Rev. Chris Jimmerson
November 5, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org
We tend to think of ministers as answering a calling, but all of us are called in some way to make a difference in our world. How will we live out our mission next?
Call to worship
First UU Church of Austin is an intentionally hospitable community where:
All people are treated with respect and dignity
All people of goodwill are welcomed
People are supported in times of joy and need
People find connection with one another in fellowship
We are fully engaged and generous with time, treasure and talent
We invite people of goodwill to find a spiritual home with us
We engage as UUs in public life
First UU Church of Austin nourishes souls and transforms lives by:
Engaging and supporting one another in spiritual practice and growth
Providing worship, programs and activities that awaken meaning and transcendence
Providing a caring, supportive and safe place to rekindle the spirit
First UU Church of Austin witnesses to justice in our personal lives and beyond, by:
Practicing liberal religious values in the public arena
Empowering all people to access the richness of life
Providing leadership to the greater UUA community to expand the reach of our movement
Partnering with the interfaith community to live our shared values
Reading
-Dawna Markova
“I will not die an unlived life. I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire. I choose to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me, to make me less afraid, more accessible, to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise. I choose to risk my significance; to live so that which came to me as a seed goes to the next as a blossom and that which came to me as a blossom, goes on as fruit.”
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 17 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.
Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 29, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org
Using an Appalachian practice brought from Cornwall, we will have a cloutie tree. People will be able to breathe the names of their beloved departed into pieces of cloth and put them on a symbolic tree.
You will lose someone you can’t live without Anne Lamott
You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly – that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.
“The Thing Is”
by Ellen Bass
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air,
heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.
“Daily Prayer”
Grandmother, Grandfather,
Guardians of the four directions,
Great Spirit at the center of all things:
Thank you for this day and for our lives.
Thank you for the bounty and blessings and abundance that you provide for us to enjoy.
Thank you for the lessons that you place before us each day
Thank you for the vision to recognize these lessons for what they are.
Thank you for the wisdom to understand the meaning of these lessons for our lives,
and Thank you for the courage to live in this new understanding.
“All Souls” by May Sarton
Did someone say that there would be an end,
And end, Oh, an end, to love and mourning?
The cold bleak voices of the early morning
When all the birds are dumb and in dark November —
Remember and forget, forget, remember.
After the false night, warm true voices, wake!
Voice of the dead that touches the cold living,
Through the pale sunlight once more gravely speak.
Tell me again, while the last leaves are falling:
“Dear child, what has been once so interwoven
Cannot be raveled, nor the gift ungiven.”
Now the dead move through all of us still glowing,
Mother and child, lover and lover mated,
Are wound and bound together and enflowing.
What has been plaited cannot be unplaited —
Only the strands grow richer with each loss
And memory makes kings and queens of us.
Dark into light, light into darkness, spin.
When all the birds have flown to some real haven,
We who find shelter in the warmth within,
Listen, and feel new-cherished, new forgiven,
As the lost human voices speak through us and blend
Our complex love, our mourning without end.
“In Blackwater Woods” by Mary Oliver
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving of the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: The fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
“Hold On” by Nancy Wood
Hold on to what is good,
Even if it’s a handful of earth.
Hold on to what you believe,
Even if it’s a tree that stands by itself.
Hold on to what you must do,
Even if it’s a long way from here.
Hold on to your life,
Even if it’s easier to let go.
Hold on to my hand,
Even if someday I’ll be gone away from you.
What do we become when we die?
What do we become
when we die?
Stars,
night,
leaves,
ash,
dirt-
Souls wandering
to help those
we wronged —
The great breath
of space
and light
and nothing?
Think
not just beyond this but here + there,
now + now-
What do we become
when we die?
Quiet
moving
bodiless
earthy
hope.
“Those who are dead are never gone” by Birago Diop, African Traditional Religions
Those who are dead are never gone:
they are there in the thickening shadow.
The dead are not under the earth:
they are there in the tree that rustles,
they are in the wood that groans,
they are in the water that runs,
they are in the water that sleeps,
they are in the hut, they are in the crowd,
the dead are not dead.
Those who are dead are never gone:
they are in the breast of the woman,
they are in the child who is wailing,
and in the firebrand that flames.
The dead are not under the earth:
they are in the fire that is dying,
they are in the grasses that weep,
they are in the whimpering rocks,
they are in the forest,
they are in the house,
the dead are not dead.
“We Remember Them” by Roland Gittlesohn
In the rising of the sun and in its going down,
we remember them;
In the blowing of the wind and in the chill of winter,
we remember them;
In the opening of buds and in the rebirth of spring,
we remember them;
In the rustling of leaves and in the beauty of autumn,
we remember them;
In the beginning of the year and when it ends,
we remember them;
When we are weary and in need of strength,
we remember them;
When we are lost and sick at heart,
we remember them;
When we have joys we yearn to share,
we remember them;
So as we live, they too shall live, for they are now a part of us,
as we remember them.
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 17 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.
Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 22, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org
How does this part of our mission fit with the others? In preparation for our November congregational conversations about the mission, a few thoughts about justice and transformation.
Reading Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
It is important for the liberal to see that the oppressed person who agitates for his rights is not the creator of tension. He merely brings out the hidden tension that is already alive. Last Summer when we had our open housing marches in Chicago, many of our white liberal friends cried out in horror and dismay: “You are creating hatred and hostility in the white communities in which you are marching, You are only developing a white backlash.” I could never understand that logic. They failed to realize that the hatred and the hostilities were already latently or subconsciously present. Our marches merely brought them to the surface ….
The white liberal must escalate his support for racial justice rather than de-escalate it. … The need for commitment is greater today than ever.
Sermon
The last part of our mission is “do justice.” Justice is love in action. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and yesterday Rep. Maxine Waters know that talking about it is not enough. We must get in the fight. Laws must be changed. The status quo is killing people.
Let me tell you about how I learned to be white in the era of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I heard people say “well, if they wouldn’t make themselves so unpleasant, they’d get a lot farther. They should go about asking for change gradually. They’re asking for too much. Then Dr King was shot dead, and my family in North Carolina was shocked. But quiet.
I was about 8 years old. One day on the way to school my mother pointed across a field and said “That’s the school for the little black children.” I remember that today because it struck me as amazing that I had never wondered where the black kids went to school. It hadn’t occurred to me to notice that there were only white kids at the Mulberry Street Elementary School. It was just the way things were. My mother took us to the city pool the first day it was integrated. We hadn’t been before. I remember the joy with which the children played in the water, the sunlight almost too bright. The situation felt fraught. Tense. I didn’t know why at the time.
There are models of cultural competency which describe the stages of that competency, and the one I’m using is from Milton Bennett. When I was 8, I was deeply in the first stage, where your world is small, and you don’t even really see people who are different from you. “Hm. Weird,” you might say, as you see cultural differences. I knew my culture. I came from missionaries to Pakistan, from Persian rugs and split-level houses, from private schools and academia. I came from a family where writing a book was the way to be special, to arrive. I came from church-going and horses and uncles who were doctors who would fix you up for free if you got measles. I came from family stories about the great-grandfather preacher who would visit and feed poor families, black and white, in a small southern town.
Later I grew into another stage of cultural development. The reversal stage. Having become aware of black culture, I was fascinated. My best friend in high school was from West Philadelphia. She was so much cooler than I was. I adored her. I prayed every night that I would wake up black. I knew it wasn’t going to happen, but I wished hard anyway. Better music, better language, more beautiful skin tone. And my father was all about civil rights. He was a ferocious civil rights fighter, not on the street, but in essays and sermons and speeches he was asked to make because he was on the 6 and 11 o’clock news. I came from a culture. Scots Irish academic/clergy class.
My perspective was still very much of the individual rather than the system. My boy cousins got in trouble with the law at least once in their lives throwing fireworks out of their car windows. When the police stopped one of them, a syringe had rolled out from under the back seat. It was from their dad’s doctor bag, but all of that got worked out at the police station. We didn’t know the reason we could laugh about it was because the boys were white and so were the police officers. We had the privilege of interacting with the authorities in the justice system, in the banking system, when applying for internships and jobs and being fairly certain that we’d be dealing with someone from our same race. If something didn’t go right, we had the privilege of never wondering whether the problem was our skin color or our race.
I could walk in neighborhoods in which I lived without anyone calling the police on “a suspicious person.” My sister can run after dark without people assuming she’s running away from something she did. I could shop by myself without someone following me around the store, thinking I might steal something.
When I’m in a grocery store for a few things I can put them in my shopping bag to carry them before paying without someone assuming I’m going to steal them. If I’m really feeling my privilege, I can grab a bottle of water and drink it while I shop, knowing that people will assume I’ll pay for it when I check out. Because I look like a nice lady. Part of that is my being white. I get the benefit of the doubt all the time. That’s the way things are. For me, the system is working pretty well. The best thing about it is I don’t even have to notice it if I don’t care to.
“The way things are” has different names. The patriarchy is what we say when we are talking about the privilege that accrues to men in our society and others. On Face Book this week, it’s becoming pretty clear that almost every woman in our culture has at some point been sexualized, harassed, assaulted in small ways. Many have been assaulted in awful ways. This sudden visibility of the situation has been painful. It only took a day for the articles to appear about women who abuse and harass men or other women, and how some men are harassed and assaulted sexually when they are very young. Yes, but it has happened to almost every woman. Sometimes we talk about it, and it becomes visible. For a while.
The way things are for white people here in the US is named the White Supremacy System. The US is not the only place this exists, but let’s talk about it as it is here.
It’s not a broken system. The system is working exactly the way it’s supposed to. It’s supposed to make people of color players of the game of life here play at an added level of difficulty. White Supremacy is not about individual racists, people who shout “Blood and Soil” and carry tikki torches from Lowes to protest removal of statues of Confederate generals. It’s a system that has exactly the effect it’s supposed to have. Sometimes the legislatures try to make it better. These days they are trying to make it worse through voter suppression, gerrymandering, abolishing affirmative action.
The White Supremacy System is all around us. It’s the air we breathe and the water we swim in. I don’t have to think about it if I don’t want to. One of my privileges as a white person is that I can engage when I’m moved to and disengage when I get tired. If I were a person of color I would not have the privilege of being able to turn it off. I would be dealing with it all the time, all around me and within me, as I battle internalized racism and the color prejudices within my own culture.
I have spent most of my time in a middle stage of cultural competence called minimization, where I minimized the cultural differences I saw. “Everyone is the same under the surface,” I would think, and we’re all just people.”
I traveled enough to be curious about other cultures, to understand something about how things were in Europe, the Middle East, Thailand, India. I knew there were big cities, skyscrapers and traffic and all, in Afghanistan, Nigeria, Kenya. Curiosity gets you to the stage where you understand that people from other cultures are as complex and individual as those from yours. You can’t imagine that all Latino and latina people are one way, all Black people think this one thing or that one, that all Native folks want this one thing or that one. If you were white, and someone told you “White people love unpaid internships, why is that a thing?” You might bristle. Although the web site “Stuff white people like” is very good for checking your reactivity as a white person. Unpaid internships, hummus, “My So-called Life,” Ray Bans, Grammar, among many other things. You can’t really stereotype individuals, but there are some cultural things you can recognize …
The stage I’m in now is that I know that things are better when minds from varying cultures have had input. People who speak different languages, have cultures different from mine, (and mine is fairly smack in the middle of the dominant white American culture) see things from a different point of view. The more points of view I can include, the better the end result. Diversity, in a church or in a field of corn, ensures sturdiness. If you plant the same kind of corn, or the same kind of potato, one disease can wipe out your whole crop. Lack of diversity equals weakness. In a community, If you’re all too similar, things get handled in the same old way.
We are going to have several “Teach-ins” here, run by our Change Team, a joint effort of the People of Color group and the White Allies. Look for the dates in upcoming newsletters. You might join the Dismantling Racism conversations here on Saturdays, come to the movies shown mostly on Fridays, or get involved in visiting prisoners at the detention centers.
If you are white, you’re not a terrible person. You can’t fix it by yourself, but you can begin to fix you.
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 17 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.
Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 15, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org
We celebrate our impending renovation with a symbolic groundbreaking, and we talk about other life situations which are a paradox of the already and the not yet, the comforting and the discomforting, preparing the way for the new.
This morning we are celebrating two things that go together wonderfully well. Our groundbreaking ceremony, which is a community experience of and affirmation of our moving ahead in the process of being a more welcoming congregation physically, and the Hindu festival of lights, Diwali. Diwali is about the defeat of ignorance, about lighting someone’s way home.
Unitarian Universalism is all about the Light of Truth. That is what our chalice stands for. The search for truth is at the forefront of our faith. We teach that the revelation of truth is ongoing. It wasn’t dropped down from somewhere all at once, self-contained, with all the answers to everything. There isn’t a revelation that stands, written in stone, but the Spirit of truth continues to reveal itself to us as we gather more knowledge and more experience as humans. The light grows. Our worship services contain pieces of the truth, as great writers and thinkers, and as the ministers and the congregation grasp them. We always say “We could be wrong,” which is a great truth in itself.
We know there are people who need truth, who are starving for it, people who have been harmed by ignorance. We know there are thirsty human souls longing to hear the message that there is worth and dignity inside every person. They have been made to feel worthless by their religion, or by their family, or by the human condition, which seems to be that we hurt inside in a thousand invisible ways. Some people need this faith, however flawed its members and ministers may be. We need one another, and we need those who will be drawn here in the future. We make room for them. We light the way for them.
“Prince Rama was the son of a great King, and was expected to become King himself one day. However his stepmother wanted her own son to become King, and tricked her husband into banishing Rama and his wife Sita to live in the forest. But this was no ordinary forest. This was the forest where demons lived, including Demon King Ravana. Ravana had twenty arms and ten heads. There were two eyes on each head and a row of sharp yellow teeth. When Ravana saw Sita he wanted her for himself and so decided to kidnap her. Ravana placed a beautiful deer into the forest. When Sita saw the deer she asked Rama if he could capture it for her so they could have it as a pet.
However when Rama was out of sight Ravana came swooping down in a chariot pulled by flying monsters and flew off with Sita. Sita, although afraid, was also clever. Being a princess she wore lots of jewelry and she dropped her jewels, piece by piece onto the ground to leave a trail for Rama. Sure enough Rama, realizing he had been tricked, discovered the trail, and also came upon his friend Hanuman, King of the Monkeys. Hanuman promised Rama he and all the monkeys would help Rama to find Sita and they searched the world looking for her. Eventually a monkey located Sita on a dark, isolated island, surrounded by rocks and stormy seas. Hanuman flew to Sita to make sure it really was her. She gave him her last precious pearl to give to Rama and prove it really was her and she had been found. The monkeys helped Rama for a second time by throwing stones and rocks into the sea until they had built a great bridge to the island.
Rama and his faithful army battled with the demons until they were victorious. Finally Rama took his wonderful bow and arrow, specially made to defeat all evil demons, and shot Ravana through the heart, killing him. There were huge celebrations when Rama and Sita returned to the kingdom. Everyone placed a light in their windows and doorways to show that the light of truth and goodness had defeated the darkness of evil and trickery.
To celebrate Diwali, across India people decorate with beautiful lights, and some keep the lights on in their homes for the five days of the festival. In Nepal, there is a tradition of keeping your door open during Diwali. Both are lovely instructions to us as we make our space welcoming.
Many of us are aware of the forest full of demons. We feel ourselves surrounded by fears, surrounded by a feeling of loneliness, of self-hatred, of addiction or despair. These demons clutch at us, sometimes we feel lost and unable to see a way forward. Then we have friends, the monkeys and bears in our lives, people who come searching for us, people who accompany us on our journey, who get us out of bad situations, people whose writings inspire us, whose deeds give us courage.
These people, these heroes and sheroes are the lights that light our way out of the forest, that light our way home. During the ground breaking, I am going to invite us to call out the names of these lights, these people, … Martin Luther King, Jr … Fannie Lou Hamer … Howard Thurman … Rabindranath Tagore … Flannery O’Connor …
Who has been a light on your way?
I’m going to ask the architect and the folks involved with other aspects of the construction along with the members of our building team to go out into the garden. This is where we will have the symbolic groundbreaking. It is tremendously exciting to break ground, but there is another aspect to a construction and renovation project. It’s a breaking. There is some violence to it. There isn’t a way to create something more welcoming without moving things we love, breaking some things we thought would always be there. I want to let you know that this garden will be moved, will be renewed. It won’t be exactly the same as it was. Many of us have loved it fiercely, and many have enjoyed it without thinking about it too much.
This is why we need courage to move forward. It’s not always comfortable to keep the door open, to keep the lights on for those who are on their way home.
Please call out the names of the people whose light illuminates your path, and, if you know them, the names of people who have given this church life to this moment.
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 17 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.
Rev. Meg Barnhouse & Leadership Team
October 8, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org
How will you use your gifts? What if we were able to use our gifts to their full potential, and purposefully encourage others around us to do the same?
Call to Worship Mother Teresa
Love cannot remain by itself – it has no meaning. Love has to be put into action and that action is service. Whatever form we are, able or disabled, rich or poor, it is not how much we do, but how much love we put into the doing; a lifelong sharing of love with others.
Reading
How Will You Use Your Gifts? by Don Southworth
One of the first things I saw on my first day of seminary at Starr King School for the Ministry in August 1996 was the official school T-shirt. On the front of the shirt was a beautiful drawing of a sand dollar. I discovered the importance and meaning of the sand dollar later that morning during our opening worship service. Rebecca Parker, the president of Starr King, spoke poetically and movingly about the sand dollar’s history at the school and its symbolism for our time there. For decades incoming students have been given a sand dollar as a welcome gift in a ritual to honor the gifts we brought to the school and to represent the grace and mystery of our vocations to ministry. We were each invited to choose a sand dollar to take with us on our journeys.
With tears in my eyes, I prayerfully selected the sand dollar that I knew would be the perfect companion on my road to ministry. When I returned to my seat, and as I lovingly fondled it, my precious sand dollar shattered into several pieces and soon was nothing but sand dollar dust. I realized that this probably wasn’t a good omen for my future, so I snuck back to the basket to take another. Certain that nobody saw me, I slunk back to my seat and gently placed the new sand dollar in my pocket. Fifteen minutes later, when I went to touch my sacred sand dollar, I discovered it too was in pieces. Convinced that the Gods were telling me something about my choice to pursue the ministry, I quietly dumped my sand dollar dust into the garbage and wondered if seminary was the right place for me.
Fortunately, the T-shirt on the wall had writing on the back as well. It said: “How will you use your gifts?” Since sand dollars did not seem to be my thing, I hoped I could do a better job with that question. On that day, that question became one of the guiding lights of my life and ministry. How will you use your gifts? I have been blessed to be surrounded by faculty, friends, family, colleagues, and congregations committed to living that question with me. It is a question with the power to transform the world.
How will you use your gifts? Imagine what would happen if everyone of us committed to fully living out the answer to that question and helping others to do the same. Imagine if every person in the world overcame their doubts, fears, and oppressions and shared all their gifts.
We have the power to change and heal the world when we use our gifts to bless the world. And what better place to practice than in our religious communities, where we are encouraged to bring our unique talents, skills, passions, and dreams, and share them as widely as we can – even on those days when we feel as imperfect as a broken sand dollar.
You and I are miracles, my friends. We are packages of gifts that have never been seen before in the history of the world and will never be seen again. Our potential, our greatness, lie in how well we open our packages, our lives, and share them with other people. To paraphrase the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:
Everybody can be great. Because everybody can share their gifts with the world. You don’t need a master of divinity degree to share your gifts. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to share your gifts with the world. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love. (And maybe a pocket full of sand dollar dust!)
Sermon
Meg Barnhouse
(Sung)
Let the life if lead speak for me
Let the life if lead speak for me
When I’m lying in my grave
and there’s nothing left to say
Let the life if lead speak for me
Our Worship this morning is about Transforming Lives. Two members of this congregation will speak about their own lives, which have been transformed through service within this congregation.
One of my favorite theologians is the Baptist minister Howard Thurman. He said
“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
Most of the church members you see participating in worship this morning are members of the First UU “Transformation Through Service” team. They are here to invite you into transformation. If you care to participate, they have interviewers who sit with you for about an hour to ask you questions about you. This morning you are invited to think about a word or two that describes a gift you bring to this community. You might be a good teacher, a listener, a builder, an idea person, a detail person, or all of the above. This program is an invitation to transformation through service, so no one is asking you to sign your gift words. They will be collected at the end of the sermon time and some of them will be read aloud so we can be encouraged by the many gifts among us.
Tomas Medina
If I had my way, we’d change the order of our mission statement. I’d swap “do justice” and “transform lives” so that our mission statement read, “We gather in community to nourish our souls, do justice and transform lives:” In my experience, that I’m about to share with you, it is in doing justice that lives are transformed.
When I first walked through the doors of First UU, three and a half years, ago. I came for the worship service, to nourish my soul.
And my soul was nourished. It felt really good to be surrounded by people who believed in the same things I did, our 7 principles, and who drew on our 7 sources to inform their spiritual journey.
When I took the path to membership class here, I was told that there was a need for ushers and that being an usher was a good way to start becoming part of the community.
So my very first act of service here was to usher. And I did it for selfish reasons, to become part of the community. And it worked.. One Sunday, while I was ushering, Rev Mari walked up to me and asked me if I was going to come to the newly formed Alphabet Soup group, for people who identify as belonging to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or questioning community. I joined.
Another Sunday Rev Mari asked me if I was going to be part of the Adult religious education group, that was going through the new Welcoming Curriculum to help ensure that we continue to be welcoming to the LGBTQ community. I joined.
Another Sunday, Rev Mari asked me if I was going to be part of the newly formed People of Color group. I joined.
As an aside, if I just read the announcements in our order of service, Rev Mari woldn’t have had to take the extra step of telling me about all these opportunities. But I grew up Catholic and at the end of mass, the priests always read the announcements. I kind of figured if there was something I should know it’d be announced from the pulpit. That is not the case here.
Eventually, people other than Rev Mari starting asking me to do things. I became the facilitator of the Alphabet Soup Grop, I served on the intern committee for our most recent ministerial intern, Susan Yarborough. And, I’m a steward for this year’s pledge drive.
But it was my encounter with Peggy Morton, that really transformed my life, she told me about an opportunity to visit immigrant women being held in detention , at Hutto, about 45 minutes from here.
I am a child of immigrants and very much appreciate the opportunities this country has given to my family and me. For the longest time, I’ve wanted to give something back And, I’ve been very bothered by the fact that many immigrants to this country don’t receive the welcome that my parents were given when they immigrated in the 1950’s.
I began to visit women at Hutto once or twice a month All I did was converse with them, about simple things like their families back home or in the States. And, about incredible things such as their harrowing trips from their home countries to the states and the reasons why they came, which was often out of fear for their lives after seeing family members killed by gangs.
Talking with these women was humbiling. I very much admired their courage and resilience. It also made me appreciate how easy my life is because of the fact that I was born in the US, through no effort on my part.
All of the activities I’ve mentioned have been transformative for me. Before moving to Austin, I lived in NYC for 25 years. When I lived there I was a very appreciative consumer. I took advantage of much of what the city offers: theater, restaurants, night life, etc. My time at First UU has made me much more into a creator. I feel like I make experiences now as much as I consume them.
I’ve saved the most important transformative experience, I’ve had for last. This June, inspired by my time at General Assembly, our annual gathering of UUs, I took my first pro bono immigration case as an attorney. I represented a lesbian woman from Guatemala who had fled with her girlfriend because of threats made on their lives. When the women crossed the border into the US, they were caught by ICE and put into detention, aka jail, at Hutto. The girlfriend voluntarily deported herself back to Guatemal unawae of her rights to seek asylum. My client, on the other hand, did file for asylum. Though American Gateways, a not for profit organization that provides legal help to immigrants, I represented this women in immigration court. I’m happy to say that on August 23, the immigration judge handed down her decision and granted my client asylum. My client is now out of detention, living and working in Austin, without fear of being deported.
This was the single most transformative event of my life. Last year in a class I’m taking here at First UU, we were asked the question as to what is the thing in your life that you feel driven to do, that you just can’t not do. I answered that I’ve struggled with this my whole life. I felt like I should have a calling but never had one. I can now say, I have one. Using my legal education to help new immigrants to this county, is now something that I cannot not do.
Currently, I’m helping with our guest in Sanctuary, Alerio’s legal case. And it feels great to be able to provide the service that I feel called to, in the same place that I call my spiritual home. I feel whole, in a way that I’ve never felt before.
My point in telling you all this is to encourage you to move beyond just attending worship and start providing a service that you feel at least a teensy bit of a calling to. Or, if you already giving service, first of all, thank you. And secondly, if you fee so called take a leap and try something you have never done before. I acknowledge that we’re all busy and it totally normal to resist giving up more of your time. Believe me, I’ve often had that feeling myself. But, I promise you that in providing service to others your life will be transformed, in ways big and small. And just as important as the transformation, your soul and the souls of those your serve, will be nourished.
Carolyn Gremminger
So, how is serving others transformational?
My path of service at First UU has transformed my relationship with our community: from being a consumer to being a co creator. My energy has been heightened. I now purposefully try to see how I can use my gifts to become an innovator in service here and how I can connect with others to enhance our church community, and its efforts to better serve Austin and our world.
As writer Thomas Moore has said, “this process is not so much something we do, as it is something done to us”
Of course, it is important that I am clear on my motivation and attitude.
I try to enter with an open heart and mind and create a loving, accepting place for others. This effort sometimes open up new avenues inside of me.
If I draw from my Source, my Ground of Being, this enables me to have more hope and energy
“We all have a unique gift of service to contribute, and with time and persistence, it becomes apparent, by finding that “sacred service” the work that helps others and nourishes ourselves, we find how to “begin with ourselves, but not end with ourselves”- Roger Walsh
I have found that service can be transformational, when done mindfully and intentionally. There is a joyful path of service, a conscious spiritual path.
Not out of a sense of obligation, or for the ego or personal gain, not attached to outcomes.
A specific commitment to care for a need in our circles of concern.
I would like to share an example of how I was a beneficiary of someone else’s apparent path of service. I was going through a biopsy procedure, a few years ago and I was very afraid.
I did not take anyone with me to the appointment at the Hospital.
A volunteer approached me in the waiting room, and asked if she could accompany me. I agreed.
The reason it was scheduled at the hospital was due to the fact that the area to be biopsied was close to my rib cage. I decided to be a brave solder, as usual, and did not accept my doctor’s offer of a local anesthetic.
The volunteer stayed right by my side. As the procedure went on, I came to understand my doctor’s offer. The pain was intense and I was obviously distressed. The volunteer held my hand as the doctor administered the anesthetic. Tears were rolling down my face…. I grasped my helpers hand and looked up at her through my tears and said “thank you” and I will never forget her response…”there is no where else I would rather be.
This happened years ago, and I have never forgotten it. I don’t know the lady’s name, and I would guess she is a cancer survivor. I have always hoped that her act of service helped her in some way. She surely helped me that day, and I was a total stranger.
It can be an inspirational path, in service of creation, done in gratitude and can result in a more joyful experience of life.
You might find that the people you are attempting to serve can help you, teach you things.
I can honestly tell you that I have been personally transformed by my path of service here at First UU.
When I first entered these doors 15 years ago, I felt pretty lost and isolated. I now have support on my spiritual journey in community. I feel at home here.
Being a lay leader has introducing me to people and ideas that have changed my life at a profound level. I see myself in a different way today, more confident and loved. My mind and heart have been opened to a whole new realm of possibilities and hope. I now know that I am a valued member here whose talents and presence are needed. It has truly been a life changing experience.
In our community, our tribe, in the crucible for the creative, to quote Meg’s recent sermon. I experience so much fun and meaning and I have made some really dear friends through service on the Board of Trustees, cochairing the Public Affairs forum and helping out with the theater group and gallery openings.
Together we have accomplished great things…I can’t wait til the next service opportunity!!!! J
First UU is a safe place to practice new skills.
You can risk failure and be ok. Grow from the risk, in a non shaming environment. You can take a leap of faith here!
We are all in need of caring and care at certain points in our lives.
One could ask the question, who is really being served?
My reality is that I receive so much more than I give.
There are so many ways to get involved in service work here both large and small, short and long term projects and efforts.
So, if you are interested, how can you find your calling, your “Path of Service”
You could ask yourself:
What makes me come alive? What causes am I passionate about? What energizes you? What is needed?
Be open to the gifts that service can give you. The Process open up new possibilities, talents, feelings, sensitivities, a new and profound sense of belonging. It can unearth a new identity.
What we do in this life matters, for ourselves, our loved ones, and the community at large…. We can help to build a “heaven on earth”.
So, what do you say friends, let’s all work together, to continue to build Beloved Community .
Thanks!
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 17 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.
Rev. Chris Jimmerson
October 1, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org
Often we must make decisions and face challenges with incomplete information and limited options. Sometimes if we move into these situations with an open mind and heart, doing so can be transformative.
This past Friday morning, as I sat down to start writing this sermon, which I had titled, “leap of faith”, I glanced at the calendar on my computer and realized that it was exactly three years from the day I began full-time ministry here at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin.
So, it occurred to me that I probably ought to start by thanking our senior minister, Meg Barnhouse, for having taken a leap of faith on a fresh out of seminary new minister, who had only just received ministerial fellowship from our Unitarian Universalist Association three days prior to that first day of full- time ministry here at the church.
Thank you all for supporting Meg’s leap of faith.
The phrase “leap of faith” is thought to have derived from the Danish Philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, who actually used the term, “leap to faith”, which he thought was necessary in order to accept the contradictions and paradoxes present within the Christian belief system.
In my life, I eventually came to agree with him about those contradictions in Christian beliefs, so Ileapt to a different faith and became a Post-Christian Unitarian Universalist.
Anyway, I wanted to explore the ways in which we take leaps of faith and even what we mean by the phrase these days, with or without the religious connotation. I was curious about how much power the phrase might even still hold in our more secular era.
So, I conducted my own, rigorous, scientific study.
I put a post on Facebook asking folks to tell me about a time they had taken a leap of faith.
The post garnered 42 responses.
I told my trainer at the gym about this because he often likes to get into philosophical discussions with me as he puts me through exercises no one my age has any business attempting.
He said, “Wow! I didn’t think you had that many friends.”
Apparently, he’s a comedian too.
Anyway, some common themes emerged. Lots of folks had made a leap of faith to move somewhere to which they had always been strongly drawn – a place where they felt a peace and at home – often at great expense and often involving the sacrifice of lucrative careers.
Similarly, many people expressed having given up a career, often in mid-life or later, and making a leap of faith to pursue a strong sense of calling:
– Some, like me, had felt a calling to ministry and found themselves upending their lives to enroll in seminary.
– Many other people had made a leap of faith to switch careers and answer a calling to one of the other helping professions such as psychological counseling, social work and medicine.
– Other folks felt called to pursue a wide variety of creative arts fields, from writing to music to different types of design work to performance arts and many others.
People also talked about making all kinds of leaps of faith around parenting.
Another common theme people expressed was taking a leap of faith to allow themselves to love and be loved, as well as to leave a long-term relationship that was no longer working.
Finally, several Unitarian Universalists wrote of their struggles to allow themselves to even experience faith again after finding Unitarian Universalism, because they had been wounded by religion in their past.
Several themes around what taking a leap of faith is and is not and under what circumstances we most often take such a leap also emerged from those posts, as well as in several journal articles I read on the subject.
We most often take a leap of faith out of a love for something, a desire for something greater and more fulfilling, not out of fear. In fact, fear-based decision making most often keeps us stuck where we are or causes us to regress.
Leaps of faith are not acting rashly or foolheartedly. They occur when we feel a strong pull toward something, we feel a need for change in our lives, we face some challenge, and we must make decisions about what to do with incomplete information and often with limited options.
We choose to move forward, we make the leap as best we can in the face of great uncertainty.
And, really, when in life are we ever not facing great uncertainty.
And in fact, some folks have expressed that their leaps did not even really feel like much of a choice at all. I remember reading the story of one woman who eventually established a successful consultancy business after feeling unfulfilled and miserable for many years in a corporate job. She wrote of her experience, “It felt less like a leap and more like being pushed off the edge of the cliff.”
And we have to know that sometimes we do fall off the cliff. Sometimes we make a leap of faith, and we fail, or it does not work out, at least not the way we had planned. Sometimes, like the Wiley Coyote in those Road Runner cartoons, we go flying off the edge of the cliff only to hang impossibly in the air for a moment and then fall straight to the ground below with a loud “splat”.
The thing is, almost always, like the Wiley Coyote, we somehow miraculously survive the fall. And unlike the coyote, sometimes good things do eventually come out of it – we learn from it – we are transformed even if recovering from the fall is painful.
Back in the early 2000s, my spouse, Wayne, and I had begun to realize that we wanted to make some changes in our lives. We were living in Houston at the time. For a variety of reasons, we wanted to get out of Houston and felt that Austin would be a better fit for us.
Likewise, though we both had good positions doing work we liked at a non-profit healthcare clinic, for me at least, there was still a feeling of something missing, something not quite completely fulfilling about what I was doing.
So, I began applying for positions in Austin.
In 2004, when I was offered a position as the executive director of a non-profit organization providing immigration legal services and advocacy on behalf of immigrant rights, we made a leap of faith.
Wayne is a physician, we thought. He can get work anywhere, we thought.
We leased an apartment here in Austin, and I moved over to start the new position while Wayne remained in Houston for a while to sell the house and search for primary care positions here in Austin.
We sold the house, and Wayne thought he had found a position.
Then, it fell through, and he was not able to find another one.
“Splat”.
Apparently, at that time, primary care physicians across the country were trying to move to Austin, and the city’s healthcare infrastructure had not kept up with its population growth, so such positions were almost never coming open.
So Wayne had to go back to work for the clinic in Houston. For a year, we lived in separate cities, one of us traveling to be with the other one on weekends when we could.
And it was hard. It did feel as if we had fallen off of a cliff sometimes.
And yet we learned from it and were eventually transformed by it.
We learned that our love for one another, our relationship, was strong enough to survive and overcome the geographic distance that had been placed between us.
We learned that there really is some truth to that old adage that absence can make the heart grow fonder, but what they don’t tell us is that we have to work at it, even from across the distance, to help that love grow even stronger.
We learned that my domestic skills and talents were extremely lacking. I found out you can’t microwave an egg.
I’ve gotten better since then, though Wayne might feel differently as to what degree.
Eventually, Wayne got a great position with a clinic here in Austin, where one of the other doctors happened to be a member of this place called First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin.
He told Wayne all about it, and we decided to visit the church. So began a series of other leaps of faith that have been transformative in our lives and have led to me standing in this pulpit this morning telling you this story.
One of the things that so strongly drew me to Unitarian Universalism was that it inherently involves taking a leap of faith – not a leap to faith so that we can accept holding contradictory beliefs simultaneously like Kierkegaard said was necessary – but rather an acceptance that none of us has all the answers.
That revelation is continuously unfolding.
That there are questions more profound than answers.
That undiscovered vistas still lie before us.
That sometimes we experience transcendence by allowing the great mystery to wash over us.
We make leaps of faith within this religion all the time.
Lifelong UUs and/or UUs who are people of color, who stay with our faith even when it does not always live up to its own aspirations.
People who were previously non-religious who discover in Unitarian Universalism a faith that does not require holding beliefs in the supernatural.
Folks from various different faith backgrounds who often felt wounded by their prior religion, and find in Unitarian Universalism a faith where they can leap back in again.
And every Sunday, we come together as people from these wide ranging backgrounds and more. Every Sunday, we come together as a people with a multiplicity of theologies or world views.
Earlier, I called myself a “post-christian UU”. I made that distinction to acknowledge that we do have many UUs who view their faith through a Christian lens.
And among us every Sunday morning we have atheists, and agnostics, and possibilians, and Buddhists, and folks who draw from earth centered traditions and many, many other faith views. We have a number of us who hold a faith we have constructed for ourselves by drawing from many of the world’s wisdom sources.
Yet, despite these differing views, we come together to experience, no matter what each of us may envision it to be – humanity, the web of all existence, God, the music of the universe unfolding – no matter what we call it, we come together to experience something we recognize as much larger than ourselves, yet of which we are not just a part, but an integral part.
And that leap of faith we make together during worship, at its best, creates in us a sense of accountability to each other and our world – a faith that the way in which we lives our lives matters.
It takes a big leap of faith for us to come together across such a wide range of spiritualities, and yet every Sunday, we do exactly that.
Perhaps we need each other to take our leaps of faith. Perhaps, though we must sometimes go alone into the wilderness for a while, in the end our faith exists only in relationship with others.
In fact, sometimes, we make a group leap of faith. Over the years, I have witnessed the folks in this church make some pretty big and brave leaps of faith together.
Here are just a few of recent examples. Offering immigration sanctuary first to Sulma Franco and now Alirio Galvez. We were taking a leap of faith in both instances because it is not possible to know what the outcome may be when providing sanctuary.
And with Sulma, we were having to kind of build the bicycle while riding it because we had never done this before. And what a leap of faith Sulma took and Alirio is taking with us.
This church also had a capital campaign and is about to begin renovations and expansions. We made a leap of faith that like in that old movie, Field of Dreams, “If we build it, they will come.”
And my friends, they will come. Already, they are coming to our doors. We are only swinging those doors wide open and setting up a larger welcoming table for folks who are not really “they” but “us”.
Author and speaker Martha Beck said on Oprah, so it must be true, that our leaps of faith are always love based decisions, never fear based. These then are just a few of the love based decisions this church has made together.
We make our leaps of faith – we take risks in the face of uncertainty – because we are lured by love and life to do so. We take our leaps of faith because we don’t get to feel fully alive, most creatively alive unless we take these leaps.
We only get love if we leap.
We only experience the fullness of our own creative capacity if we leap. Our souls only take flight if we take a leap of faith first.
So, now you can go out into the world after our service today and tell people that one of the ministers at church told you to go take a flying leap.
Please, just be sure and also tell them that he said that because he wishes you the love and creative life fulfillment he gets to experience every day serving as a minister at this church.
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 17 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.
Rev. Meg Barnhouse
September 24, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org
We are in the middle of talking about our mission these days and part of our mission is to nourish souls. Rosh Hashanah is a time to celebrate the birthday of the world and a time of reflection. We discuss some of the ways we nourish our own soul and others’.
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 17 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.
Rev. Meg Barnhouse
September 17, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org
As we welcome Rev. Meg Barnhouse back from her sabatical we begin an examination of our mission, with a question in our minds: “Do we need to change this mission, or does it still express who we want to be?”
Text of this sermon is not yet available. Click the play button to listen.
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 17 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.
Laine Young
September 10, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org
We bring water to share from a place that is meaningful to us. Into this ritual we bring our love, hope, and courageous faith, and through it we seek to renew our covenantal commitments with one another. We remind ourselves of the church home we share.
Call to Worship by Barbara J Pescan
For the beauty of the earth, this spinning blue green ball, yes! Gaia, mother of everything, we walk gently across your back to come together again in this place to remember how we can live, to remember who we are, to create how we will be.
Reading
Water Makes Its Mark By Matt Alspaugh
A glass of tea sweats a circle of droplets on an old table
Drying, they pull dirt and stain from the wood, leaving a ring
Water makes its mark
Deep in the earth, in a cave, a drop falls each minute
Where it lands, a great pillar of white rock has grown up
Water makes its mark
On the surface above, a stream burbles and flows
carving out potholes in the granite of its bed
Water makes its mark
Along a highway cut, a geologist points out the layers of tan slate
each penny-thin sheet,
the memory of a torrential rainstorm eons ago
Water makes its mark
In its network of veins, the blood-
-salty like-the sea water- from-which -we -sprang
flows on in cycles, giving life
Water makes its mark
The dark clouds pass on, yielding no rain
Crops wither, and drought comes
Famine, migration, violence, and death soon follow
Water makes its mark
A space probe turns its camera toward whence it came
Imaging one solitary pixel of light
Its color the pale blue of oceans
Water makes its mark
A solitary tear slides down the cheek
A tear of abiding joy,
a tear of unending grief
We see, and share the depth of feeling at its true core
Water makes its mark
Sermon
When I started thinking about today’s service, I thought, “What better way to start today’s water communion than with a Story For All Ages! I am a religious educator, after all” Once I had this realization I knew the perfect story. I’ve told it here before, although not in a while. It is one of my kiddo’s favorite stories, so it is told more frequently around our house.
Since it is Water Communion, today’s story is about a drop of water.
Once upon a time there was a drop of water named Higgins. Higgins was no ordinary drop of water. He was a drop with a dream. Higgins lived in a valley where it had not rained in a very long time, so all the lovely green grass was turning brown, all the beautiful flowers were wilting, and all the trees were starting to droop.
Higgins had a dream that one day the valley would be a beautiful place again. But what could he do? After all, he was only a drop of water.
One day Higgins decided to travel and tell others about his dream. All the other drops listened very politely, but no one believed that his dream would come true. “Higgins,” said one, “get your head out of the clouds. You can’t spend your whole life dreaming.”
Higgins decided that he had to do something to make his dream come true. So he began to think and think and think. One day, as he was walking by a rusty old bucket, he got an idea.
“If enough of us drops of water got together in this bucket,” Higgins thought, If there would be enough water to sprinkle on a few flowers to help them grow and become beautiful again!”
Eagerly, Higgins told everyone his great idea. But everyone thought he was being foolish. “That Higgins is nothing but a dreamer,” they said.
Higgins decided he had to do something to convince the others that he was right. So he said to them, “I don’t know about you, but I’m getting into the bucket! I hope some of you will join me. Then there might be enough water to help at least some flowers grow beautiful again.”
So Higgins ran as hard as he could, hopped way up in the air, and landed with a kerplunk in the bottom of the bucket.
And there he sat … JUST A DROP IN THE BUCKET.
For a long time Higgins was very lonely. It seemed like no one else was going to join him. But after awhile some of the other drops could see that the grass was dying and the flowers were wilting and the trees were drooping. They all agreed that something must be done.
Suddenly, one drop shouted, “I’m going in the bucket with Higgins!” And he leaped through the air and landed- kerplunk -in the bucket.
Then two other drops yelled, “Wait for us!” And they hopped through the air and landed in the bucket. Then ten drops jumped through the air into the bucket. Then thirty. Then fifty! And then hundreds of drops came from all around just to hop in the bucket!
Soon, the bucket was completely full of water. But there were still more drops that wanted to join, so they found another bucket and hopped in. Before long, there were two buckets of water-then three-then four-then ten-and then hundreds-and then thousands of buckets of water!
Along came a powerful breeze that blew over all the buckets, and all the water flowed together to make a mighty stream. Everywhere the water flowed, the grass turned green again and the flowers bloomed and the trees stood tall and straight once more.
All this happened because Higgins had a dream and his dream came true. Because he knew that although he was just a drop in the bucket, enough buckets with the wind behind them, then justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.
How many of you have felt like Higgins before? Sometimes it can seem like we are all alone and that our dreams of a just and loving world will never become reality. This has never been more true than in our current political and environmental climate, where we may feel like only a drop in the bucket compared to the many crises affecting our world today.
But then we find a community like First UU Church of Austin that shows us that we are not alone on our journey. Every year as we come back from whatever we have done over the summer we gather in community to remember that together we can do more than we could ever do alone. We celebrate our reunion each year in a ritual we call water communion.
Into this ritual we bring our love, hope, and courageous faith, and through it we seek to renew our covenantal commitments with one another. We remind ourselves of the church home we share, a home that we come back to, a home we welcome all to make their own, a home of love, hope, and faith.
We gather this morning carrying reminders of our summer. The water we share may call to mind light summer showers, thunderstorms, dewy mornings, or misty evenings. Or it may remind us of moments at ocean sides, poolsides, riversides, lakesides, or even our own backyard. Perhaps we found ourselves in the presence of water during a moment of sadness or joy. As we blend our waters together, we reflect upon what we did in these places and moments.
And now, we will begin our Water Communion. Remembering that the sounds of children are part of the silence, please come forward and add the water you have carried with you silently and reverently.
Blending Waters
May our gathering together this morning be a blessing for one and all. May it inspire us to make this coming year a year of hope, love, and courageous faith. And may we walk in the full awareness – as often as possible – of the blessed ties that bind each of us together in community. Amen.
Benediction
It starts with a drop, Then a trickle …
A burble, a rush of water, bubbling toward its destination;
And finally the wide, endless sea.
All rivers run to the sea.
Today you brought water
Poured it into a common bowl.
Though our experiences have differed,
These waters mingle, signifying our common humanity.
Today you came
And shared in this sacred community.
May you depart this sacred space,
Hearts filled with hope for new beginnings;
A fresh start.
Go forth, but return to this community,
Where rivers of tears may be shed l
Where dry souls are watered,
Where your joy bubbles,
Where your life cup overflows,
Where deep in your spirit you have found in this place a home.
All rivers run to the sea.
Blessed 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 17 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.
Rev. Chris Jimmerson
September 3, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org
As First UU Church of Austin lives into our values and mission, what is possible? What differences will we make in whose lives? How big can we dream, and what will it take us to get there?
Call to Worship
By Leslie Takahashi
To worship means to consider that which has worth – today we consider, with gratitude, the many gifts of this community –
The opportunity to be affirmed in who we are and to offer that affirmation to others The chance to stand up together to help remake the world in the ideal of justice
And the aspiration to consider all life as precious for if all of it is made of stardust, how can it not be wondrous?
So this morning let’s welcome all of these gifts with gratitude – for they have been paid for with many currencies
The blood of the martyrs who died so that we can be free in our religion
The sweat of those who persisted in justice’s name against hostility and adversity The tears of those who struggled to build better lives for those in this life
The questions of our children as they understand the world anew and offer their understanding to us as a fresh lens
The laughter and joy of those giddy with the embrace of community
The dollars and cents of those who gave what they could – and then stretched a little more.
The infinite small acts of service that make the parts greater than the whole, done by those who knew themselves in sympathy with our purposes.
So today we consider with gratitude and humility what it means to pay forward what has been paid forward for us.
And now, with all of this, let us enter into worship with gladness in our hearts.
Reading
Gifts
For those who came before, who gave to us this faith that sustained us this, our beloved religious community.
We offer our gratitude and those gifts that are significant and meaningful to us.
For those who will come after us, our literal and spiritual children and grandchildren, who will carry forward our beloved Unitarian Universalism and our beloved church.
We offer our gratitude and those gifts that are significant and meaningful to us.
For the gifts of live and love.
We offer our gratitude and those gifts that are significant and meaningful to us.
For our common purpose, for the opportunity to gather as a community, for the blessings of nourishing souls and transforming lives both inside these church walls and beyond them, for the call to do justice.
We offer our gratitude and those gifts that are significant and meaningful to us.
For ourselves, we who form and carry forward our faith and our beloved community.
We offer our gratitude and those gifts that are significant and meaningful to us.
Sermon
“We gather in community to nourish souls, transform lives and do justice.”
What an inspiring mission. What a grand purpose. What a sacred reason to be.
And it arose out of set of values that this religious community has discerned are at our very core:
This is the time of year where we are engaged in our stewardship campaign to ask you for your financial pledges that will make living out those values and that mission possible next year. One of your stewardship ministry co-chairs really wanted me to call this the “Sermon on the Amount”. I declined.
I declined because I want to talk with you about more than just the amount. I want to reflect upon the vision that those shared values call us toward – the dream that we step into every Sunday, when we say together that mission, our sacred reason to be. – But I do also want to acknowledge that we sometime shy away from talking about money, especially here in church and especially as a part of worship.
And yet, a spiritual practice of generosity and a commitment toward responsible stewardship of our church and religious community is a vital part of nourishing our own souls and transforming our own lives. We have inherited this church, our spiritual dream and vision, because of the generosity of our religious ancestors, and we have the opportunity to pass it on even more greatly realized to those who will follow us. And to me, there is something divine in that possibility.
Our church, and all Unitarian Universalist (or UU) churches, are organized in a manner that is referred to as “congregational polity”. Polity just means how we organize and govern ourselves. Our congregational polity goes all the way back to 1648 and a written set of promises, or a covenant, that a group of our predecessor churches made to one another, called the Cambridge Platform.
Briefly, congregational polity, as established by the Cambridge Platform, means that we are a group of associated churches that support and work with one another so that we can all more greatly live out our shared UU faith. Each church pays into a shared administrative body called the Unitarian Universalist Association or UUA. The UUA provides many forms of important administrative and educational support to our churches and our larger UU work in the world.
However, each of our UU churches are independent entities. We own our own property and govern ourselves. There is no centralized denominational hierarchy that can tell us what to believe or what to do – all thanks to the Cambridge Platform.
Maybe that is why my UU History professor in seminary had us sing out Boo-yah after any mention of the Cambridge Platform.
Oops, boo-yah.
Let’s do that together. The Cambridge Platform.
Boo-yah.
The Cambridge Platform. Boo-yah.
The Cambridge Platform.
Boo-yah.
Thank you for indulging my religious nerdiness. Now, another result of congregational polity is that there is no centralized denominational body that provides us with overall financial support. The lion’s share of the funding that allows this religious community to step into the dream together, live out our mission, our sacred purpose together, comes from the very members of this religious community. We have to fund ourselves, also thanks to the Cambridge Platform.
Boo-yah.
And that’s OK, because I know that this congregation is up to it.
We have … you have the spiritual generosity to step into that dream together.
I know this because I have watched you pledge to a capital campaign that will result in creating a welcoming table for more and more folks who will join us in living our sacred purpose together. Strengthened by their presence among us, I have no doubt we will step into the dream even more fully.
And I have experienced the spiritual generosity of this church very directly and very personally.
Several years ago now, not that long after my spouse Wayne and I joined this church and before I went to seminary, Wayne developed a disabling and potentially life-threatening condition called polymyositis.
Polymyositis is likely an inherited condition wherein the immune system attacks the body’s own muscles.
For Wayne, it caused a number of symptoms and problems including weakening his leg muscles to the point where it was difficult for him to walk.
Members of this church brought us food. They offered to take Wayne to his various medical appointments. One member came by and gave Wayne two beautiful walking canes that this church member had hand carved himself.
I can’t begin to tell you how much that all helped.
I was working as the executive director of an immigration legal services non-profit at the time, a job that required well over 40 hours per week. Trying to balance that with caring for Wayne’s needs and just being with him was extremely difficult, and the help that members of this church gave us made a real difference.
Plus, I was scared. I was greatly worried. My heart was hurting over seeing what the disease was doing to Wayne and the fear that it might take him from me.
Just knowing that this church was holding us in prayers and love helped us to make it through that time.
Now, I want you to know that Wayne is doing much better now.
The polymyositis is in remission, and he is even seeing a fitness trainer at a gym, doing exercises people half his age have no business doing.
And in my time with the church since then, and especially now as one of your ministers, I have witnessed this religious community do the same for so many others – helping people through battling cancer and other serious illnesses, holding family members and loved ones through the deaths of ones they loved, loving and supporting one another through any number of life’s challenges and sorrows, and also celebrating life’s joys together.
And that’s only some of the spiritual generosity of this religious community that occurs within these church walls. But you also take that generosity out into our community and our world in so many ways.
We have folks working for justice by engaging in antiracism activities, fighting for LGBTQ rights, the rights and dignity of the disabled, women’s rights, immigration justice and so much more. We have a group of real leaders in the Austin area on the environment and climate change.
This congregation offered sanctuary to Sulma Franco and helped her avoid deportation to her home country of Guatemala, where she would have faced persecution and most likely even death.
That’s the difference that gathering in community to nourish souls, transform live and do justice makes. It changes lives for the better.
Sometimes it even saves a life.
I believe it changes our own lives by helping us to be better people.
People living more fulfilling, ethical lives and who are moved to work for justice in our community and our world.
What an inspiring mission. What a grand purpose. What a sacred reason to be.
And the thing is, I could go on. I have only scratched the surface of all the many ways in which this congregation is demonstrating your spiritual generosity by living out that mission. In all, we have over 80 ministries and programs.
I want to change gears just slightly now though and talk about the resilience and spiritual generosity this religious community has demonstrated over the past several months, while our senior minister, Meg, has had to be out so that she could heal and recover from the serious infection she had developed.
First, I can’t begin to adequately voice for you how much the love and support so many of you expressed to Meg and Kiya has meant to them. You helped lift their spirits at a time when it would have been easy to fall into despair.
And all the while, you have kept that mission alive.
For instance, over these past few months, a dedicated group of church leaders have expanded our efforts toward antiracism, multiculturalism and dismantling the dominance of white norms, both in the church and by working with other groups out in our community. We can and must keep expanding this work; however, we have an everstrengthening base upon which to build.
During this time, so many of you have worked in so many ways as we battled the many harmful bills that came up in the Texas Legislature. We were not always able to stop some of them, but there were important victories. I was happy to see that on Wednesday of last week, a judge at least temporarily blocked one of the most harmful of those that did pass, Senate Bill 4, the so called “show me your papers” anti-immigrant, anti-sanctuary city law.
Over the past few months, you have kept this religious community growing in so many ways. A dedicated group of building committee volunteers did a new set of canvassing visits for our capital campaign to invite relatively new members to participate. Those newer members responded very generously, and many of them have now become canvassers themselves!
And speaking of new members, 46 great folks joined the church between January and July of this year. That is more than joined in all of 2016.
In general, Sunday attendance has also been up, as has attendance in our Faith Development classes for our children and our youth.
If you did not get to be at the service that our high school youth did in May, let me tell you it was profoundly moving. It was great evidence that our folks that work with our children and youth over in our faith development wing are doing amazing and holy work. Rumor even has it that a couple of our youth have begun considering going to UU seminary.
The greatest number of members from this church ever to attend our Unitarian Universalist annual General Assembly did so this past June. Under the leadership of our excellent denominational affairs chair, our participation in our larger faith is growing.
And, so many of you have worked in so many ways to continue and expand our social justice and interfaith efforts this year.
Under the leadership of it founding chair, we have formed and sustained a terrific new Women’s Alliance.
Then recently, this congregation has again offered sanctuary to an immigrant that faces potentially life-threatening consequences without it.
Over the past week, I have been heartened by the generosity shown across our country to offer support and aid to people affected by Hurricane Harvey. I have been especially touched by the responses of our local UU churches, and most especially you, the folks of this church.
Because once again terrific leadership has stepped up from among you. They are providing us ways to donate tangible items and/or to make a financial contribution to folks who have been affected by Harvey. You can also contribute to help our UU churches that were damaged by the storm. Please visit the social action table in the gallery after this service to find out more.
These are just a few of the ways you have kept our mission alive and the spiritual generosity of this religious community flowing over the past few months while Meg has had to be away.
I tell you all of this because that is not what so often happens when a well loved minister is unexpectedly absent for an extend period due to serious illness. What more often happens is that much of what I have just described grinds to a halt. Anxieties rise. Tempers flare. Attendance and new member growth fall.
And very often the poor soul who steps in as the acting senior minister under such circumstances is treated in way that, oh, let’s just say is quite the opposite of the compassion, support and generous spirit with which you all have treated me.
And although of course I would not have had it happen under these circumstances, the compassion and support you all have shown me, has allowed me to learn and grow as a minister. You have helped my soul thrive, and for that I am and always will be extraordinarily grateful.
