Waldo sued the family and was granted the inheritance. This money made all the difference. The money made all the difference for him. It made all the difference for Thoreau. It made the difference for the Alcott family and for many men and women escaping from being enslaved in the South. Interest on the money granted to him by the courts paid him as much per year as he was making as a minister.

He finally quit the church because he couldn’t stand the ceremony of communion any more. People should pay attention to living their principles during the week instead of focusing on having communion on the weekend to make everything okay. He began writing and lecturing, making his living through his stirring speaking style, which drew enthusiastic crowds.

He was asked to give the graduation address at Harvard, where a class of ministers was graduating, and he came down so hard on the local churches, talking about how dull they were, how rule-bound, how frozen and intellectual their ministers’ sermons that it was impossible for their people to get nourishment for their souls at church. Harvard did not appreciate the alternative vision he painted of finding the divine in nature, in the oneness of all things, of following your inner wisdom, respecting the knowledge that comes fresh to you from your experience rather than quoting people whose wisdom may have been good for their own times but might have nothing to do with the now. The people at Harvard asked him not to come back, and he did not, until he was an old man and they asked him to help with the memorial service for those killed in the Civil War.

One of the places he spoke was on Cape Cod, where, at the post-lecture reception he met a slender woman named Lydia. They had a nice conversation, and several months later he wrote her a letter proposing marriage. He apologized for not having time to ask her in person. She wrote him a letter accepting his proposal. He asked that she change her name to Lydian, and she did. They bought the big house by the road in Concord and started a family.

Emerson made a practice of inviting people who interested him to come to Concord. Bronson Alcott’s Temple School in Boston had just gone broke due to his not being a very practical headmaster and because they believed that there was no original sin, that the children were basically good and their spirits did not need to be broken. They believed the children should move around a lot during the day and have various experiences as they learned, rather than sitting still and reciting the knowledge the teachers were imparting, and also perhaps because there was a slight scandal as they believed in teaching the children frankly about procreation. Emerson wrote and invited the Alcotts to come to Concord. He found a house for them to rent. They came and stayed.

Mostly it was Emerson who paid their rent, another neighbor who paid their taxes while Bronson taught his daughters and expounded his theories about vegetarian eating and proper education. His daughter Louisa May Alcott was a wild pony of a girl, always pretending she was a horse. She told her parents she’d been a horse in a former life. She was outspoken and had dark eyes and dark hair, unlike his blonder daughters, and he felt there was a correlation between having a divine nature and being blond. As you know, Louisa May came through for the family, and when Emerson wasn’t around to support them any more, she did it with her writing.

Another friend in Concord was David Henry Thoreau, who changed his name to Henry David Thoreau. He was another Harvard graduate whose family owned a pencil factory in Concord. He was a green man, always in the woods or on the river, with strong views on simplicity of living, on the divine being found in nature, of living without getting drunk – drinking only water. He had a child like spirit, scorning nice clothes, baths and haircuts in favor of befriending the foxes and trees, and knowing the call of every bird and the name of every plant. Emerson and his family found him delightful. He became a teacher for their two sons, who adored him.

For a while he courted Lydian’s sister Lucy, who was staying with the family. He was in his twenties and she was nearly forty, but he thought she was elegant and sophisticated. Mostly though, as the years went on, he loved Lydian. When Emerson went on speaking tours he stayed at the house to look after everything. He planted the garden, fixed the porch, built Lydian a secret compartment under one of the dining room chairs to store her good gloves. The Emerson children loved him. Did Lydian? We don’t know. The Emersons supported Thoreau, and when he wanted to move to the woods, they gave him use of a woodlot they owned by Walden Pond, where he built a tiny shack in which he lived for a time to write a book about his boat trip up the river with his brother John. John had died of Lockjaw the same year the Emersons’ young son Waldo died of Scarlet Fever, and the community was bonded in sorrow over these two terrible losses.

Another frequent house guest was the brilliant, beautiful and radical Margaret Fuller. Lydian took to her bed when Margaret was in the house. The way Emerson looked at her, the letters they wrote back and forth across the hall from his study to Margaret’s bedroom, the long walks they took in the woods together, all were too much for Lydian to endure. Margaret’s father had educated her well beyond the limits normally observed by young women of the day. She had studied Latin and Greek, astronomy and history, theology and literature. She was the first women allowed access to the sacred halls of the Harvard Library. In a time when women were forbidden to get paid for speaking in public, she made her living by hosting “Conversations” at the Boston bookstore run by Elizabeth Peabody. Women would come from far and wide to hear these conversations on marriage, the role of women, sexuality and all manner of topics challenging the commonly held mores and values of the culture. She was a challenging woman, who would “break her sword on your shield,” and the men loved to engage with her. It helped that she had large beautiful eyes, abundant hair and a lovely figure, and that she was as well educated as any of them.

