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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
and Small Group Ministry Participants
July 27, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

One of our church’s most transformative ways of deeply connecting with fellow church members and experiencing profound spiritual growth is by participating in a Chalice Circle or Wellspring ministry group. Join us and hear four participants share their experiences and the real differences they make possible.

Chalice Lighting

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

Call to Worship

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

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

from THE HEALING WISDOM OF AFRICA
by Maladoma Somé

Whether they are raised in indigenous or modern culture, there are two things that people crave. The full realization of their innate gifts and to have these gifts approved, acknowledged and confirmed. There are countless people in the West whose efforts are sadly wasted because they have no means of expressing their unique genius. In the psyches of such people, there is an inner power and authority that fails to shine because the world around them cannot perceive it.

Sermon

NOTE: This is an edited ai generated transcript.
Please forgive any omissions or errors.

Chris:
There are two things that people crave the full realization of their innate gifts and to have these gifts approved acknowledged and confirmed.

I love that statement from our reading earlier and given our current societal and political situation. I don’t know about you all but for me it can feel like as the author pointed out those innate gifts are being stifled.

Anyone besides me feel like living under the threat of rising fascism can be challenging to our psychological well-being and spiritual development? Well today we have some terrific folks who are going to testify about how participating in or even leading one of the small group ministries our church offers can provide a sense of connection and belonging. These groups provide a space where folks can talk honestly and vulnerably about some of the most vital and meaningful aspects of life, where folks can perceive, and then approve, acknowledge, and confirm one another’s unique inner power and authority.

I am delighted to invite these folks to share with you their experiences with our Chalice Circle and Wellspring small group ministries.

Hi, I’m Signe. Wellspring was my first introduction to small group ministry in 2021 as a participant. After that, I signed up for Chalice Circle and recently co-led a group, and I see some of my members out here, so that’s kind of fun.

Some of you may have seen me sitting over there near the candles in natural light. I’ve smiled and waved and shook the hands of many fellow UUers during the beginning of the service. Thus my smaller UU community started, the ones that like to sit in the same place.

Yes, we sat, sang, and stood together, but that was not the deeper connection I desired. It was during a homily someone else spoke about being in a chalice circle and how that impacted them and their UU faith. That sounded like something I needed to hear at the time, thus starting my UU spiritual journey.

So I signed up for Wellspring. This group explores in depth UU’s spirituality practices within safe structured group format as designed by Parker Palmer. Learning by doing, deep listening, and spiritual reflection within the group process requires dedication. Practices shared were drafting a group covenant, learning to craft a personal prayer, and how art, music, and movement are essential to a spiritual practice.

My inner Catholic contemplative mystic found this type of soul work familiar, now fueled with UU spiritual practices and like-minded people.

My journey of self-transcendence continues with a spiritual director, also called companion, from resources provided by Wellspring. Well, Wellspring requires a commitment of self-discipline and time for deep reflection and spiritual practice. The following year, I needed something lighter and signed up for Chalice Circle, which directly relates to the monthly topics of the church.

Chalice Circle continues to use safe group practices while reflecting and sharing about the church’s monthly themes. Each year, the themes change based on practices of our faith, values, and principles, like practicing resistance and cultivating compassion. Complete materials are provided via packets that are 10 to 15 pages long. The contents are carefully curated spiritual questions, exercises, poems, videos, playlists to expand on the Church’s theme. I found them worth saving for self-reflection, thus building my online spiritual library.

One of the past spiritual questions from the Path of Belonging Packet in 2022 was, “When was the first time you thought to yourself, Now I belong?” And because of Wellspring and Chalice Circle, I believe now I belong here. Thank you.

I’m Peggy Morton and I’m honored to have time to talk to you a little bit about my wellspring experience, the wellspring love at the center experience.

So I’ve been a part of this First-UU community for 29 years and have attended two chalice circles over the years, organized several social justice activities, and I’m not sure why it took me so long to finally sign up last spring for a wellspring class, but I’m truly glad I did. And I must say, it’s been the most enlightening experience I’ve had in this community.

I need to admit, I was not excited when our national denomination decided to go with this Article two. Because I thought I was very grounded in UU theology from our eight principles. But embracing this wellspring Love at the Center class, where we met twice a month for six months, opened my eyes and heart more deeply to UU theology, both historically and into today, and I now understand Article two better, and I like it.

Both the Reverend Carrie Holly-Hurt and a relatively new UU Melanie Caulfield guided us through this work in a way that I learned more about myself, six other attendees, and our facilitators in community together.

After each meeting, the next day, we would be emailed the readings that we were supposed to read and journal about and prepare for our next meeting. Obviously, we had two weeks to do this, which gave me a lot of time to read and think.

But at the next gathering, I would always hear a variety of perspectives about the lessons. And I have to admit, sometimes I would think, Did I misunderstand what we were supposed to do? But in reality, what it was, I eventually realized that we as individuals were gathered in community and embracing pluralism, a new term to me from Article II. And we shared from all of our different experiences, our different backgrounds and perspectives, coexisting quite like that interdependent web of existence that we learned about long ago when my spouse Fred and I first came to this church together and we only had seven principles at that time.

So I had known personally that having taken a sabbatical from teaching to live in Ecuador for a have in return to continue teaching high school journalism and to eventually add or start specializing in teaching English as a second language for the last eight years of my teaching career that I had lived experiences working with people from different backgrounds.

After retirement I stepped into voluntarily teaching adults English as a second language and eventually into advocating for human rights first in solidarity with unhoused people, then immigrants, then formerly incarcerated people. And I knew that I had learned from them about coexisting and embracing the lessons they had taught me in our interdependent web.

Yet through our wellspring group I saw better that Even when so many of us in this sanctuary today may seem like we’re all the same, we too have equally different backgrounds as we seek understanding from each and every individual who we meet. We’re bringing to life that spark of the divine that you used to say we were all born with. And I’m grateful, the many lessons I’ve learned and those that I still have to learn. And I appreciate each of you for listening to me today. I hope several of you will find or be able to make happen the time to explore and join a wellspring class.

Hello, I’m Doug Gower. Thank you, Reverend Chris, for asking me to speak about chalice circles. They say Unitarian Universalism is a process theology, not a belief one. Thus a chalice circle emphasizes not inculcating religious beliefs, but discovering and practicing our own.

What is that focus? To me, it’s the beloved community in the form of getting to better to know a small subset of our church congregants. A chalice circle is an intentional gathering for spiritual reflection. It is covenanted. That means anything discussed in the group stays confidential in the group.

Each session starts with lighting the chalice. In our case, that was a 99 cent plastic battery candle that one of our two wonderful leaders would switch on with a laugh.

A chalice circle is not a debate club. Neither is it a therapy group. Although being human, we always make some time for bitching and complaining. It’s real human beings sitting across from each other. Above all, it’s personal. It’s not performance. It’s not social media. It’s often said that people underneath are surprisingly alike, But we’re also surprisingly, amazingly different.

I met someone in our group who had traveled the world for years. Every continent, with little money, often sleeping outside in fields or under orchard trees on cold ground. I found that amazing. The only way you’d get me to sleep on an air mattress is if it were inflated on top of a king-size bed in a nice hotel with a bar.

In a chalice circle, we discover that we are alike and unique. Everyone has good days and bad days. You are privileged over the monthly meetings to witness these human ebbs and flows.

In the chalice circle, after some deep breaths, we take refuge. On the good days, we laugh a lot, out loud, gales of it. We learn to better know some of our fellow UUers. As much to the point, we get to know ourselves.

There’s a chalice workbook. Its exercises change monthly. I’m 74 years old. The last time I did a workbook was the third grade. Was I ready for this?

Each month has a cover illustration. One was Joy. It pictured a guy in a wheat field wearing a hipster hat playing a saxophone. I had a little trouble with that one. For one thing, I don’t play a sax. For another, my beard really doesn’t grow a good soul patch. So maybe extravagant jubilation under exotic conditions isn’t the whole point.

Some workbook questions were subtle. Others, honestly, a bit simplistic. But the group’s discussions never were. Joy I learned could be many things, working in a garden. Or just stop stopping, taking a moment, in the middle of a hot parking lot, on a tough day with troubles of your own to look up and see sunlight shifting through trees.

In chalice circles, we are not alone with our thoughts. In our chalice circle, the closest thing to an electronic device is the 99 cent battery calendar candle. In those 90 minutes, its scrawny, flicker, makes for not just a safe space, but a sacred one.

Americans are quick to focus on individual desires rather than the needs of the community, says Scott Hayes, a clinical psychologist. Looking around, I see people from my chalice circle right now, especially if I wasn’t wearing my reading glasses. (audience laughs) When I spot you in the pews or in the hallways, we often say hello, or stop and chat. But seeing you, I always think, “There’s people I know. There’s my community.”

The Chalice Circle is a UU program that helps make more real the beloved community. Thank you.

Good morning. My name is Nancy, and as many of you know, I am in the long process of preparing to go before the ministerial fellowshipping committee, a committee that will ultimately determine whether or not I’m fit to serve as a Unitarian Universalist Minister.

Now the majority of people who choose this route also choose to attend one of the two Unitarian Universalist Seminaries, Star King or Meadville Lombard, and most can anticipate leaving these seminaries with a strong sense of what it means to be a Unitarian.

But unfortunately, I did not have that luxury. As a mom of three, I am unwilling to relocate and my budget is tight. I know there are educational opportunities online, but trying to find privacy in a house of five is a near impossible task. So instead, I opted to attend Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, which is a Christian Seminary here in town.

At Austin Seminary, I was constantly making note of the differences between their faith and ours, and so I left feeling like I had a pretty good grounding in UU theology.

But then I began to worry. As you can imagine, there is much speculation about what candidates will be asked by the Ministerial Fellowship Committee. And my fellow seminarians and I soon began to suspect that we’d be expected to prove our grounding in UU theology, specifically because we had attended a Christian seminary.

And so, to cover my bases, I decided that I’d better take as many adult R .E. classes as possible. And soon, I found myself co-facilitating the Wellspring Sources Group with another one of my fellow UU Seminarians, Zach Havenwood.

Now, I thought I had a good understanding of my UU identity, but sources made me realize the depth and breadth of our theology. The Wellspring Sources Group explores each source in detail, complete with readings, essays, music, and of course, small group discussions. The class significantly deepened my appreciation of this faith, and it actually strengthened my commitment to this congregation, which is truly a statement I never anticipated saying.

I’ve always been very suspicious of organized religion in general, And I’ve always bristled about being told what to do and what to believe. Indeed, for as long as I can remember, I’ve always believed in the subjectivity of truth, which in most religious traditions is problematic. But our sources support this belief and celebrates the many different ways that people make sense of the universe.

For me, our sources go far in explaining who we are as a religious body. In fact, I often rely on our sources when I give people my elevator pitch for being a UU. I guess it makes sense then that sources is the foundational wellspring group. It is a prerequisite for most of the other courses.

In addition to exploring each source, I learned so much about myself and about my fellow group members throughout the entire class. It made me realize and appreciate the diversity of beliefs within this congregation. And it allowed me to form friendships with fellow congregants, something that can be challenging when you’re in a church as big as ours.

I enjoy the Wellspring Sources group so much that I went on to co-facilitate spiritual practices with fellow church member John Scott in the newest wellspring offering Love at the Center with Zach once again as my co-facilitator. And I’ve left each of these experiences with new friends a better understanding of my biases and a deep understanding of just how rich our faith really is.

As an added bonus, I started seeing a spiritual director, namely the Reverend Kathleen Ellis who is also a member of this church. The Wellspring groups encourage participants to take part in spiritual direction and I can honestly say that spiritual direction has been life changing for me. It has taught me much about the importance of presence and deep listening. I can’t say enough about the great experiences that the groups offer.

So instead, I’ll simply invite you to experience it yourself first-hand. This fall, I invite you to deepen your UU identity, to make new self-discoveries, and to get to know the members of this church a little bit better. All this and more awaits you. Thanks.

Chris:
Thank you so much to each of you for sharing those moving and informative experiences this morning. And if after hearing these folks you might be interested in getting involved in a small group ministry a special email announcement will be coming out later this afternoon or you can go to www.austinuu.org and get more information on how to get involved in a chalice circle or wellspring small group.

From our universalist heritage, we draw that sense that a river of divine love flows through our universe and through each of us. Small group ministries are one way in which we can help each other find channels for the expression of that divine love in our world, not in the abstract, but in the here and now, in this world as we find it.

Our small groups are a way that together we can combine those rivers into oceans of fierce love for our times.

Extinguishing the Chalice

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

Benediction

As we go back out into our world today, may we carry with us the love of this, our beloved religious community. May we center our lives in love just as we center our faith in love. May the melody flowing through our souls be a river of love that carries us forward. Until next we gather our spirits again.

May the congregation say amen and blessed be.