The resilience, compassion, generosity of spirit and commitment to our mission and ministries this religious community had demonstrated during this time is nothing short of amazing. You are already stepping into the dream together.
So, our stewardship campaign is just the way we provide ourselves with the resources it will take to keep living that dream together next year.
Members of the church have already pledged $300,000 toward 2018, many of them raising their pledges by significant amounts compared to this year.
I know that not everyone has circumstances that will allow them to do that, so here is that sermon on the amount after all. In this church, we ask that our folks pledge an amount that is meaningful and significant to you within your means. We are hoping to increase our pledges by around 5% overall.
Oh, and we also ask that you please be nice to your canvasser.
They are wonderful group of church volunteers who we can never thank enough.
What a compelling set of values this religious community shares.
“We gather in community to nourish souls, transform lives and do justice.”
What a sacred reason to be.
May we keep the dream of this, our beloved religious community alive and growing by continuing to support ourselves as we have done going all the way back to the Cambridge Platform.
Boo-yah! And Amen.
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 17 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.
Rev. Chris Jimmerson
August 27, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org
When we encounter life’s challenges and difficulties, the stories we construct about them can help us or hinder us from fully engaging in them and moving toward wholeness and healthiness. Drawing on the work of Glennon Doyle Melton and Brene Brown, we will look at all three acts they outline for our stories.
Call to Worship
No One is Outside the Circle of Love By Susan Frederick-Gray, Erika A. Hewitt
We know that hurt moves through the world, perpetrated by action, inaction, and indifference. Our values call us to live in the reality of the heartbreak of our world, remembering that:
No one is outside the circle of love.
We who are Unitarian Universalist not only affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person; we also affirm the inherent wholeness of every being-despite apparent brokenness.
No one is outside the circle of love.
We know that things break, or break down: promises, friendship, sobriety, hope, communication. This breaking happens because our human hearts and our very institutions are frail and imperfect. We make mistakes. Life is messy.
No one is outside the circle of love.
With compassion as our guide, we seek the well-being of all people. We seek to dismantle systems of oppression that undermine our collective humanity. We believe that we’re here to guide one another toward Love.
No one is outside the circle of love.
No matter how fractured we are or once were, we can make whole people of ourselves. We are whole at our core, because of the great, unnameable, sometimes inconceivable Love in which we live.
No one is outside the circle of love.
Reading
“Statement of Conscience on Escalating Economic Inequality” adopted by the UUA General Assembly
Challenging extreme inequality inequity locally and globally is a moral imperative. As a pragmatic faith we are committed to working to change economic and social systems with a goal of equitable outcomes of life, dignity, and wellbeing experienced by all. The escalation of income and wealth inequity undergirds many injustices that our faith movement is committed to addressing including: economic injustice, mass incarceration, migrant injustice, climate change, sexual and gender injustice, and attacks on voting rights….
…The growth of inequity does not happen by accident. It is a direct consequence of the decisions of those people who own and control the nation’s and world’s corporations and resources and their allies in government, who take for themselves the wealth created by the hands of the many and the bounty of our fragile planet….
…Unlimited funding of campaigns by wealthy individuals and corporations, lack of access to conventional financial institutions and predatory lending, and flawed tax policies increase inequity and insecurity….
…Our Unitarian Universalist faith calls us to respond to economic injustice and advocate for those among us being harmed by inequity…
…Words and deeds of prophetic people challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil such as inequality with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love….
…By speaking, acting, and spending in concert with one another and by centering, resourcing, and empowering communities who are most impacted by economic inequities, we can create better and more just economies. Together we can make a difference….
Sermon “A Story in Three Acts”
Act I:David Overton and Rev. Chris Jimmerson
David
In late March of this year, almost exactly three months before our annual Unitarian Universalist (or UU) General Assembly in New Orleans, a controversy broke out within our larger UU denomination.
The Unitarian Universalist Association (or UUA), the administrative body that serves our congregations in a number of important ways, hired a white, male minister to head up the Southern UU regional arm of the UUA. The minister who the UUA hired did not live in the south and did not plan to move to take the position.
A conversation began among UU people of color about how UUA hiring practices had seemed to favor white, male, ministers and how few people of color had been hired to serve in top management positions.
Very quickly, a Latin religious educator from the south revealed that she had been a finalist for the position. She had been told by the UUA director of Congregational Life that, though qualified for the position, they were looking for someone who was “a right fit for the team.” and were thus hiring someone else. People of color have often experienced the term “right fit” as code language that white people use to exclude non-whites from positions for which they are clearly qualified.
A number of charged exchanges broke out on social media and other communications. The UUA President at the time, Rev. Peter Morales, wrote a statement regarding the controversy, hoping to calm the situation. Instead, a number of UU people of color found his wording hurtful. The controversy became more inflamed.
A few days later, Rev. Morales resigned from serving as President of the UUA, citing his hope that doing so would allow healing to occur. By early April, the chief operating officer of the UUA and the director of congregational life also resigned. The minister who had been offered the position announced he would not accept it.
The Executive Director of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association wrote a letter to the UUA board in response. His letter further inflamed matters and by early June, he too had resigned.
In May, our well-loved UUA moderator (the moderator presides at UUA board meetings and at our general assemblies) also resigned due to a recurrence of a previous cancer that had been in remission. On June 2, Jim died.
So, as our denomination approached its annual General Assembly in June, we found ourselves with no president, several other high-level resignations, no moderator, and a raging internal controversy.
Chris
I recently participated in a workshop with Glennon Doyle Melton and BrenŽ Brown. The workshop was about how when we encounter difficulties, hurt and or/failure in life, if we can identify the truth of our story – if we can avoid creating a false story to numb the pain – we often can transform ourselves. We can learn and change in ways that are healthier and more life fulfilling.
As David and I were talking about recent events within our denomination and at our UU General Assembly, it became obvious to us that the framework presented in the workshop provides a great way to understand recent events within Unitarian Universalism and the challenges and opportunities our denomination is facing. In the workshop, Melton and Brown describe how when experiencing great difficulty, to respond to it in ways that are healthy and potentially transformative, we must live out a story in three acts.
In our current UU story, what David just described is Act I. Our denomination began what Melton and Brown call a “Brutiful Adventure”. “Brutiful” refers to how life can be both brutal and beautiful and that we have to accept and experience both. We do not get one without the other. If we reject the brutal, we also reject the beautiful.
The brutiful adventure begins with an inciting incident that often reveals realities and truths we have been suppressing or denying. In the case of our denomination then, the inciting incident was the most recent UUA hiring decision and revelation that a qualified person of color had been among the final candidates that David told you about.
This incident let loose a strong undercurrent of feeling among UU people of color about UUA hiring practices specifically and a continued dominance of white cultural values within UUism more generally that has been with us dating all the way back to a controversy that broke out in the early 1960 over efforts toward black empowerment within UUism.
The brutal includes the great hurt that so many have felt since the incident, the string of resignations and the unexpected and untimely loss of Jim Key during the middle of it all.
The beautiful is the way in which so many UUs have vowed to one another and to our denomination to work through these difficulties and truly live out our commitment to becoming a truly anti-racist, multicultural denomination.
Act II:Carolyn Gremminger and Rev. Chris Jimmerson
Carolyn
Since the events that David described, there has been a recognition within Unitarian Universalism, leading up to and following General Assembly (or GA for short), that we still have much work to do to be in right relationship with each other and to truly become a religion that lives our commitment to dismantling racism, both within our faith and beyond it.
We have come to realize that we are not all in agreement yet, and that we will have to live in that tension, even while remaining in covenant with one another for a while.
For example, we have begun a conversation about a culture of white supremacy within Unitarian Universalism wherein we do things in ways that adhere to white, western European cultural norms, often to the exclusion of other cultural practices.
Yet, some UUs object to the use of the term “supremacy” given how it is so often used in the media these days in relation to white nationalists and neo-Nazi hate groups. Other UUs though, feel very strongly that the use of the “culture of white supremacy” terminology is necessary in order understand the great challenge that lies before us as a denomination. For these UUs, the term captures that the dominance of white cultural norms is the water in which we currently swim and thus can be very difficult to see.
Other UUs fear that the great, almost singular concentration upon our internal UU struggles with race leading up to and at GA may distract us from other vital matters, such as climate change, class inequality, LGBTQ rights, women’s rights and the like.
Yet other folks also worry that this internal focus could prevent us from being present and vocal in public life at a time when our religious values are needed like never before.
Similarly, the UUA board had approved raising 5.3 million dollars over time to fund Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism. Many saw this is a very positive step. Others worried that it might drain resources from other important needs. During the early and most emotional times of the inciting controversy, relationships between folks became strained or broken and will need time and much mutual work for healing to be possible.
So, our denomination is acknowledging that we must commit to doing the work of coming together across our differences, healing, and learning from all that has happened. We have committed to living out our multiculturalism both within UUism and out in our world. We know that this will take time and that we must stay engaged even while it will still be difficult sometimes.
Chris
What Carolyn just described is what Melton and Brown would call “Act II” of our story. Act II is where we have to stay on the mat – we have to struggle with our difficulties, feel the bad feelings, live in tension for a while, because if we try to avoid them by moving on too soon, we will be doomed to relive Act I yet again someday.
Melton and Brown also say that we have to identify what the rules of our current world are that may be holding us back. We have to identify such unhelpful rules in order to move past Act I and begin to work through Act II. For UUism, some of those rules include the dominance of white cultural norms within our denomination, such as perfectionism, either/or thinking and avoidance of open conflict.
Unitarian Universalism is currently in Act II with the story we are sharing with you today, at least for the most part. We are identifying that which has been holding us back and trying our best to stay on the mat. At times, we have not been entirely successful at staying on the mat, and that is not surprising or out of the ordinary. It is difficult. Sometimes we have to recommit.
We have lost leaders because they did not stay in relationship with us. We are hopeful they will come back into relationship, perhaps in a different way than they were before.
Yet, we also have a great number of us who have committed to staying on the mat – to doing the challenging yet potentially transformative work that lies ahead. At GA, the leaders that moderated our sessions clearly worked hard to set a tone that was respectful and healing but that also recognized the difficulties with which we must grapple. They modeled acknowledging our mistakes and working with one another across our areas of disagreement.
A multitude of opportunities to learn about dismantling racism and creating multicultural ways of being were also offered at G.A.
So at GA and since then, our denomination has been doing its best to stay in the struggle against racism internally and externally.
The way forward will be uncomfortable and difficult sometimes. This is where we are for now – staying in the struggle, even though it is hard at times, because it is the struggle that makes transformation possible.
Act III:Valerie Sterne and Rev. Chris Jimmerson
Valerie
While as a denomination, we are still mainly in what Carolyn and Chris have described as Act II, we thought it would also be important to mention some really positive developments that have occurred leading up to GA, at GA and since then.
After Peter Morales resigned, the UUA appointed three co-presidents to serve until the election for our new president could be held at GA. All three co-presidents were people of color, and one was the first female ever to serve as UUA president. These co-presidents implemented interim hiring practices with specific multicultural goals for UUA positions, including management positions Then, at GA, the delegates selected our first elected UUA president, Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray! Rev. Frederick-Gray has pledged to work with a board-appointed commission to put into place permanent multicultural hiring practices and has already appointed people of color to top positions within her new administration.