Another friend who came to Concord because of the people gathering there was Nathaniel Hawthorne. He had courted Elizabeth Peabody, but had ended up marrying her less challenging and sicklier sister Sophie. Emerson arranged for a friend of his to rent them a house within walking distance of his own and the Alcotts. Hawthorne was handsome and moderately successful as a writer. He was a member of the Transcendental Club that Emerson hosted, where they talked about Eastern religion and philosophy, about the oneness of everything, about the old mores and what the new ones should be. If Emerson was in love with Fuller, Hawthorne was more so. He would come take her for walks, and they would sit in the woods on a blanket and talk for hours. Sophie Hawthorne handled it the opposite way from Lydian, declaring that she adored Margaret too, maybe more than Nathaniel did. When Emerson came looking for Margaret and found her in the woods with Hawthorne, though, suddenly the man whose house the Hawthornes were renting needed his home back and they had to move to Salem. In his fever of loss he wrote a book about a sensual and lovely young woman who was made to wear a scarlet letter A after having been caught in an affair. She embroidered it with gold thread, insisting that coming together with her lover was a sacred act. Sophie hated the book, as she knew exactly who that woman was. Horace Greely offered Margaret a job as an editor of the New York Tribune, so she left for New York to do that.

Thoreau came out of the woods and began living in Concord again. His book about the boat trip was published but it didn’t sell well. He began putting his journals from the pond together, looking for a publisher. No one wanted to touch them. He kept polishing them until they were the first American memoir, one of the books that shaped American thought and philosophy. Finally Emerson paid to have them published.

Emerson also paid the way for the runaway slaves who were on their way to Canada. The homes in Concord were a stop on the Underground Railroad.

Throughout the story of this group is the refrain “Emerson paid ….. ” If Thoreau had had to get a job, where would American thought be? If the Alcotts had disintegrated under the grind of their poverty, where would American literature be? If the Transcendentalists hadn’t been rooted un Unitarianism, hadn’t formed the thought of a religion which could contain those who believe that everything was connected, that all was one with one soul, that wisdom comes from within, that there is a spark of the divine in everyone, that the divine can be seen and felt in nature, where would UUism be? Emerson paid for the space where all of this could happen.

In this congregation we have people who don’t make much money, people who have just enough to live on if they don’t go on vacations or send the kids to private school, and people who have enough to share. It’s sometimes hard to be one of the ones who gives more than others do. This congregation needs about two thousand dollars per family to be sturdy, to have the people it needs to hold the sacred space for us to have the indescribable and life-sustaining experiences we have here, to have the outreach that supports justice work in this state. For some, two thousand is not possible. For others, ten thousand or twenty thousand is a possibility. Some can step into the role of being the Emersons of this community. It will never be fair. Did Emerson always support the community happily and without a thought of resentment? No. Sometimes he felt he was the only grownup around. Sometimes he gave openheartedly. He always gave. Think about whether it might be your time to be an Emerson here.

Whatever happened to Margaret Fuller?

She became a journalist, and traveled overseas, the first female foreign correspondent reporting on the Roman revolution. She wrote about Garibaldi and the rebels, and news made its way back to MA that she was in love with a Count. The Count had been disinherited because of his revolutionary activities. He was going to make her a Marquesa. She was pregnant. Had they married? She wanted to come home. There was hardly a place for her around Boston with her radical ideas, her education, her conversation. How much less would there be a place for her now, married to a foreigner. If not married, then with a child out of wedlock. It was beyond imagining. The boat left the harbor too low in the water from all the Italian marble in the hold, including a bust of John C Calhoun bound for Cola SC. He was also a Unitarian, although not one of the angels on the abolition issue. Margaret’s friend Robert Browning begged her not to get on the boat. She herself had a sense of foreboding. She and the baby, Nino, and the Count set off. The Captain died of smallpox and was buried at sea before they’d gone very far at all. Nino, the baby, got smallpox too, but his parents nursed him back to health. The new Captain, inexperienced, overshot the NY harbor and the ship ran aground off of Fire Island at three in the morning in gale winds and high waves. The ship began to break apart. All that marble in the hull began to break through. One ship board friend jumped into the water to try to swim to shore, visible and not too far away through the pounding surf. They watched him drown. A sailor who had befriended the baby offered to take the child to shore. They strapped Nino to the man’s chest and then had to watch them both drown. Margaret was seen by folks on shore standing on the deck, her long dark hair whipping around in the wind, her white nightgown already making her a ghost, and then the ship and everyone still on it disappeared under the waves. The bust of John C Calhoun was recovered and sent to Cola. The Count’s body washed up on shore, but Margaret was never seen again.

“All the Gossip from Concord”
Roses reading by Emerson
Readings all from the Friends in Concord
From Margaret Fuller. Rock star, radical thinker
From the Hymn book
A new manifestation is at hand

Most sermons during the past 19 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

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Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above. Text of this service is not available.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
September 29, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

We hold an apple and talk about how apples developed. Were they developed by humans or did they develop themselves in order to appeal more to humans, insects, birds, and animals so their DNA would be spread far and wide? How smart is this apple?

Chalice Lighting

We light the fire of Truth and ask to be clear, wise, and humble enough to admit when we don’t know. We kindle the warmth of community and ask for open heartedness and patience. We are grateful to the Spirit of Life and ask to learn the secret to loving and being loved.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Reading
THE BOTANY OF DESIRE
by Michael Pollan

We’re prone to overestimate our own agency in nature. Many of these activities humans think they take for their own good puposes in agriculture (outlawing certain plants, fighting bugs, and replacing other) are mere contingencies as far as nature is concerned. Our grammar might teach us to divide the world into active subjects and passive objects but in a coevolutionary relationship every subject is also an object, every object a subject. That’s why it makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did as a way to conquer the trees.

Most sermons during the past 19 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS