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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
September 23, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

This Sunday will be a party. We will talk about UU 101, 201, and 301 with original songs and stories from Rev. Meg. We will all be invited and encouraged to make our pledges together as a celebration of faith and hope, expectation and promise.

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

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 18 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
& Rev. Chris Jimmerson
September 16, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

As we begin a sermon series on our church’s ends/goals, we will talk about living our UU faith and values, teaching them to our children, and acting on them in the world.

When you think about your values, your personal values, what are they? Honesty? Authenticity? Busy-ness? Kindness? Winning? Compassion? Security? Power? Connection? Knowledge? Skill? Wisdom? Experience? Health? Inclusion? Fairness? How did you get those values? Did your parents teach you directly? Were there teaching stories? Was it a matter of watching the grownups and deciding you want to be like that, or not be like that?

I was taught through the stories of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. Wisdom is more valuable than money. Kindness and love are paramount. We will be judged on how we treat the poor, the widows and the orphans. No group of people is better than another based on anything but character. Except people who don’t like classical music, and people who do think they are better than other people. So there are the big values and then there are the tiny ones. Jar with golf balls, beads and sand?

This congregation named its values, and the list is here in your order of service:

• Transcendence – To connect with wonder and awe of the unity of life
• Community – To connect with joy, sorrow, and service with those whose lives we touch
• Compassion – To treat ourselves and others with love
• Courage – To live lives of honesty, vulnerability, and beauty
• Transformation – To pursue the growth that changes our lives and heals our world

Children learn values mainly by interactions with us. When I was working as a family therapist, parents would talk about their hopes for their kids. “Well, odds are they are going to turn out pretty much like you, “They would grow pale and quiet. Yes. Be the person you’d like your child to be. You want them to say please and thank you? Say it to them. You want them to be kind? Be kind to them. How do you want them to handle frustration? You handle it that way. How do you want them to express anger? You do that? How do you want them to treat their friends? You do that. Does that make sense? This doesn’t always work. Sometimes there are organic issues, chemical imbalances, etc. that throw you a curve. Sometimes substances get involved, and each substance has its own “personality,” Alcohol is self-despising, accusing, pitiful and angry. When a substance gets involved, you are dealing with your loved one’s personality plus the personality of the substance.

When I was working as a family therapist, I would ask people what their parents’ expectations had been. “They just wanted me to be perfect,” they’d say. When I asked people what they wanted for their children, they would say “I just want them to be happy.” There is a disconnect there. I began to ask parents to create a “job description” for their children, a list of qualities and values that, if their children were to move toward those, they’d feel they had done a good job as parents. For my children, I make this list: be kind, strong and brave, joyful, useful loving honest and healthy. No one can be all of those things every moment, but it can be your goal, your constellation of stars by which you steer your little ship. We would say this list in our prayers every night. Now my grandchildren have their own list they say every night.

How are our values going to be transferred to our children here?

How do you teach someone to treat themselves and others with compassion and love? How do you teach someone to connect to the world with awe and wonder at the unity of life? Well, you teach them to extract DNA from strawberries, to make a volcano from lemons, you teach them about worm farming and the cycle of life, about water, about other people and their religions, about helping others and being fair, how to be an individual and also part of a group, how to look after the interests of yourself and your people, but balance that with looking after the interests of the community. We teach them about what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist in this world.

We have to talk about our faith. We make a family chalice and light it at meal times or in the evening while we’re going about our activities. We say things like “As Unitarian Universalists, we don’t act like that.” Or “As UUs, we treat our friends this way, we treat our elders this way, we disagree with curiosity and respect.”

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 18 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
September 9, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

We bring some water from a place special to us for the common bowl as we speak together about places that move us, have meaning for us, or hold comfort for us.

Intergenerational Sunday

(Sing) — Wade in the water

This is a spiritual song from the Africian American tradition. Women and men in Africa were enslaved and brought over in ships to be sold in people in South America and North America. Enslaved people in the US were allowed to go to church, and some of the songs they would sing had layers of meaning. They mean one thing, and they also mean another thing.

First verse: See that band all dressed in white. The leader looks like an Israelite.

The Israelites were people we learn about in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Jewish Scriptures. Their people had been enslaved in Egypt for 400 years until a hero named Moses helped them escape. They went across a sea to the place where they could be free. In the story, God pushed the water out of their way, and then when the bad guys chased them, all the water fell back on them. Wade in the water.. God’s going to trouble the water. What does that mean, trouble the water?

Story in the Christian Scriptures, in the gospel of John. There was a pool in Jerusalem, and the legend was that God would make the waters choppy and rough, troubled, from time to time. If you could get in or get your friends to put you in when the water was troubled, you would be healed. The story goes that Rabbi Jesus had a conversation with a man whose legs hadn’t worked for 38 years. He told Jesus he didn’t have anyone to put him in the water when it was stirred up. Jesus told him to rise, take up his bed, and walk. He did. The religious people told the man he’d broken the law by carrying his bed on a day people were supposed to rest. He said that the man who healed him told him to do that. They looked around for Rabbi Jesus, but he had already left.

This Scripture, which the men and women in church all knew, teaches that the laws people make up are not important to Rabbi Jesus, who they worshipped. The laws said they were slaves, and that they should obey the people who owned them. This song says if a law is not right, not just, it’s okay to break it.

Wade in the water…. God’s going to trouble the water

See that band all dressed in red… Looks like the band that Moses led. There was a woman who was a hero to the enslaved Africans. Her name was Harriet Tubman, and she led groups of people escaping through fields and swamps, through mountain passes and friendly houses with hiding places so they could get to the Ohio River and cross over into states where enslaving people was against the law.

For these enslaved believers, water meant baptism and it meant a way to throw the dogs off your trail and a way to get to freedom. Their lives had plenty of trouble, so having a faith story that troubled waters were the time when healing could happen was very strengthening.

Those of us who are physically free still have rivers to cross in our lives and inside ourselves. The waters around us get troubled. We can remember that these are times we can ask for help from our friends, teachers, and family, and that the Spirit of Love is loving us.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 18 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
July 29, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

The service is created in collaboration with the Camp UU Hogwarts. Celebrate the magic we make here at First UU and the magic you make in your world!

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

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 18 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
July 22, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

So many people suffer from blue days, sad weeks, or stormy months. How do you know if what you have is depression? Is it related to events, or is it hereditary? Does it come to you out of nowhere? Let’s talk about what we know.

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

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

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

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
July 8, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Unitarian Universalist Children and Youth learn about gender identity, sexual preference, gender presentation, and all the other terms in the multicolored universe in our curriculum called Our Whole Lives. There is an adult version, too. Here are some bits of information that might be new to you!

Call to Worship
from James Howe, Totally Joe (The Misfits, #2)

I hated that the soldier doll had my name. I mean, please. I didn’t play with him much. He was another Christmas present from my clueless grandparents. One time when they were visiting, my grandpa asked me if G.I. Joe had been in any wars lately. I said, “No, but he and Ken got married last week.” Every Christmas since then, my grandparents have sent me a check.

Meditation Reading
Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society

A man once asked me… how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five. “Well,” said the man, “I shouldn’t have expected a woman (meaning me) to have been able to make it so convincing.” I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also.

Sermon

When I had my first child I was determined that all the gender expectations were not going to have any effect on us. I dressed him in yellow. I did not refuse to tell people his gender, but I tried to raise them as free from those structures as I could. I did not let him have a gun as a toy. I don’t think he even knew what one was. We watched videos. I was a kind of crunchy granola mom. When he was about two we went on a playdate to a friend’s house. He was looking at the kids toy chest. I just saw his bottom as he dove into the toy chest, flinging toys over his shoulder to get to the one he wanted. It was a silver six shooter. He raised it above his head, his eyes following the gun as if it were the Lost Chalice of Jerusalem. As if it glowed with power. He played with it the whole time we were there, and as we were leaving I had to pry it from his fingers. After that he made guns out of bread, out of cheese, out of sticks. I finally gave up.

I didn’t bother as much with his brother, since his brother wanted to do everything that first born son did. I did not have any girl children for contrast, but I saw my friends grow children. Some of them were rowdy and rough and some liked pink and were not interested in chasing trains through the town or stopping for hours by construction sites to watch the big machines. There was a moment one August before first grade when my first born wanted a Barbie lunch box. I thought okay, here it is, this is my test. I try to act nonchalant and told him he could pick whichever one he wanted. He ended up with GI Joe on his lunch box and he got the doll as well. Action figure, sorry. When it’s a boy toy we don’t call it a doll we call it an action figure. I get it. One time I asked the man at the paint store what the recipe for this paint was. Formula, he said, with a stern look.

When you ask yourself what are masculine quality is in what are feminine qualities, how do you try to answer? We all know the rules, and the rules do change. Women can wear pants now without any approbation unless they are Pentecostals.

First you’ve got gender. If you oversimplify you say that nature is binary you’re either male or female. Nature, in fact, doesn’t see it that way. There are males and females and then there are those whose gender is somewhat indeterminant. The doctors and the parents have always chosen at Birth which gender to fix the child to conform to. What if we left that alone and let people be inter-sex? Some cultures have a place for people who are both and neither. They are sometimes seen as holy people, touched by the Gods.

So Nature has more than two genders even though most people are born into one or the other. Now, what about your brain? What gender do you feel you are? If either?

I remember being at General Assembly one year and listening to Dan Savage, sex columnist from San Francisco, say there are two genders, pick one. He got a lot of push back from the entire universe lists, who wanted to make room for there being a continuum of gender. Maybe you can identify as a little bit masculine-of-center or a little bit feminine-of-center or all the way to one side or the other. Why not? In fact, that seems to be the reality. And what does feminine-of-center mean anyway? We are humans with our human expressions. When I was a little girl I wanted two six-guns. Because I was masculine? I wouldn’t let my mother put me in pants; I had to wear skirts all the time. Because I was feminine? Why do we even have to put those characterizations on our self-expression? Was I expressing my gender with my frilly skirts and my six-guns or was I expressing my spirit?

So there’s what you feel like in your brain, whether you are male or female or something in between. Some people want to answer the question and some people don’t feel they can adequately answer the question in the words that are culture gives us with which to answer. What you feel like in your brain is a gender identity. How you express it is your gender expression or just your expression? Some women like to dress from the men’s department because that kind of clothing expresses what they would like to communicate about themselves. They feel most comfortable dressing from the men’s department. For others it’s because men’s clothing fits them better, lasts longer, is cheaper, and has pockets.

In our culture, because men are more highly valued than women, it is much easier for a woman to dress like a man than it is for a man to dress like a woman. If a girl is like a boy, she’s affectionately known as a tomboy. If a boy dresses like a girl, he has more problems. Needs parental support. There are men who are straight in their sexuality who like to dress as women. Being straight in their sexuality is another way of saying there sexual preference is for women. But they like to express themselves as a woman too. Does that make them a straight-male-gay-woman? See how ridiculous that is? There are men who like to dress as women in there daily lives, and men who dress as women in order to perform drag. Does this mean they wish they were women? Not usually. This a lot to get our heads around? Most definitely.

In most youth groups these days it is part of check-in to introduce yourself and let the others know which pronouns you prefer. Many people prefer the pronouns they-them-theirs, so that they can be free of the his or hers pronouns. Other people are comfortable with him-his-hers-her and sometimes pronouns change. Sometimes teen-age years are a time to try on different identities, and sometimes kids know from the time they are three or four what gender they prefer to be and how they want to express. You can call it gender-nonconforming, or genderqueer. Queer is a word that is no longer seen as pejorative, but kind of jaunty and descriptive. It is even used by academics as in queering history, queering The Sciences etc. There was a wonderful talk given at General Assembly many years ago called queering religious education. I hope you get to see it sometime.

Let’s talk about sexual attraction. Some people are attracted to one gender their whole lives and other times people shift. Some people can be attracted just to the smell of a person or the side of their hands and it doesn’t matter what their gender is. Some people stay non-binary in their gender and some people are attracted to all kinds of folks and some are not attracted to anybody.

I think the upshot of all of this is that maleness and femaleness we used to think we would know it if we saw it, but it’s such a social construct even though it is for Reaching Across the planet, maybe people can slide on the continuum, maybe people can stake out their place and stay there, maybe it doesn’t matter.

Why do we need to know what gender a baby is. Why do we need to know whether to say, “Oh what a handsome baby” or “what a beautiful baby” or say to the girls “I love your little shoes” or say to the boys “those shoes make you look like you could run fast”! It’s such a deeply embedded part of our culture and many people are just born knowing they don’t like trucks cuz they’re a girl and they don’t like paint cuz they’re a boy. Can our hearts be big enough for all of us. Because we need all of us. And we need to be able to focus on what matters. Truth. Compassion. Community. Love.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 18 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
July 1, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Throughout human history there have been moments, places, and events which have seemed holy. What does that mean? How do we mark those times and places in our own lives?

Call to Worship
Rumi

I looked in temples, churches, and mosques but I found the devine within my heart.

Reading
Walt Whitman

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.

To me the sea is a continual miracle.
The fishes that swim–the rocks–the motion of the waves–the ships with men in them.
What stranger miracles are there?

Sermon

When I was fifteen I used to go to the Philadelphia Art Museum. Walking through an enormous room that contained the ancient pillars of a Hindu temple, I heard, not with my ears, but with some other sense, a low vibrating note that stopped me in my tracks. It went through me. The next room was a Zen tea garden. I fell in love that day with the simplicity, the colors, the paper walls, the bamboo and falling water, the single teapot on a low table. As soon as I got home I cleared all the tchotchkes, and made a minimalist space in which my spirit felt right. I’d walked through those rooms before, but that was the day they came to me as holy places. Was the holy spark in them or in me? Does it matter? Later it was a spring down in the woods beside the Presbyterian church my then-husband served. I would slip away, down the hill past the fellowship building into the woods, and at the bottom of the hall was the spring. It felt holy to me, water just bubbling up out of the ground, and it felt like truth and refreshment to my spirit. When things speak to us and help us on our way, those are holy moments.

I lived in Jerusalem for half a year, and the city is home to holy sites for three of the world’s religions: Islam, Judaism and Christianity. In Bethlehem you’ll see the cave where the baby Jesus was born. In Jerusalem you can visit the site of the last supper, the crucifixion, walk the Via Dolorosa. It’s not that people just remembered for three hundred years and passed down the knowledge, it’s that the Emperor Constantine’s mother walked around the city and had feelings about where things happened. She discovered the hidden fragments of three crosses, the two on which two thieves were executed and the one on which Jesus died. She wasn’t sure which was the true cross until a miracle revealed the truth to her. Now, you can tell by this story that I am dubious about all of this.

I think an individual can feel a spring, a tree, a view, a canyon, river or lake is sacred to them, and I think a people can feel as a people that a place is sacred to their people. I don’t know how that happens, because I don’t belong to a people that is an entity like that. One well meaning lady deciding for an entire religion where the holiness is? No.

Carl Jung borrowed the Polynesian word “mana” to talk about the great impersonal power that imbues certain objects, images or archetypes with the ability to connect people with the holy, either outside them or within them …. Power, effectiveness, prestige, understood to be supernatural. It came to the psychological world by way of anthropologists reporting from Pacific Islander cultures.

In the Jewish scriptures, people would stack stones to mark a place. Lots of peoples do that. A pile of stones marks a place to remember. Some people get a tattoo to mark a time that feels set apart, blessed, full of power. The birth of a child, the memory of a dream, a realization or a vow.

We can mark the every day sacred moments in our families by lighting a family chalice before meals, or at the end of the day as we tell each other what we’re grateful for and what we wish we’d done better. We mark the growth of children on the doorposts, we plant a tree for a birth or a death, we give a gift when we visit a friend, we send money when we are grateful or when we are determined to make a difference. All of these are ways to mark holy moments.

Is everything holy, as Peter Mayer’s song says? I love that idea, but I can’t be a dolphins and sunsets spiritual person. If nature is holy, then there are mosquitos, roaches, cancer, preons, and flesh-eating bacteria. Are those things holy? Is the divine in those things? Hinduism says god is the creator and destroyer. Are some things evil? This is an interesting question, but I don’t have the patience to spend any time on it. We are in times that try our souls. Many among us are grieving, upset, horrified at the separation of children from parents who have either done nothing illegal in asking for asylum, or who have committed a misdemeanor by crossing the border not at an entry point. We have been made to look at the behavior of people in our country going back to the beginning, slaughtering Native men, women and children, selling children away from their parents who were enslaved, forcing Native kids away from their families into schools where they were not allowed to speak their language, be with their parents or learn their culture.

We want to say “this is not us, ” but it has been. Those of you who are sorrowing, your sorrow is holy. The Divine is moving in it. You who are outraged, your rage is holy. The Divine is moving in it. Your brokenness is holy. Those of you who say “Don’t mourn, organize,” your determination is holy. The Divine is moving in it.

How do we learn to see the sacredness of our tears, our shouts, our planning and coordinating? Something becomes holy by the investment of heart and treasure, memory and experience. When we bring our hearts to a spring, to a hiking path, a rock, a view, a river, a church, we are recognizing the power in that place that comes from the love of people for that place, the openness of their hearts as they being them there. We can make our dinner table sacred by lighting our family chalice and taking a moment to be grateful to the earth, the farmworkers, the truckers and grocers whose job it is to bring us this experience of eating together. We could make our homes holy by keeping a bowl of water by the front door so we can dip our fingers into it in gratitude as we come in, or we can light a candle as we close our eyes for a moment in gratitude. I would love for you to tell me about what you do in your family to mark the moments where Divine wind blows through, where connection takes place, where relationships are strengthened, where grace is given. You are surrounded by miracles, as Whitman says, surrounded by as many holy things as you can see the holy in.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 18 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 17, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Unitarians and Abolition. Some were heroes, others not very heroic at all. It seems that we have always been, and still are, a mixture of passion and fear, militant and hesitant, part of the solution and part of the problem.

Call to Worship
from Jody Picoult’s novel “Vanishing Acts”

I suddenly remember being very little and embraced by my father. I’d try to put my arms around my father’s waist and hug him back. I could never reach around the equator of his body; he was that much larger than life. Then, one day I could do it. I held him instead of him holding me and all I wanted at that moment was to have it back the other way.

Reading
from Johnathan Foers novel “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”

Darling,

You asked me to write you a letter. I do not know why I am writing you this letter or what this letter is supposed to be about. But I am writing it none-the-less because I love you very much and trust you have some good purpose for it. I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.

Your Father

Sermon

I came in to Unitarian Universalism as many of us did, from other denominations and I was thrilled with the stands on justice that this denomination was taking. As I got to know us better, I heard the history of the church I served in the south. They’re doing a bit been the big split during the Civil Rights Movement. No one was against working for civil rights, but some people felt it should happen more gradually. Everyone wanted the YMCA in the town to be integrated but some people wanted to work with the politicians and the leadership of the Y to make it happen and others wanted to take a more militant stand, a more disruptive stand. Those who wanted to be disruptive ended up getting frustrated leaving the church. Unitarians have been like this since our beginning. When I say like this I mean carrying espousing a variety of different perspectives different stances on social issues and on how to bring about Justice. No one is against Justice, well maybe John C Calhoun. Did you know he was a Unitarian?

John Caldwell Calhoun (March 18, 1782-March 31,1850) was a United States representative, senator, secretary of war, secretary of state, and vice president. A political sparring partner to John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, and Henry Clay, Calhoun is best remembered for the rallying cries of “states’ rights” and “nullification,” both of which he invoked to support his steadfast opposition to tariffs on manufactures and his defense of slavery.

He was a son of South Carolina, educated at Yale, where he was exposed to Unitarian ideas and espoused them. He remained calvinist in his dour personality and in his opposition to Pleasures such as dancing. After graduation he briefly study law in Charleston South Carolina before going back up north to the Litchfield law school, and Connecticut. Litchfield was a hotbed of anti-federalists and secessionist politics. Are you surprised that there was this kind of group in Connecticut? Don’t be. It’s everywhere.

He moved back to South Carolina as a gentleman farmer, which means that enslaved men and women did the farm work and the housework.

John Quincy Adams was his nemesis and his partner in building All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington DC, where they both worshipped. Calhoun remained a staunch defender of the enslavement of men and women from Africa until his death in 1850. His rallying cry was states rights and nullification by which he meant that a stage should have the right not to enforce a federal law if they didn’t agree with it. Many southern states have made attempts to behave as if this is true up until today.

Many of the Southern unitarians were against enslavement, but they did not want the country to break apart, so they were working to vote for compromise. Some of them did not want to compromise. The American Unitarian Association in Boston sent a minister down to the church and Savannah to talk to them about abolition, they did not let him into their pulpit and they told the AUA not to send anybody else like that down there, they were fine thank you very much, and they did not want to sully the purity of religion by engaging in politics from the pulpit.

One of The unitarians who wanted to keep the union together and so compromised more than he should have was Millard Fillmore. President Fillmore succeeded to the presidency after the death of Zachary Taylor. He did not want to identify with either the anti-slavery Whigs or the pro-slavery Southern Democrats, and he vowed that he wanted “to look upon this whole country, from the farthest coast of Maine to the utmost limit of Texas, as but one country”

Fillmore delayed signing the Fugitive Slave Act for three days, until September 18, 1850, while he pondered its implications. He knew it would be greeted with protest by abolitionists and other northerners who resented being made the South’s slave catchers. Further, he expected that the new law would destroy his political career. He had sworn an oath, however, to defend and preserve the Union. Accordingly he signed it. Charles Sumner, who would soon campaign for the repeal of the Act in the Senate, said, “Better for [Fillmore] had he never been born; better for his memory and the good name of his children, had he never been President.” Some in the South were also dissatisfied with the combined effects of the acts. The governor of South Carolina made public threats of secession. Fillmore immediately gave the United States Army orders to reinforce Federal positions in South Carolina and other southern states. This prompt action stopped any talk of secession.

Fillmore never doubted he had taken the right action. His definitive statement on the subject was: “God knows that I detest slavery, but it is an existing evil, for which we are not responsible, and we must endure it, and give it such protection as is guaranteed by the Constitution, till we can get rid of it without destroying the last hope of free government in the world.”

During his presidency and afterwards Fillmore was befriended by Dorothea Dix, the crusader for better treatment of the mentally ill. He promoted her social legislation and she supported him in his presidency, his political career, and in his bereavements.

Fillmore’s association with First Unitarian Church of Buffalo lasted for 35 years. He took John Quincy Adams to church with him there in 1843 and President-elect Abraham Lincoln in 1861. A letter written in 1849, turning down an invitation to speak at a Unitarian meeting in Boston, saying, “I sympathize with those who inhance liberal Christianity. But yet I am not a member of the Unitarian church,” remains puzzling. He had contributed much money to the Unitarian church, including a registered payment in 1848.

Numerous abolitionists in the congregation greatly disagreed with Fillmore’s acts as President. He understood this and did not complain. Although George W. Hosmer, minister of the church, 1836-67, disagreed publicly with Fillmore’s positions, particularly on the Fugitive Slave Law, the two men enjoyed a close relationship. Upon Fillmore’s death, Hosmer said, “He dreaded war; by any and every means he would save his country from such calamity as war would bring. When Congress by a large majority passed the Fugitive Slave Bill, then for the sake of peace he thought it best to sign it.”

Now all can see, and some saw it then, it was only postponing the horror But I know Mr. Fillmore was honest, unspotted by corruption, and never thought of the nation’s capitol as a place to make money or satisfy selfish ambition. No goods of the nation clung to him; his hands were clean. Integrity and economy kept him safe. A letter he wrote to me, when he suddenly found himself at the head of the Government, reveals the strong earnestness with which he took up his great duty. In serious words he said how deep he felt his dependence on God, and with all his heart sought his guidance.

Conrad Wright has suggested that most Unitarians fell into one of three groups: those influenced by the prominent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who acted for the immediate cessation of slavery; those who sought a gradual end to the institution of slavery, so as to minimize disruption of the social, economic, and political order; and those who opposed slavery on moral grounds, but resisted making a political commitment to end it. An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, written by Unitarian Lydia Maria Child, firmly established the “Garrison” perspective within Unitarianism. Her work also greatly influenced William Ellery Channing.

Some of those who were long-time abolitionists felt that it was going to take more than legislation and debate to end slavery. A group formed called The Secret six. Two of them were wealthy men, and the other four were men of influence. Two of the not wealthy men were Unitarian ministers, Thomas Higginson and Theodore Parker. They met with a fiery abolitionist named John Brown and funded his raid on Harpers Ferry. He wanted to steal weapons in order to arm enslaved men to make a rebellion. John Brown felt that violence was demanded if slavery were to end. He and his men had killed some pro-slavery householders in Kansas, and the secret six felt that perhaps with this desperate, passionate, murderous person could end the horror.

After Brown was caught, one of the men had himself committed to an insane asylum, insisting that he had not helped Brown. three of the men went to Canada, one stayed in the U.S. and plotted to break John Brown out of prison. Theodore Parker was in Italy with Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning trying to recover from his tuberculosis. He stayed there until he died.

Sources: John McCauley Unitarianism in the Antebellum South, Wikipedia

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 18 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 10, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

People in the congregation write their questions down and Meg will read the questions and answer as many of them as she can.

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

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 18 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 3, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

In this intergenerational service we celebrate the traditional Unitarian ceremony of flower communion. We remember its origins as a vivid resistance to Nazi oppression.

Call to Worship
“Blessing the Bread”
by Lynn Ungar

What a gathering-the purple
tongues of iris licking out
at spikes of lupine, the orange
crepe skirts of poppies, lifting
over buttercup and daisy.

Who can be grim
in the face of such abundance?
There is nothing to compare,
no need for beauty to compete.

The voluptuous rhododendron
and the plain grass
are equally filled with themselves,
equally declare the miracles
of color and form.

This is what community looks like–
this vibrant jostle, stem by stem
declaring the marvelous joining.

This is the face of communion,
the incarnation, once more
gracefully resurrected from winter.

Hold these things together
in your sight–purple, crimson,
magenta, blue. You will
be feasting on this long after
the flowers are gone.