In late April and early May, almost seventy percent of our congregations participated in anti-racism/culture of white supremacy “teach-ins” using materials created by UU people of color. These congregations dedicated a worship service to the teach-in and many have offered educational classes following it. In the two days before GA, hundreds of UUs participated in intensive undoing racism workshops, and, as Chris mentioned, there were a number of great workshops on the subject also provided during GA.
We also held a beautiful memorial service for Jim Key at GA, which allowed our folks some closure around his loss. Kiya performed Meg’s song, “All Will Be Well” at the memorial service.
Since GA, our denomination has also begun to embrace a both/and outlook rather than an either/or point of view regarding our being able to do the internal work of examining the dominance of white cultural norms within our own institutions and showing up to work for justice in our larger world. We can do both, and, in fact, must do both. An essential part of doing racial justice in the world is also doing it in ourselves. We can’t make change out there, if we don’t also do so in our own hearts. Additionally, we can work for racial justice while also still working for justice against other forms of oppression and harm to our environment.
For instance, large numbers of our UUs were among the interdenominational faith leaders who showed up in Charlottesville to stage a peaceful, interfaith counter protest to the neo-nazi, white nationalist supremacists group who were there. Here at our church, we decided until Meg could be back with us to do something similar to the teach-ins I mentioned earlier. In the meantime though, our church already has a lot going with antiracism and multiculturalism efforts.
We have done education on white supremacy culture with our Austin Area UU White Allies for Racial Equity group and our Board of Trustees. We have an active People of Color Group and allies group. We have begun offering a racism-unlearning circle and have offered several film screenings and other learning opportunities regarding antiracism.
Finally, a group of folks is working to identify a broader educational curricula that we can offer in 2018 that would accommodate a large number of our church members being able to attend it over time.
So, much is happening and moving forward!
Chris
All the positive developments that Valerie just described are what examples of what Melton and Brown say can happen in act III of our story. If we have done the work of identifying the rules that are holding us back and staying in the struggle, we get to write our own ending for the story.
While we still have much work to do and must stay on the mat for a while, as Melton and Brown would put it, these positive developments are a sign that even though these have been difficult times for us as a denomination, they also offer us the opportunity for real growth and transformation.
We have the opportunity to write our own ending – to create a faith that is truly multicultural and inclusive of a multitude of cultural norms and practices. Such a faith in turn, holds the great potential of being transformative for each of us as individuals, by widening our worldview.
We invite you to join in. Feel free to talk with David about opportunities for getting involved with our larger denominations. Join our people of color or allies group according to how you identify.
Together, with each other and with the many wonderful folks in our larger UU faith, we will write our own ending to the story we have shared with you today.
And that truly is holy work.
Amen.
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 17 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.
Rev. Chris Jimmerson
August 20, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org
Our mission begins with “we gather in community.” As we prepare to celebrate and participate in LGBTQ Pride week and activities, we’ll examine how our common purpose begins with a concept of community that values all of us as our truest, full selves. This will be the first in a series of sermons on the elements of our mission.
Call to Worship
WE ANSWER THE CALL OF LOVE By Julia Corbett-Hemeyer
In the face of hate,
We answer the call of love.
In the face of exclusion,
We answer the call of inclusion.
In the face of homophobia,
We answer the call of LGBTQ rights.
In the face of racism,
We answer of justice for all races.
In the face of xenophobia,
We answer the call of pluralism.
In the face of misogyny,
We answer the call of women’s rights.
In the face of demagoguery,
We answer the call of reason.
In the face of religious intolerance,
We answer the call of diversity.
In the face of narrow nationalism,
We answer the call of global community.
In the face of bigotry,
We answer the call of open-mindedness.
In the face of despair,
We answer the call of hope.
As Unitarian Universalists, we answer the call of love –
now more than ever.
Reading
LET US MAKE THIS EARTH A HEAVEN By Tess Baumberger
Let us make this earth a heaven, right here, right now.
Let us create a heaven here on earth
where love and truth and justice reign.
Let us welcome all at our Pearly Gates, our Freedom Table,
amid singing and great rejoicing,
black, white, yellow, red, and all our lovely colors,
straight, gay, transgendered, bisexual, and all the ways
of loving each other’s bodies.
Blind, deaf, mute, healthy, sick, variously-abled,
Young, old, fat, thin, gentle, cranky, joyous, sorrowing.
Let no one feel excluded, let no one feel alone.
May hate and warfare cease to clash in causes
too old and tired to name; religion, nationalism,
the false false god of gold, deep-rooted ethnic hatreds.
May these all disperse and wane, may we see each others’ true selves.
May we all dwell together in peace and joy and understanding.
Let us make this earth a heaven.
Sermon
This coming week, the Austin-area lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer community (or the LGBTQ Community) will gather for a number of LGBTQ Pride events, culminating in the annual Pride parade Saturday evening. Lots of straight friends and loved ones will also join in the Pride activities.
For many years now, our church has been participating in these Pride events, and for two of those years recently, we have held a “Big Gay Sunday” service to celebrate and give context to that participation.
So, earlier this summer, already knowing I would be in the pulpit on this date and that it would be Big Gay Sunday, I was at our Unitarian Universalist annual General Assembly earlier, and seeing it on display at a booth in the exhibit hall, I had no other choice than to purchase this big gay rainbow stole to wear for this momentous occasion.
And this is a time for celebration. Yet, I cannot help but feel an eerie sense of this strange juxtaposition between what happens when many souls come together at LGBTQ pride and what we witnessed last week in Charlottesville, Virginia and to lesser degree yesterday in Boston.
Next weekend, people will come together for the Pride parade, where they will proclaim universal love and acceptance – the valuing of each and every person claiming the fullness of our own, individual identity.
People will celebrate inclusiveness and the forming of community. They will uphold the beauty of how our differences blended together allow each of us to shine more brightly, so that together we form that famous pride rainbow that will be on display on flags everywhere. There will be beautiful colors and sometimes-flamboyant outfits. There will be dancing and music and laughter and joy.
We will recognize that progress has been made – oppression can be overcome. Though we are not nearly all the way there yet, and progress has come at a heavy price sometimes, our demands for justice have been and continue to be worth it. Contrast that with what we saw with the white supremacist nationalist groups last week in Charlottesville.
This so-called “Unite the Right” event could not have been more different than LGBTQ pride.
Well, except for the guys carrying Tiki torches straight out of the “on sale now” rack at Pier One Imports. As Betty Bowers, who claims to be America’s best Christian posted on Facebook, “when fascism comes to America it will be carrying Polynesian party accessories”.
They also carried Nazi flags on the streets of an American city, waving them next to their confederate flags, bringing together two symbols of two of the worst, most murderous episodes in recent human history.
Some dressed in paramilitary gear, and many carried semi-automatic weapons, pepper spray and other armaments.
The white nationalist protesters chanted misogynistic, racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic slogans.
“Blood and Soil”, they chanted – a phrase borrowed from Nazi Germany that idealizes a master race rising up out of white, rural, farm life.
“Jews will not replace us,” they chanted.
“White lives matter more.”
“F-You, Faggots.” Only they used the actual f-word that I will not say in this sanctuary.
Violence broke out, and, despite the claims of Mr. Trump that there was blame on all sides; the white nationalists instigated that violence.
A 20-year old man drove his car into a crowd of peaceful counter protestors, injuring 17 people, killing Heather Heyer, who was only 32 years old.
My heart breaks. I struggle with understanding. I struggle with holding these two events occurring so closely in time with one another, each seeming to take a sense of pride in such opposite directions.
LGBTQ Pride seeking inclusive community, while a white nationalist movement glorifies exclusion, along with religious, racial, gender and sexual identity tribalism.
A celebration of something worthwhile gained through a hard fought movement for justice versus outrage over the perception privilege lost because of the human rights gains of others.
Solidarity and equality juxtaposed with authoritarianism and hierarchy.
And the list could go on.
I think it is important to note that this rise in authoritarianism and race-based nationalism is happening not just here but throughout the world. So, I it is an existential threat to humanity and our world.
Certainly, it is a threat to those of us who are among its targets. So, I am feeling a need for the sense of love, acceptance and belonging inherit in our upcoming LGBTQ Pride week. I am feeling grateful for my Unitarian Universalist faith and this church that I so proudly serve.
Our faith was likely the first to perform a same sex union in the late 1950s! We were among the first denominations to ordain gay ministers. Though we were much slower to ordain transgender ministers, we were still one of the first faiths to do so historically. Unitarian Universalists have long been amongst the most vocal supporters of LGBTQ rights and marriage equality.
This church has been an LGBTQ welcoming congregation for several decades now, as are 95% of our congregations with at least 150 members. The Welcoming Congregations Program is a Unitarian Universalist curricula that helps our churches learn how to be welcoming and inclusive places for people who identify as LGBTQ.
If you have never experienced what it feels like to be excluded from your family or a community simply because of who you are, it is hard to describe what it feels like to find a community where you are welcomed and included. After feeling rejected by and never really a part of the religion of my childhood, when Wayne and I first found First UU Church of Austin, the only way I can describe what it felt like to me is that it felt like coming home, only to a religious home that I had never had before.
In fact, Wayne and I used to joke that being gay at this church almost seemed to be an advantage. People would be like, “Oh, you’re gay. That’s great! Wanna be on the board of trustees?”
I think that one of the ways that we do the work of ridding ourselves of the prejudices and sense of supremacy we have all been taught in one way or another, is to do the spiritual work of expanding who it is we are able love and love with equality, like the Welcoming Congregations program has helped so many Unitarian Universalists to do.
And that brings me back to the folks in the white supremacist nationalist movement.
I do not think that responding in kind to the violence, hate and intolerance will help us understand or much less have any chance of persuading anyone. Nor do I think it will help us resist this harmful ideology.
In fact, I think we likely need the opposite. We need that sense of love and compassion I was just discussing. As Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. put it, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
Earlier this week, the founder and editor of a conservative political journal who had been an avid Trump supporter, wrote an editorial in the New York Times in which he stated that given the events of the past several months, he now greatly regrets that support.
I was disappointed to read the comments by progressives on the editorial, in which many of them lambasted him and attacked him personally. What makes us attack even those who seem to be transforming their worldview in a way that we might be better off supporting?
At a recent public forum here at the church, Bruce Naylor, one of our congregation members put forward a concept he called the “Warrior Brain” that has helped me make sense of what we have been witnessing, as well as our own temptations to respond in kind sometimes.
Bruce theorizes that warfare had, at least at one time, as we moved from hunter gatherer, nomadic, tribal groups into agricultural city states, an evolutionary advantage, because at least for some groups, it eliminated the competition. Warfare then shaped our brains and was passed on through successive generations.
Bruce says that our warrior brains drive us toward an “us versus them” ideology. It focuses us on winners versus losers and loyalty versus traitors. Our warrior brain offers us no empathy for the enemy. In fact it dehumanizes our perceived enemies. It uses deception as a tactic. It fills us with anger. It pushes us toward tribalism. It makes us most comfortable when there is an authoritarian leader and a hierarchal organization of society.
Sounding familiar?
