Being Present with one another

April 25, 2022 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 24, 2022
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Our covenant of healthy relations calls us to “Welcome and serve by being present with one another through life’s transitions” What does it mean to be present with one another? How do we do that?

Chalice Lighting

This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.

Call to Worship

At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.

– Albert Schweitzer

Affirming Our Mission

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

Meditation Reading

Being fully present isn’t something that happens once and then you have achieved it; it’s being awake to the ebb and flow and movement and creation of life, being alive to the process of life itself.

– Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World

Sermon

Text of this sermon is not yet available.

SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 22 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link above 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.

PODCASTS

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

Coming to Life again

April 18, 2022 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 17, 2022
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Inanna, in the Babylonian faith story, goes to the underworld to visit her sister. At every level of the underworld, she is stripped of one more element of her rank and dignity. After three days in the underworld, she returns to the overworld. What does this story have to teach us about loss and resurrection?

Chalice Lighting

This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.

Call to Worship

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)

– e e cummings

Affirming Our Mission

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

Meditation Reading

AN EYE FOR MIRACLES
Diego Valeri

You who have an eye for miracles
Regard the bud now appearing
on the bare branch of the fragile young tree.
It’s a mere dot,
A nothing.
But already it’s a flower,
already a fruit,
already its own death and resurrection.

Sermon

Text of this sermon is not yet available.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

Awakening

April 11, 2022 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
April 10, 2022
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Many of us are engaged in a lifelong process of awakening to realities that are different than what we were taught. It is a process that can feel liberating and help us awaken to our own, full creative potential. So, why are we witnessing such a backlash against wokeness.

Chalice Lighting

This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.

Call to Worship

Love and Justice are not two.
Without inner change, there can be no outer change.
Without collective change, no change matters.
You make an actual vow,
hear the crys of the world
step into the experience of awakening
to the suffering of the world
and the desire to bring an end
to that suffering.

– Rev. Angel Kyodo Williams

Affirming Our Mission

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

Meditation Reading

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.
What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.
To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.
You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.
Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?
Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?

– David Whyte

Sermon

Text of this sermon is not yet available.

Most sermons during the past 22 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

What is the Eighth Principle

April 4, 2022 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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What is the Eighth Principle?

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 3, 2022
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

What started the sense that we needed another principle? Why now? Why antiracism? Why do we choose to focus on this issue as opposed to all of the other oppressions? We will vote on it at our May meeting.

Chalice Lighting

This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.

Call to Worship

MY HELP IS IN THE MOUNTAIN
Nancy Wood

Earth cure me.
Earth receive my woe.
Rock strengthen me.
Rock receive my weakness.
Rain wash my sadness away.
Rain receive my doubt.
Sun make sweet my song.
Sun receive the anger from my heart.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Meditation Reading

People say, “What is the sense of our small effort?” They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.

– Dorothy Day

Sermon

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SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

Grasshoppers in Indra’s Glittering Net

March 27, 2022 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 27, 2022
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Our seventh principal affirms that we are all part of the physical world in both a physical and a spiritual way. The health of our planet and the health of other animals and humans affect the health of our own body/ mind.

Chalice Lighting

This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.

Call to Worship

A NETWORK OF MUTUALITY
By Martin Luther King, Jr.

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied to a single garment of destiny.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
There are some things in our social system to which all of us ought to be maladjusted.
Hatred and bitterness can never cure the disease of fear, only love can do that.
We must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation.
The foundation of such a method is love.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Learn more about Beloved Community at this link. – The King Center

Meditation Reading

A PRAYER OF SORROW

We have forgotten who we are.
We have alienated ourselves from the unfolding of the cosmos.
We have become estranged from the movements of the earth
We have turned our backs on the cycles of life.
We have sought only our own security
We have exploited simply for our own ends
We have distorted our knowledge.
We have abused our power.
Now the land is barren
And the waters are poisoned
And the air is polluted.
Now the forests are dying
And the creatures are disappearing
And the humans are despairing.
We ask forgiveness
We ask for the gift of remembering
We ask for the strength to change.

Sermon

Text of this sermon is not yet available.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

Water Communion 2022

March 22, 2022 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 20, 2022
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

A year ago, during the freeze, many of us lost our water for many days on end. Others of us who had water filled up containers to give to our neighbors and friends. We bring water to the service and share a couple of sentences about about our experience of the freeze last year as well as what water means to us.

Chalice Lighting

This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.

Call to Worship

THE NEGRO SPEAKS OF RIVERS
By Langston Hughes

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its
muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Learn more about Beloved Community at this link. – The King Center

Meditation Reading

Water knows no boundary. Though we may draw it on a map, say this is where the water starts and where it ends, it is not true. Water knows the way into the Great Mystery. It is not afraid of going underground. Water is not afraid of dams or dry creeks, bridges or brick walls. It is patient. Water understands time. It will find a way.