Go in peace.

SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 25 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link above to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

PODCASTS

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

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Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
July 13, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Over the past decade, First UU Church of Austin has twice offered immigration sanctuary to immigrants fearing unjust detention and deportation. What might being a sanctuary church look like, given the racist, police state tactics we are currently witnessing under the intentionally deceptive guise of national security and immigration enforcement?

Chalice Lighting

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

Call to Worship

“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”

– Hebrews 13:2

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

WHAT DO RELIGIONS TEACH ABOUT IMMIGRANTS
by Alonzo Gaskill

The majority of religious traditions teach their adherents the importance of respecting life. Many, such as the dharmic faiths, have a central teaching, the need to practice ahimsa, or non-violence in actions, but also in words and thoughts. Thus, most major faith traditions will take the position that if someone from another country or community visits your own, you have a duty to treat them with love, respect, dignity, and honor.

…the command to embrace love and even help those who immigrate or visit is consistent. Indeed, most religions teach that there are spiritual or salvific consequences for negating this sacred commandment.

Sermon

Valerie Kaur’s Movie Clip:

She clung to a jacaranda tree. When I was little, my father said to me, “If you ever get lost in the woods, hug a tree.” That’s what they teach us when we are children, that the trees will calm us, protect us, love us when we are scared and alone.

She clung to a jacaranda tree. They took her anyway, pried her fingers from the silver trunk, dragged her into an unmarked van. Bystanders shouted and cursed and cried for them to stop, but they did not stop. Masked men threw tear gas canisters behind them as they drove away, disappearing into a cloud of gas like villains in a poorly written movie script.

I can’t get the images out of my head. The masked men, the bystanders, the cloud of gas, the young woman, and the tree.

Who do I want to be in the story? Who do you want to be in the story? I want to be the jacaranda. I want to make myself so strong, so steady, so rooted that my neighbors can hold on to me, the neighbors I know, and the ones I do not know. I want to find the courage inside of me to transfigure myself, to be braver with my love than I ever have before.

You might say, “What’s the use? They took her anyway.” Here’s what I see. One jacaranda is not enough. We need hundreds of jacarandas, millions of jacarandas, so that no matter how hard they pry her away, another one of us is right there ready for her to take hold. We must all become jacarandas.

This is not pretty poetry. This is a life-and-death call to risk ourselves for others, to become that strong, that rooted, that powerful, that beautiful, to become jacarandas.

In May of 2015, First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin offered immigration sanctuary to Sulma Franco, whose life would be endangered if Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE were to deport her to her home country of Guatemala.

If you don’t know Sulma or her story, we will be celebrating her here at the church on this coming Saturday evening, July 19.

In the summer of 2017, we again offered immigration sanctuary to a young man named Alirio, whose life would also be at threat if ICE were to deport him to El Salvador.

Back then, providing church immigration sanctuary involved setting up a private, apartment-like area of the church in which Sulma and then later Alirio could live.

At the time, ICE had an internal memorandum dictating that their agents would not enter a church building to detain an immigrant and place them into the deportation process.

Because Sulma and then Alirio might have been at risk if they left the church grounds, church members also provided for meals, groceries, laundry and the like.

Along with a number of other churches and organizations, some of which have joined together to become the Austin Sanctuary Network, we also worked with Sulma and, again, then Alirio, to conduct a public advocacy campaign.

The campaign was designed to gain their freedom from the threat of detainment and deportation, as well as to shed light on a broken immigration system.

Sulma’s status is now such that she no longer requires church sanctuary.

Alirio remains in a kind of extended sanctuary, wherein he is able to spend more time with family and loved ones, while still accessing whatever safe haven the church can still provide, which I will talk more about shortly.

We have remained a part of the Austin Sanctuary Network and still consider ourselves a sanctuary church.

But then came the second Trump administration, and they rescinded that ICE memorandum about not entering, not desecrating, church spaces.

Then came the second Trump administration and the implementation of the extremist, White Christian Nationalist plan called Project 2025, and suddenly – suddenly, we find ourselves in a new and far more threatening environment in which our government is using immigrants and other vulnerable folks as targets to test how far we will allow them go toward establishing an authoritarian police state.

And if we are tempted think this is an exaggeration, we need only study the history of authoritarian states to understand that this is the playbook aspiring despots have so often used.