Recently, though, I had lunch with Bruce and another of our terrific church members, Peter Roll, and we theorized that we likely would also have inherited what we are calling our “Aquarius brain”.
Remember that old song, “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius”. Sure wish that would happen just any time now.
As the development of agriculture allowed humans to evolve into larger and larger city-states and then nations, we would have seen a survival advantage from cooperation and greater inclusion, as well as greater and greater specialization.
The Aquarius brain that would have been shaped by this would move us toward empathy, reason, compassion and inclusion. It would lead us to value difference rather than fear it. It would move us toward favoring more democratic organization of social groups and influence us toward loving with equality. This is sounding much like that juxtaposition I was struggling with earlier, isn’t it?
Now, these are very broad descriptions of the Warrior and Aquarius Brains concepts. If you want to learn more, look for the Science and Religion First Sunday Seminars that will begin this October.
I think these concepts can be very helpful as a framework for understanding, at least in part, what we’re witnessing in our country and our world. We all inherited both a warrior brain and an Aquarius brain. Some of us likely have a biological predisposition toward one or the other, and our cultural environment likely drives us toward more often engaging one or the other. But it’s not just the white nationalists that can fall into warrior brain mode. We do too.
Here is why I think we have to know this.
The stakes are high very right now. I don’t assume to know what candid Trump really meant by “make America great again”, but I do know what his white supremacist nationalist followers mean, because they have told us.
It means going back to a time when women were to be barefoot and pregnant. It means going back to a time when anyone without Lilly white skin was to remain subservient or risk there very lives – a time we unfortunately have never really entirely left behind.
It means going backwards so that Jews and Muslims become fair game to be scorned, degraded and attacked.
It means going back to a time when those of us with non-conforming sexual and/or gender identities were to remain hidden deep within our metaphorical closets at risk for our very lives.
Those are the stakes, and I think that if we engage our warrior brains now and respond with hate toward the hate, violence toward the violence, then the opposing ideology will have already won, because we will have already given in to it.
We must instead proclaim our ideology of love, inclusion and equality at every opportunity we can show up to do so.
So when we go to Pride events this coming week, we are not only celebrating. We are also uplifting and singing out a clear message.
We will not go back.
We will not go back.
We. Will. Not. Go. Back.
My friends, I will not go back. In my lifetime, I have tasted something greater than when it started, and I will not give up the greater equality and the opportunity to be legally wed with the person who is the love of my life.
And the only way I know to resist going back is to demonstrate more love in my world. To contrast and juxtapose that love with the opposite of it that is being expressed so frighteningly these days.
I must find ways to shut down my warrior brain and, as Dr. King said, drive out hate with love.
I must find a way to love even that young man that drove his car into a crowd of peaceful protestors, though still loudly condemning what he did and opposing the ideology that compelled him to do it with every fiber of my being.
I know this will not be easy. Empathy comes hard in situations like this. I try to imagine what misery lies behind such actions. I know it is not possible to live a life that is happy and full with a heart filled with such malice, and perhaps that is a seed from which some amount of empathy might grow.
I’m fear that if we give up on even one human being, we give up on all of humanity.
So, we must find a way to go on loving even when it is difficult, because it may be our best way to resist the existential threat of rising global authoritarianism and racial-ethnic supremacy.
We must find a way to go on loving for ourselves and those who are dearest to us, because the alternative is an entire society and perhaps an entire world constantly locked in warrior brain.
The Buddha said, “In this world, hate has never yet dispelled hate. Only love dispels hate. This is the law, ancient and inexhaustible.
So, during LGBTQ Pride this coming week, may we love with a great fierceness. May we put that love into action, building and expanding communities of love, acceptance and belonging in all of the days that follow.
Amen.
Benediction
Now, as you go out into our world, carry with you the love and sense of community we share in this sacred place.
Carry with you a mind open to continuous revelation, a heart strong enough to break wide open and a peace that passes all understanding.
May the congregation say, “Amen”, and “blessed be”.
Go with love.
Podcasts of sermons are available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 17 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.
Erin Walter
August 13, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org
Sexism and misogyny go way back, and challenging those oppressions can be a source of personal and spiritual growth. Why are UUs called to address sexism in ourselves, our churches, and our wider world? What simple or creative ways can people of all genders rise against misogyny in our daily lives? This sermon won the UU Women’s “Justice for Women and Girls” 2017 sermon award.
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 17 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.
Rev. Chris Jimmerson & Laine Young
July 30, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org
For our annual intergenerational service after our summer Hogwarts Camp, we explore the magic we make happen here at the church and beyond.
Opening words Nora Roberts
Magic exists. Who can doubt it, when there are rainbows and wildflowers, the music of the wind and the silence of the stars? Anyone who has loved has been touched by magic. It is such a simple and such an extraordinary part of the lives we live.
Homily
LAINE
Hey, Chris! Did you see all the little witches & wizards running. around church this week? Once again, First UU Church of Austin was transformed into Camp UU Hogwarts, complete with Hogwarts classes, games of quidditch, a giant waterslide, a planetarium, and even our first YUULE Ball (and that’s Yule, with two U’s, of course)!
The Harry Potter series is celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year, and this is the twelfth year we have had a Hogwarts-themed summer camp, and each year I like to think about why. We could pick a different theme for our summer camp every year, but something about Harry Potter, something about the idea of magic, seems to speak to us. Maybe it speaks to us partly because magic can mean so many things to people? Chris – what does magic mean to you?
CHRIS
Not supernatural
Not sleight of hand, magician’s tricks
When the whole is greater than, more complex and rich than the sum of the parts. There are so many examples of this happening in our world. Here are just a few that come immediately to mind.
People with varying interests, abilities and points of view coming together in the church to make our church life and ministries deeper and able to accomplish more from social action to fellowship to the arts to the renovations and so much more.
A comedy or musical or theatrical performance where on one night there is a dynamic connection between the performers and the people in the audience that is not there during together performances. I do not know what the difference is – what the magic is but it happens.
I have attended worship services where all of the different aspects are good and somehow the way in which the different elements enhance and multiply the effect of each other make the whole even greater than the individual parts.
The work that so many folks in our church do all the time to bring love out into public life so that it shows up as justice, when these varying efforts come together to make surprisingly wonderful change for the better in people’s lives, to me, is magical.
Laine, tell us a little about how this kind of magic showed up during Camp UU.
LAINE
Let’s see… on Wednesday afternoon the Great Hall, known as Howson Hall the rest of the year, was once again transformed! All the campers were decorating bags and filling them with all kinds of toiletries – there were so many bags that I couldn’t see the tables! The campers were making all of these bags to donate to Posada Esperanza, which is part of Casa Marianella, an emergency homeless shelter in Austin that serves recently-arrived immigrants and asylum seekers. Chris – did you know that Posada Esperanza offers a full-service transitional housing program for immigrant mothers and their children who are escaping domestic or cultural violence? The mission of Posada Esperanza really reflects the commitment of First UU Austin towards justice for immigrants.
And on Thursday, our witches and wizards enjoyed a performance by Youth Rise, an Austin-based organization that is largely comprised of young women and queer youth of color who have been impacted by the incarceration or deportation of a parent or caregiver. After the performance, our campers drew pictures and wrote letters to our government representatives about immigration – talk about making magic happen by putting our UU values and principles into action!
Chris, I wonder – what do you think we most often don’t realize about magic?
CHRIS
That it is so often born out of our takings risks – our making mistakes and learning from them.
Our experience with providing immigration sanctuary for Sulma Franco. Immigration sanctuary is when a church brings an immigrant faced with deportation into their campus to live to try to keep the authorities from carrying out the deportation.
We took a risk. We sometimes made mistakes because we were learning as we went.
Could have formed larger coalition sooner
Involving more people and finding more ways for people to be involved
Reaching out sooner to the larger faith community
Yet, we did learn and the coalition got stronger
The magic happened and was a transformative, life saving result for Sulma, and I believe transformative for the. church because we were truly living that mission we say together every Sunday.
Coalition grew into the larger Austin Sanctuary Network (now 25 churches) which supported St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in offering sanctuary to woman and her young son, who was also able to avoid deportation, which was likely life-saving for them.
Now the magic has come full circle, as we are in conversation with the Austin Sanctuary Coalition that we helped form and is stronger because of what we learned from our mistakes. We are in conversation with the coalition and a young man from EI Salvador whose life would be at risk if he is returned to his home country and who may need us to offer him sanctuary
I think we also forget sometimes that the magic almost always comes out of connection and a sense of belonging.
Even when it happens when we are alone such as when having an experience of beauty and awe in a nature setting, the sense of magic is our connectedness to our world and our unIverse.
This happens all the time here at the church. The sense of love and connection I witnessed between the children, youth and camp counselors at Camp UU was amazing!
Just yesterday, I started the morning with our stewardship ministry team and a wonderful group of our church members at a training on how to make the magic happen for our upcoming stewardship campaign that will support our church’s mission and ministries next year. The generosity of our folks in supporting this church is truly magical.
Then, I came over to the church for the Path to Membership class, where our terrific congregational administrator, Shannon Posern and several of our church leaders were discussing information on the church, Unitarian Universalism and the ins and outs of becoming a member of the church with a great group of folks interested in joining us on our spiritual journey. I can’t think of any greater magic.
And finally, I think about the way that the people in this church have come together during the challenging time while the senior minister, Meg, has had to be out because of such a serious infection (which we are grateful is gone now) and it touches my heart. This could very well have very well plunged us into anxiety and chaos. It often has in other churches that have encountered similar circumstances.
It is that sense of community that I think makes the magic happen. In the end it is not those of us who are the religious professionals that make church happen, as very special as we are, it is the folks that form the church and keep its mission and ministries alive and thriving that create the beloved community and radiate love and compassion throughout this church building and out beyond its walls into our world.
The fact that the people of this church have kept the magic happening until Meg can be back with us, I think, is a wonderful tribute to her and her ministry.
That is truly some big magic.
And speaking of big magic, Laine, I’m curious what things you all might have added this year to enhance the magic at Camp UU?
LAINE
That’s a fantastic question! This year was a unique year in Camp UU Hogwarts history. We had a new camp committee, which is also known as the CHARM Committee, and it was my first year as Headmistress Hedera Hufflepuff. I have been helping out with this camp since Kaitlyn was 6 years old, so…. 8 years now, but mostly with behind-the-scenes things, so this was an entirely new experience for me.
There were several magical additions to the camp this year. A new class was added called IUU, which is short for “Introduction to Unitarian Universalism.” On the first day of camp we all learned a chalice lighting together and signed the Camp UU covenant, which the camp’s head house elf, Laura Miller, showed us earlier in service. The IUU class also did things like a Blessing of the Wands Tuesday morning, which I thought was wonderful. There was a UU History class, and the Defense Against the Dark Arts class really explored our UU values and principles not only in the world of Harry Potter but also how we can put these values and principles into action in our daily lives.
I love that this year the campers, prefects, and professors had so many opportunities to explore and learn about how magical our UU values and principles truly are!
CHRIS
Wow, it sounds as if we are making magic happen here at the church and beyond!
And amen to that!
Benediction
May you know serenity.
May you know loving kindness.
May you experience a little magic in your world.
May the congregation say, “Amen” and “Blessed be”
Go in peace.
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 17 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.