– Thomas Lloyd Qualls, Painted Oxen

Sermon

Text of this sermon is not yet available.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

Renewing Faith

March 13, 2022 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
March 13, 2022
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

In challenging, sometimes scary times such as those in which we find ourselves, it can be hard at times to maintain our faith. Perhaps we can help each other retain our faith and resilience. Perhaps faith is to be found in our struggles for love, justice and a better world – a continual process of remembering that there is beauty to be found in the struggle, even when we cannot know what the outcome may be.

Chalice Lighting

This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.

Call to Worship

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead, you relax and float.

– Alan Wilson Watts

Affirming Our Mission

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

Learn more about Beloved Community at this link. – The King Center

Meditation Reading

FIRST LESSON
– Philip Booth

Lie back daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man’s float is face down. You will
dive and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

Sermon

Text of this sermon is not yet available.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

How to eat a car

March 6, 2022 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 6, 2022
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all; Our sixth principal is broad and demanding. How in the world do we promote this, much less make this happen?

Chalice Lighting

This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.

Call to Worship

Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good.

– Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Affirming Our Mission

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

Learn more about Beloved Community at this link. – The King Center

Meditation Reading

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, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these — to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.

– Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Sermon

Text of this sermon is not yet available.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

Widening the Circle

March 4, 2022 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
February 27, 2022
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Liberation theology helps us understand that we all can fulfill our greatest potential when we open ourselves and our institutions to all people – greater and greater perspectives. Unitarian Universalism proposes that walking together in covenantal community, in the ways of love, is our way toward widening that circle, maybe even bursting it wide open so none of us left on the inside or the outside.

Chalice Lighting

This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.

Call to Worship

Differences are not intended to alienate, to separate. We are different precisely in order to realise our need of one another.

– Desmond Tutu

Affirming Our Mission

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

Learn more about Beloved Community at this link. – The King Center

Meditation Reading

A POEM IS BELONGING
– Rosemerry Watola Trommer

And if it’s true we are alone,
we are alone together,
the way blades of grass
are alone,
but exist as a field.
Sometimes I feel it,
the green fuse that ignites us,
the wild thrum that unites us,
an inner hum that reminds us
of our shared humanity.
Just as thirty-five trillion
red blood cells join in one body
to become one blood.
Just as one hundred thirty-six thousand
notes make up one symphony.
Alone as we are, our small voices
weave into the one big conversation.
Our actions are essential
to the one infinite story of what it is
to be alive. When we feel alone,
we belong to the grand communion
of those who sometimes feel alone-
we are the dust, the dust that hopes,
a rising of dust, a thrill of dust,
the dust that dances in the light
with all other dust, the dust
that makes the world.

Sermon

Text of this sermon is not yet available.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

A Good Goodbye

February 21, 2022 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 20, 2022
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

What makes a good goodbye? Our goodbye is going to be a long one. How can we talk about our gains and losses? How can we talk about the grief and the love that we share?

Chalice Lighting

This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.

Call to Worship

Earth mother, star mother,
You who are called by a thousand names,
May all remember
we are cells in your body
and dance together.
You are the grain
and the loaf
That sustains us each day.
And as you are patient
with our struggles to learn
So shall we be patient
with ourselves and each other.
We are radiant light
and sacred dark
-the balance-
You are the embrace the heartens
And the freedom beyond fear.
Within you we are born
we grow, live, and die-
You bring us around the circle
to rebirth,
Within us you dance
Forever

– Star Hawk

Affirming Our Mission

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

Learn more about Beloved Community at this link. – The King Center

Meditation Reading

– Mary Oliver
A SUMMER DAY

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean –
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down –
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Sermon

Text of this sermon is not yet available.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

What if you were really loved

February 13, 2022 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 13, 2022
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

A New Year’s resolution some years ago led me to the question: what if we were really loved. I have been pondering it since. So many people have that question underneath everything they do or say. Do you really love me? That is what they are asking.

Chalice Lighting

This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.

Call to Worship

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength,
while loving someone deeply gives you courage.

– Lao Tzu

Affirming Our Mission

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

Learn more about Beloved Community at this link. – The King Center

Meditation Reading

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this,
in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep you close your eyes.

– Pablo Neruda

Sermon

Text of this sermon is not yet available.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

Connected to All Creation

February 6, 2022 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 6, 2022
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Animals help us understand and feel our connection to nature, that we are rooted in the being of all beings.

Chalice Lighting

This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.