Flower Communion

As we begin our Flower Communion I ask that as you each approach the communion vases, do so quietly — reverently — with a sense of how important it is for each of us to address our world and one another with gentleness, justice, and love.

As you bring your flower up, take a few moments to admire all the different flowers. Notice their particular shapes. Their colors. Their beauty. Are there any that particularly speak to you? As you take a moment to look at the flowers, remember that these flowers are gifts that someone else has brought to to this church community today. It represents that person’s unique humanity. If you did not bring a flower this morning, that is alright. Please still come forward and take a moment to admire all the flowers.

Please leave the flowers in the vases for the time being. Everyone will get a different flower than the one they brought to church at the end of service.

Norbert Capek started this ritual to celebrate the beauty of our faith and the people in it. Remembering that the sounds of children are a part of the quiet, let us now share quietly in this Unitarian Universalist ritual of oneness, community, and love.

Please move toward the center aisle and get in line to come to the flower altar in front of the pulpit.

Blessing

Infinite Spirit of Life, we ask thy blessing on these, thy messengers of fellowship and love. May they remind us, amid diversities of knowledge and of gifts, to be one in desire and affection, and devotion to thy holy will. May they also remind us of the value of comradeship, of doing and sharing alike. May we cherish friendship as one of thy most precious gifts. May we not let awareness of another’s talents discourage us, or sully our relationship, but may we realize that, whatever we can do, great or small, the efforts of all of us are needed to do thy work in this world.

Sermon

Flower communion is being celebrated in almost every one of the thousand UU churches in our country. It is a ceremony which was made up in a war-torn country where really bad things were going on because the country’s leaders thought that some people were good and other people were troublemakers, dirty, lazy and wrong. A Unitarian minister named Norbert Capek said “Look at the flowers. All of them are beautiful, and they are so different from one another. No one looks at a daisy and says “Why are you not a rose? If you tried harder you could be a rose.” No one looks at a lily and scolds it for not being a poppy. Flowers are beautiful, each in their own way, like we are. Whenever human beings get together, we are like a big bouquet of flowers.

Flowers have to be so brave. Their seeds fall into the ground and are buried by leaves, wind and rain. They stay there in the darkness, which is where they need to be for this first part. Then they split open, and a little shoot comes out. The shoot makes its way toward the sun. Where is the sun, it asks itself, and goes past any obstacle in order to find the light. That is a good picture of our hearts. We love the light of truth, the light of connection with each other. The light of love and purpose. Finally the shoot breaks through the ground, and it sends its stem up with two leaves. Those leaves eat air and sun and rain and they make more leaves and more, and then sometimes there is a bud. The bud is tiny and perfect. I think it might like being a bud.

But then one day its petals start to loosen. OH NO!!! What’s happening? I used to be so neat and compact, and now I’m opening up, ew, spreading out! Nooooooooo! Then — wait a minute, I’m beautiful! This is great!

Then, just when you’re enjoying your beautiful openness, when you are a blossom, and the bees are coming to visit you and you’re all warm in the sun… then your petals open even more and start falling off! OH NO!! But now you are at a great point… you are using your green energy to make seeds, and you’re ready to let them fall into the earth. Bye, little seeds, Blessings on you! See you when you sprout.

This church is in a period where part of it is blooming. I have to tell you that last Wednesday I was grumpy. TOO MUCH CHANGE. I don’t like it. It’s hard having the bathrooms under construction. It’s hard wondering if our concrete will pass the stress test. It’s hard knowing you are struggling to get here, to find parking. I want things to be easy. GRUMPY. It hurts to bloom. Yes it does.

In the words of the poet Dylan Thomas “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green age;”

We feel the force. It is the life force, that makes us grow and change. Let us welcome it, with all its surprises and alarms. Let us have faith in it, that if we welcome it and line ourselves up with it, it will take us to the place we need to be.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 18 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
May 13, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

My mother didn’t like being called cute. She wanted to be tall and elegant, but she was cute. She tried to teach me to “drive like a lady,” and she won all the belching contests when we were camping. There are things we want to keep from our mother’s lives and voices, and things that don’t help us, things we can let go of.

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

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 18 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 22, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

On this Earth Day, we talk about the life of seeds as they interact with the life of humans, about how diversity is crucial to protection against disease, and how well-meaning people sometimes create unintended consequences when solving short-term problems.

Call to Worship
– Denise Levertov

But we have only begun to love the earth.
We have only begun to imagine the fullness of life.

How could we tire of hope?
– so much is in bud.

How can desire fail?
– we have only begun to imagine justice and mercy,

only begun to envision how it might be
to live as siblings with beast and flower, not as oppressors.

Surely our river cannot already be hastening
into the sea of nonbeing?

Surely it cannot drag, in the silt,
all that is innocent?

Not yet, not yet
– there is too much broken that must be mended,

too much hurt we have done to each other
that cannot yet be forgiven

We have only begun to know
the power that is in us

if we would join our solitudes
in the communion of struggle

So much is unfolding that must complete its gesture
– so much is in bud.

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

Hoof and horn, hoof and horn,
all that dies shall be reborn
Corn and grain, corn and grain,
all that falls shall rise again.