We need only look out how the administration co-opted the California national guard and sent them along with marines into the streets of Los Angeles on trumped up claims of riots that were in fact mostly peaceful protests in reaction to ICE raids destroying so many lives in that city.

We need only look at these photos posted by my friend, Lawrence Ingalls in Santa Ana, CA, several miles from where the supposed riots in Los Angeles were supposedly occurring.

Lawrence and his husband, my friend and colleague, Rev. Dr. Jason Cook, live just one mile from where these military personnel were deployed, fingers on the triggers of their automatic weapons, no explanation provided for their presence on the streets of an American city.

Under the false guise of national security and law enforcement, they are denying due process, violating humanitarian norms, separating families, including children from their parents, kidnapping people and flying them off to countries where they have never been and that are known internationally as the most egregious violators of human rights and dignity.

In those countries and now here in the U.S. in facilities such as the recently opened, so called “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida, the Trump administration is placing people into what can only truthfully be called concentration camps.

Trump and his supporters, including some in our government, have even made jokes literally celebrating alligators eating people who might try to escape that facility in Florida, one of them posting “Alligator Lives Matter”.

And this language is no accident. This is a racist throwback to the early 1900s when black people, especially black babies were often referred to as “alligator bait.”

The language is on purpose. It is a blatant racist appeal.

And because our government and ICE are doing all of this under the cover of lies and secrecy, behind the cowardice of wearing facial masks like the KKK of old, racists vigilantes across the country are adding to the terrorism and victimization by posing as ICE agents themselves.

Here is just one extremely disturbing example, though this fool didn’t even bother with a mask.

ICE impersonator video

So, given this racist, government sanctioned environment, what do we do?

How do we as a church continue to provide faithful sanctuary?

And make no mistake, we must continue to do this.

At the very least, we must continue to do it to halt the authoritarians from expanding their reign of terror upon even more folks.

More vitally though, we continue to do it because our values centering us in love demand this of us – because that mission we say together every Sunday demands this of us – because our humanity – the preservation of our very own souls demand this of us.

We cannot know and be a part of the divine love that flows through our universe and allow this to go on.

So, how do we continue to do it?

What does faithful church sanctuary look like in this age in which we find ourselves?

Well, I’m not sure we know all for the answers to that yet. I know I don’t. We’re still learning even as we resist the new evils being perpetrated. I began with the video from Valarie Kaur though because I think that metaphor of us all becoming jacaranda trees is so powerful and so useful.

We must all become those trees, and, as a church, we will also be called to provide more branches for more folks to hang onto.

So, for instance, there may be circumstance in which we are still called to provide a literal, physical place for someone to stay within the church.

But even when physical sanctuary is not a viable solution, we will be called to try to metaphorically shelter those whose legal and human rights, indeed their very life and wellbeing are at risk by joining in pubic advocacy campaigns – we are called to let our rogue government know we are watching and resisting – called to protest – called to demand information on the whereabouts of folks taken into ICE custody and due process for them, such as the 49 people in our community that ICE “disappeared” recently – and, yes, some of us may be called to civil disobedience and personal risk.

We are called to demand local law enforcement disengage with ICE and provide proper due process, access to legal representation, including for immigrants.

We will be called to accompany folks to court and immigration visits – leveraging our own privilege to take sanctuary into the places where ICE abuses are regularly happening.

Faithful church sanctuary may also involve detention visits when and if possible, supporting legal expenses, assisting with day to day errands of life so that folks have less exposure risk, supporting know your rights and legal presentations, and helping to set up safe havens and care for children separated from parents.

And I believe, because these gross violations of human rights are being committed within a grotesque ideology of White Christian Nationalism, we must be willing to publicly counter this by loudly proclaiming this is not religious – this is not Christian.

We have to be willing to know and use scripture from the world’s religions, especially the Christian bible, that demands the just and compassionate treatment of immigrants.

These are just a few examples. We will learn more as we go. We are fortunate to have Peggy from our Inside Amigos church immigration justice group and Austin Sanctuary Network.

Please talk with Peggy to find out how you can get involved and what you can do to help your church be that faithful sanctuary to which we are called.

My Beloveds, for me, this is personal, and it is spiritual. It is a religious calling from the very core of our Unitarian Universalist faith.

I return to where I started this sermon.

Over the years, I have gotten to know Sulma and Alirio and have come to love them both.