Call to Worship

Our bodies, our thoughts, our minds, our spirits are affected by the whole earthen community, and affect this whole in return. This is both a mystical sensibility and a scientific fact. It is an awareness that makes us tingle with its responsibility, its beauty, its poetry. It makes our lives our most foundational form of activism. It means everything we do matters, and matters wondrously.

– Lyanda Lynn Haupt

Affirming Our Mission

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

Learn more about Beloved Community at this link. – The King Center

Meditation Reading

It came to me that every time I lose a dog they take a piece of my heart with them and every new dog who comes into my life gives me a piece of their heart. If I live long enough all the components of my heart will be dog and I will become as generous and loving as they are.

-Unknown

Sermon

To see the entire service which includes the virtual Parade of Animals click here.

Text of this sermon is not yet available.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

Spirited Identities

January 31, 2022 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
January 30, 2022
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

We tend to think of our identities as clearly defined and stable over time. Research shows though that our identities are complex, sometimes self- contradictory, and adaptable, as well as that they evolve over time. And that may be advantageous. We’ll explore this and claiming our full identity as individuals and as a religious community.

Chalice Lighting

This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.

Call to Worship

One of the major shifts in human understanding has been a move away from seeing ourselves as solitary independent agents in charge of our own destiny toward a more complex awareness that we are in a direct function of who we are with. We are relational creatures. Everything about us is shaped by our connections or disconnections with those around us.

– Rev. Ken Herto

Affirming Our Mission

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

Learn more about Beloved Community at this link. – The King Center

Meditation Reading

IMPERFECTLY DIVINE
By Alix Klingenberg

Spirit of Life, Earth and Sea and Sky,
Place of deep longing in my hearts
Find your way from silence to voice
Give me strength and courage to speak truth through my life
For I am a creature of the Universe, small but infinite
A momentary body in the sea of life, and also the sea itself
I am a gathered bit of energy, and one who gathers
A creation and a creator
Let me not hold too tightly to one form and lose the other
For we are not form but process, ever-changing and ever-renewing
Help us see that we are neither the beginning nor the end,
but something perfectly natural and imperfectly divine.

Sermon

Text of this sermon is not yet available.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

Prophetic Religion

January 23, 2022 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
January 23, 2022
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

What does it mean to be a prophetic religion? The prophetic is often thought of as having to do with predicting the future, and it can involve projecting what current circumstance might mean for the future, as well as offering a vision of a more just and peaceful future. Might the prophetic also involve speaking truths in the here and now, embracing our struggles and our broken hearts even as we strive for creating that better world?

Chalice Lighting

This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.

Call to Worship

To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

– John Ruskin

Affirming Our Mission

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

Learn more about Beloved Community at this link. – The King Center

Meditation Reading

The prophetic liberal church is the church in which all members share the common responsibility to foresee the consequences of human behavior (both individual and institutional), with the intention of making history in place of being merely pushed around by it.

– James Luther Adams, “Taking Time Seriously,” The Prophethood of All Believers

Sermon

Text of this sermon is not yet available.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

Lessons from Pandemic Chaplaincy

January 18, 2022 by tom Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons

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Rev. Lee Legault
January 16, 2022
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Lee Legault weathered the winter and summer 2021 COVID surges as a chaplain resident at Ascension Seton Medical Center of Austin, feeling privileged to walk beside patients and their families in the pandemic. She brings a grab bag of thoughts/advice/admonishments/assurances based on her time working with COVID patients and their families. As the Omicron variant rages, let’s learn and grow together to the benefit of the interconnected web of existence of which we are all apart. Lamenting together, we may take heart that we are never truly alone.

Chalice Lighting

This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.

Call to Worship

My work is an ourpouring of laughter through age-old tears.
It is an uttered anyhow through grief enduced fear.
It is a song of praise being sung in uncertain, unknowing lands.
It is a warmth shared behind half-masked faces and gloved hands.

My work is seeing you how I want to be seen.
It is talking honestly and openly, but not being mean.
It is trusting in those who stand to my left and my right.
It is fighting with we all win, not just fighting to fight.

My work is your work if you believe too,
that we all work together to make everyone free.
That together we can weather the struggles we face,
That God loves us, even hears us whenever we pray.

– Rev. Jane Evans

Affirming Our Mission

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

Learn more about Beloved Community at this link. – The King Center

Meditation Reading

We pause this hour to remember those whom we have lost those whom we fear losing those from whom we are separated those to whom we would offer a helping hand a caring heart and the will to live. We pause this hour also to hope for life and good living for love and kind words for reconciliation for the support of family and friends and for meaning in the struggle for wholeness. May our memories and hope renew us for the days and nights to come.

– Rev. Susan Milner

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