The story of Johnny Appleseed is a good example of how history gets simplified and painted over with the assumptions and prejudices of whatever generation is telling the story. The Disney Johnny Appleseed shows a boy in Pennsylvania in the early 1800’s taking care of his family’s apple trees, picking big round red apples and singing “Oh, The Lord’s been good to me, and so I’ll thank the Lord for giving me the things I need, the sun and the rain and the apple tree, the Lord’s been good to me!” Bluebirds twitter around his head, and he has a guardian angel who looks like an old white settler and talks like he’s going to say “Consarn it!” any minute. He shows Johnny a cooking pot to wear as a hat, gives him his bag of seeds and his good book, and sends him west with the other white folks who were being offered 100 acres for free if they could establish a permanent homestead. A permanent homestead was established if you planted 50 apple trees and 20 peach trees in three years. There were land-development companies who had “bought” the land (after the First Nations people were “removed”) and wanted it to be settled by European Americans.

He was born John Chapman, in the late 1700s. Moving west, his story begins on the western frontier, which was anything west of Pennsylvania. His beliefs were Swedenborgian, which was Christianity informed by the writings of the Swedish scientist and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. They taught that a person should live gently, in love, filled with the love of God. One of the beliefs pertinent to our story this morning is that they didn’t believe in grafting trees, because they believed it hurt the trees.

An apple tree grown from seed produces what are called “spitters,” because that’s what you had to do after you took a bite of one. “Sour enough to set a squirrel’s teeth on edge and make a jay scream.” – Thoreau

Disney and I imagined that Johnny Appleseed was eccentric enough to roam the west barefoot planting trees that would produce lovely sweet apples that people could eat off the tree, but that betrays a cultural blind spot. Since he didn’t believe in grafting, all his trees were planted from seed. What were the spitter apples good for, then? The great American drink, safer than the water out there, cheaper and more fun than coffee or tea – hard cider. Apparently, frontier life was lived in a bit of a haze, with every person, man, woman and child drinking it at an average per person of about 10 oz of hard cider a day.

He would stay just west of the wagons full of settlers coming to claim their 100 acres, and plant the orchards they would need. He would clear some land and plant 50 apple trees and 20 peach trees. Then he sold the orchards to the settlers, and moved on.

This land provided the basis for the building of family wealth through generations of people from England, Scotland, Ireland, Scandinavia and Europe. What was the situation for the non- white folks? Sherman promised formerly enslaved men 40 acres and a mule. Some people got that land and some didn’t. In a few years Reconstruction was over and Jim Crow laws began. Many Black folks lost their land. Banks would only lend to white folks, so farming was possible, but difficult. Wage labor was thought of in Washington DC as the proper place for Black Americans, rather than land ownership. Land is the basis for much of the family wealth of many Americans, but not nearly as much for people of color.

American farmers here lost their land as the Texas Rangers, local law enforcement, and civilian vigilantes killed thousands of Americans of Mexican descent, or pushed them across the border. Some ended up workers on land they used to own.

What happened to the spitter apple trees John Chapman planted? When Prohibition was voted in, the FBI demanded all the cider trees be destroyed, and they chopped down a good many of them themselves.

Who owns the land? Who grows the food? How is the food grown? Those are important questions globally. The people who own the land, especially land with water, have the power. Who owns the farms now?

After WWI, people started moving to the cities to work in factories. Hoover began programs to feed the destitute Europeans. America began to see itself as the food producer for the world. Ag grew more and more industrialized. Now many big-ag farms are owned by corporations rather than families. Our seeds are modified to increase their yield. The scientists who do this have all the good will in the world to make it a better place. They want farmers all over the globe to use these high yield seeds, but the companies who own the seeds want to recoup their investment, so they patent their seeds and forbid the farmers all over the world to save seeds the way they would have done for thousands of years, in order to plant again from the crops they harvested. Partly this is because the modifications don’t hold over a couple of generations, and the plants revert to the way they were before they were modified. The world bank will loan farmers money to buy seed, but only from certain approved companies. Monsanto owns the patents on 25% of all seeds in the world. This alarms some people. The scientists are under pressure to modify the seeds in helpful ways, like making them immune to Roundup, also produced by Monsanto, so the spraying will kill the weeds but not the crops. If there is an organic farm next to an industrial farm, it is incumbent on the organic farmer to make a barrier or buffer so that the sprayed insecticides and weed killers don’t get on their crops. If they do, the crops cannot be sold as organic.

Sometimes, though, the pollen from the “roundup ready” crops mixes with weeds, and then they become resistant to roundup too. They have engineered corn that has a bacteria called Bt in the kernels themselves. This is bacteria naturally found in soil which is bad for insects. Bt corn makes insects sick. The problem is, it makes all the insects sick, and there are concerns that the Monarch butterflies have been impacted by these modified crops. They were trying to develop seeds which would become sterile in two generations, making it impossible for people to use the seeds more than once, but then concerns were raised about the pollen from these plants mixing with other crops, making everything sterile eventually, and that would be bad.

If I were to make up a religion, it would be built around seeds. They hold infinite life inside themselves. If you plant an apple seed, who is to say how many apples will result over the next 100 years? A thousand? With what awe we should regard a seed. The seeds are buried in the ground, they split open, which I am sure is alarming to them. Then a new shoot begins the struggle toward the sun. Does this not mirror the journey taken by the soul? The shoot finds the sun, builds an infrastructure by which to deliver nutrients to itself, and then grows. It blooms, which may also be alarming. I’ll talk more about that on June 3 at flower communion. After the bloom, when the beauty is quiet, the seeds develop. This is the truly productive time for the seed/soul. Then the seeds scatter and the cycle begins again.