I love Sulma’s fieriness and her humor and compassion – her willingness to be that jacaranda tree for others even as she herself was at great personal risk.

I love Alirio’s gentle kindness and the steely strength he harbors within – his willingness to be that jacaranda tree for others even as he himself was at great personal risk.

I cannot truthfully and faithfully live out my own story without recognizing that it is inextricably interwoven with their stories and those of so many others.

And so I must try to live their example and do my best to become that jacaranda tree too – to declare in the name of that fierce love that I call God – “I will not remain silent. I will not hide away within my own privilege. I will do whatever I can to join with my beloveds and replace the injury to God that is being perpetrated by an ideology of spiritual and religious deceit with a faithful sanctuary within which all are loved, welcomed, and supported in their fullest flourishing.

That is the true fulfillment of the divine in our world.

We will close with Valarie Kaur’s closing words:

“We must all become jacarandas.
This is not pretty poetry.
This is a life and death call to risk ourselves for others.
To become that strong.
That rooted.
That powerful.
That beautiful.
To become jacarandas.”

Extinguishing the Chalice

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

Benediction

Leviticus 19:33-34

“If a foreigner stays with you in your land, do not do them wrong. Rather, treat the foreigner staying with you like the native born among you. You are to love them as yourself.”

May the congregation say amen and blessed be. Go in peace.

SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 25 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link above to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

PODCASTS

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
June 15, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

For individuals, feeling a part of something larger than oneself can increase happiness, enhance well-being, create a greater sense of purpose and meaning in life, give us a sense of belonging, and improve mental health in a variety of areas. First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin is a part of our larger UU faith and an even larger effort to build Beloved Community. Might fully engaging this larger belonging confer these same benefits to us a religious community?

Chalice Lighting

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

Call to Worship

SOMETHING A BIT LARGER

Scientists estimate that there are at least a septillion stars out there. That’s a one, followed by 24 zeros. Imagine then, how much star dust there may be. I am but one tiny configuration of star dust. That’s so infinitesimal. Any yet, I am an integral part of something much greater than a septillion! And that’s immeasurable! What a difference I might make.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

BELONGING
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

And if it’s true we are alone,
we are alone together,
the way blades of grass
are alone, but exist as a field.
Sometimes I feel it,
the green fuse that ignites us,
the wild thrum that unites us,
an inner hum that reminds us
of our shared humanity.

Just as thirty-five trillion
red blood cells join in one body
to become one blood.
Just as one hundred thirty-six thousand
notes make up one symphony.
Alone as we are, our small voices
weave into the one big conversation.
Our actions are essential
to the one infinite story of what it is
to be alive.

When we feel alone,
we belong to the grand communion
of those who sometimes feel alone –
we are the dust, the dust that hopes,
a rising of dust, a thrill of dust,
the dust that dances in the light
with all other dust, the dust
that makes the world.

Sermon

At the turn of the 19th century, 23 year old Joseph Tuckerman was asked to be the minister of what would become the Unitarian church in the town of Chelsea Massachusetts.

He had recently graduated from from Harvard (you know, that place that is under attack by the taco tyrant all of these years later), where one of his classmates was another aspiring minister, William Ellery Channing, who would go on to give a famous sermon he titled, “Unitarian Christianity” that would catalyze the formalization of Unitarian religion in the United States and lead to Channing and others forming the American Unitarian Association six years later.

Tuckerman, though, struggled at Harvard. It’s said Channing had even told him, “You should study harder.”

But Tuckerman felt something was missing from his studies. He didn’t want to just read books all the time. He felt like he could also learn from talking with other people.

Something was incomplete. He need more to be feel whole.

He did graduate though and went on to serve that church in Chelsea for 25 years, preaching twice on Sundays and serving the spiritual needs of the people in his congregation.

Still, he continued to feel something was missing – a dissatisfaction. That his ministry and calling were not entirely complete.

And so he began to also serve the greater community in Chelsea, where many sailors and their families lived.

The sailors were often away for months and years, so their families often faced periods where they had little money.

Tuckerman would help them with food, clothing or whatever else they might need.

In 1826, still feeling a need to connect with something larger and facing ill health, Tuckerman resigned from his church.

He went to Boston, where he immersed himself among the sailors and others who lived with financial challenges, as well as difficulties like alcoholism.

Tuckerman listened to their stories about how they had come to face these challenges and what their needs were. He studied his bible and concluded that Jesus had called us to love everyone and to assist the poor, the hungry, the sick, including the illness of addiction. And there he found his greater calling.