… as above so below. As without, so within.

Hoof and horn, hoof and horn,
all that dies shall be reborn
Corn and grain, corn and grain,
all that falls shall rise again.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 18 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 8, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

The Japanese art of kintsugi, where broken things are repaired using material that has been mixed with gold. This is a way of embracing damage, where a bowl or plate becomes even more beautiful because of its “scars.”

Call to worship
-Theodore Parker

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

Reading
-Leonard Cohen

“Anthem”

The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don’t dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be.
Ah the wars they will
be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
bought and sold
and bought again
the dove is never free.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

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

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 18 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 1, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Easter is a time of new beginnings, celebrating babies, renewing our awe at the rampant resurrection of the natural world, turning our thoughts to the life that comes out of death. “All that dies shall be reborn,” says the neo-Pagan chant. In the major arcana of the tarot, the Fool is an archetype of the beginning of the journey. What might the Fool have to teach on this, his day?

Call to worship
– e e cummings

i thank You God for most this amazing day:
for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and love and wings and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

Meditation reading
– Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

“It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing … A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It’s the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.”

Reading
– Ralph Waldo Emmerson

Finish each day and be done with it. You’ve done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in. Forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

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

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 18 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 25, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

We are trying to do challenging and long-term soul work, and it can be overwhelming. How do we find our balance again? (Intergenerational service)

Stand on one leg and see how long you can balance. Some people can do it for a long time, but you have to practice. When I was taking karate they used to make us practice kicking 100 kicks on each side. I used to be able to do it. I could do it again if I practice long enough. You have to pick one point on a wall to look at that. It helps a lot just look at one thing. Don’t Close Your Eyes. Another thing my teacher they said was that your thoughts have to be balanced if your body is going to balance. You look at one point and you try to make your mind quiet. One of the main things that makes our mind agitated is fear. Frank Herbert, in the famous book Dune said “fear is the mind-killer.”

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

– Frank Herbert, Dune

We’re afraid so many things. I put one of my fears up in FaceBook, an unfounded and unreasonable one. Others added theirs.

Afraid of looking dumb. Afraid ceiling fans would fall. Afraid of falling through the subway grates on city sidewalks. Afraid of going blind from the little light that flashes when you go through the toll booth. Spiders, bees. Getting hurt at school. Having an accident at school.

A lot of people, kids and grownups too are afraid of making mistakes. When we make mistakes, Miss a meeting or answer a question wrong or do something that loses you a friend, we lose our balance. We worry about it as we’re going to sleep at night. We think about it when we wake up in the morning. It makes your stomach hurt.

Some of the grownups and I want to tell you about a mistake we made.

Story of the Water Protectors video.

All of us have blind spots. We have good will, and we think we’re doing the right thing, but it’s easy to forget something. Even when you have four or five people working on the same thing it’s easy to forget something. Here’s what we have decided to do when we make a mistake. We are sorry. We grieve. We feel pain. We sit with that pain. We are sorry for the pain we’ve caused other people. We try to make it right if we can. We ask for forgiveness. We ask ourselves what we can learn from this. We ask the people we’ve hurt what we should learn from this. This is not to say we won’t make more mistakes.

I had a friend I was hanging out with some years ago who used a wheelchair to get around. She was fierce about being seen correctly and being treated well. She would not hesitate to tell people who made a mistake in the way they talked to her with, encouraging them to have more respect, to honor her as a whole person her and her chair. I told her I am being quiet with fear because I’m so scared of saying something wrong to you.

She said oh you will, and I will let you know, and then we’ll keep working together.

If we are too scared to make a mistake, we are scared to move in any way that we can. We are scared to roll ahead when you’re scared to walk ahead, we’re scared to stand up, we’re scared to try new things. We learn and we try to do challenging work. We have to balance care and courage. They are not opposites.

We must develop infrastructure in our souls to survive mistakes and not go into a spiral of shame. We cannot be fragile about making mistakes. We have to find a way to be open hearted and strong-hearted at the same time. This doesn’t mean we will not care when we make a mistake, it doesn’t mean we will not care about the pain; quite the opposite. It means we will take care of ourselves and each other so that we can mend after making a mistake, and we can do what we can to mend those hurt by our mistakes. And then keep working the struggle is always going to be with us. Because we struggle it doesn’t mean we’re doing something wrong. It means we’re doing hard work together.

Trauma is tricky, though. We get too intense about our work, we don’t take deep breaths, we lose our curiosity and start lecturing, we ride roughshod over people. We use our powers unwisely for a goal that seems good to us. There is an old wisdom story that addresses this.

“It was said in the old days that every year Thor made a circle around Middle-earth, beating back the enemies of order. Thor got older every year, and the circle occupied by gods and men grew smaller. The wisdom god, Woden, went out to the king of the trolls, got him in an armlock, and demanded to know of him how order might triumph over chaos.

“Give me your left eye,” said the king of the trolls, “and I’ll tell you.”

Without hesitation, Woden gave up his left eye. “Now tell me.”

The troll said, “The secret is, Watch with both eyes!”

How do you take care of yourself? How do you keep both your eyes? You stay present to the present moment. You understand that perfect order is not a possibility, that life is hard. You rest when you’re tired, you understand that the struggle continues, and if you see someone who is sinking down, you say – Are you okay? What can I do for you?

Song: All will be well.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 18 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.