He worked with his college classmate’s American Unitarian Association to create an organization that coordinated with each of the Unitarian churches throughout the Boston area to provide support and assistance to help meet the needs of folks in their neighborhoods and communities.

Joseph Tuckerman had found his purpose and now felt complete, and in doing so, he founded what we have come to know as “community ministry” – ministers who primarily serve the needs of communities beyond our church walls.

Tuckerman found his purpose in life by connecting with something much larger than himself and what had traditionally been the role of a minister.

Author and scholar of mythology and religion, Joseph Campbell said, “A hero is someone who has given their life to something bigger than oneself.”

And I suppose by that definition he means we all have the capacity to be heroes in on our own way.

He believed we all have a purpose – a calling from and toward something larger than ourselves that when followed will bring us bliss.

He said, “Follow your bliss.”

Our religious education manager, Sol, spoke eloquently of this last Sunday when they talked about the sense of calling they have found through Sol’s wonderful work with our children.

And, there is evidence that, like our Unitarian ancestor Joseph Tuckerman, we all need that sense of being a part of something greater to feel complete and fulfilled.

Studies have found that having a sense of being a part of something larger benefits us in a variety of ways, especially when that sense is that though we may be a tiny part of that something larger, we are also an integral part it.

So, embrace humility and hero potential all at the same time! Now, some of those potential benefits of doing so seem to be:

• positive psychological effects, such as reduced stress and anxiety, less depression, and a greater sense of wholeness, happiness and life-fulfillment.
• a bigger sense of connection and belonging, moving us toward greater compassion, empathy and prosocial behavior.
• it can make us more resilient in the face of life challenges.
• provide us with greater meaning and purpose in our lives, and when shared with other folks can deepen our emotional bonds.

And that’s just to name a few! 

Now, it’s important to note that feeling we are a part of something larger can take many different forms.

That “something larger” could be a belief in a deity or a sense of transcendent or divine forces at play in our universe.

But, it can also take so many other forms:

• Joining a church can feel like connecting with something larger.
• Playing a piano duet such that the combined talent produces something of even greater beauty!
• Prayer, meditation, and other forms of religious or spiritual experiences whether or not they involve a supernatural belief system.
• It can be dedication to a cause or working for justice
• It could be a vocation that fulfills us, but it could also be the volunteer work we do during our time off.
• It could be an art, music, a sport or athletic endeavor, connecting with nature, a science, learning, reading, gardening, our family and loved ones, a community or some combination of all of these and more!

Whatever gives us this profound sense of vast interconnectedness and belonging, can be the something larger through which we find that sense of purpose in life. 

It is this feeling of interconnectedness and belonging so immense it is beyond words, regardless of the specific sources that drive it within us, that has the potential to transform us.

There is currently a lot of research showing the potential benefits of psychedelics such as ketamine, psilocybin (the active agent in magic mushrooms), LSD and the like as treatments for conditions such as depression, addiction, grief and trauma.

A theory behind why these compounds may have such benefits is that they almost universally bring about this sense of vast interconnectedness.

Well, I was amused recently to read that a study in London found that people treated with psilocybin tended to switch from a highly individualistic, materialistic, every person for themself personal and political philosophy, to a more altruistic, communal, we’re all in this together mindset.

I thought, “Maybe we should create magic mushrooms for MAGA spiritual retreats.

Speaking of spiritual gatherings, this coming week, several us from First Unitarian Universalist (UU) Church of Austin will be attending our annual UU General Assembly.

General Assembly or GA is where UUs from across the country and indeed the world gather to learn together, do the business of our association of UU Congregations and organizations, and to build communal power for doing justice.

Interestingly enough, this year GA will be in Baltimore, the city where William Ellery Channing preached the sermon I mentioned earlier that launched American Unitarianism and is often referred to as the “Baltimore sermon”.

And so we return to the birthplace of something greater than us as individual congregations but of which we are still an integral part to immerse ourselves in our larger faith movement.

I can still remember the first GA I ever attended. It was at the Salt Lake City convention center right next to the Mormon Tabernacle and complex, so you had UUs and Mormons intermingling on those Salt lake city sidewalks, which made for some interesting juxtapositions.

We UUs tended to sport many more tattoos, body piercings, slogan buttons, and practical if not very attractive footwear.

We were, though, almost as white.

I remember feeling awestruck when I first joined with those thousands of other UU s at that GA, somewhat humbled by the realization that our church and we are not nearly as unique as we may sometimes think, but also feeling so empowered to discover that we are not alone.

We are not isolated, but instead a part of a much larger religious movement that is in turn interconnected in solidarity with many other faith traditions and social movements dedicated to building the Beloved Community on a national and even global level.

And my beloveds, we, as a religious community need this connection with something larger than ourselves now more than ever.

With what had been happening in Los Angeles and across our country:

• the use of the military against our own citizens,
• the threats and even violence against government officials with whom the Trump administration disagrees, and now even assassinations,
• the demonization of LTBTQ+ folks,
• spending millions on a military parade for the taco tyrant while he pushes through policies to make the wealthy and powerful even more powerful at the. expense of everyone else – dismantling things like medicaid, medicare, social security, health research and care, FEMA, and so much more.
• the use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, not to protect anyone or anything, but to intimidate – instill terror into anyone who would resist this racist, misogynistic, white Christian Nationalist, authoritarian agenda.

With these and so many other threats to justice and equity, with the absolute disregard and disdain for checks and balances and the fundamental structures and norms required for functional democracy, both nationally and here in our state, we, as one church, no matter how wonderful and engaged we may be, cannot be a lone hero. 

We need our connection with our fellow UU churches, locally, throughout the state through our Texas UU Justice Ministry, and more broadly through our UU Southern region offices and our national Unitarian Universalist Association.

We need the solidarity they bring with other faiths and secular organizations that share our values and our commitment to building the Beloved Community even up against these threats to it we are currently witnessing.

Just like with individuals, as a religious community, we can benefit from being a part of something larger than ourselves: greater social and political power; increased resiliency in this time of such great difficulty in our state and our country.

And who here when witnessing the news these days can easily fall prey to anxiety, or even despair and depression?

Me!

Connecting to our greater faith movement as a religious community can help alleviate these stressors for us, as both the community as a whole and as individuals.

It can further increase our sense of belonging, give us support and encouragement and remind us of our shared mission to nourish souls, transform lives and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Something larger.

Hope. Meaning. Purpose.

In the months to come, your ministers, along with your board of trustees, your church staff and volunteers, and with each of you who want to participate will be exploring ways of becoming even more a part of our larger UU faith and the larger movement for justice that is rising up across our country and our world.

I encourage each of you individually to explore how you can connect with our greater faith also. You can find several ways to get started by going to austinuu.org, and I would be happy to set up a time to talk with you about it also if you would like.

And, allow me to bear witness and give testimony.

I am so lucky, so blessed to get serve as your minister within this greater UU faith of ours.

Along with a fierce love, it is such a source of what gives me that sense of being a part of something greater.

Hope. Meaning. Purpose.

I wish the very same for each of you and for this religious community as a whole.

Joseph Campbell was right. I have no doubt there is a hero within each of you – a calling from something immense and powerful from both within and beyond. Keep answering that call. As Campbell said, “follow your bliss.”

Amen.

Extinguishing the Chalice

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

Benediction

“We are the dust,
the dust that hopes,
a rising of dust, a thrill of dust,
the dust that dances in the light
with all other dust, the dust
that makes the world.”

Let us go out now and make and remake our world.
May the congregation say, “Amen”, and “Blessed be”.
Go in peace.

SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 25 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link above to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

PODCASTS

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson & Chalice Camp Youth
June 8 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

We often think of freedom as an individualistic act of escaping that which limits us. And that may be a part of the whole. What if a more complete understanding of freedom involves a communal embrace of our interdependence and the choices we make in order to live love?

Chalice Lighting

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

Call to Worship

There is something in the very nature of my freedom that inclines me to love, to do good, to dedicate myself to others. I have an instinct that tells me I am less free when I am living for myself alone. The reason for this is that I cannot be completely independent. Since I am not self-sufficient, I depend on someone else for my fulfillment. My freedom is not fully free when left to itself. It becomes so when it is brought into the right relation with freedom of another.

– Thomas Merton

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

I am learning that getting well in community is liberation. We are interdependent. When one of us attains freedom, it elicits/rekindles that longing in each of us. When we learn to feel, when we learn to stand with each other in feeling, when we learn to tune into the wisdom of our bodies, to love ourselves, to love each other, we are doing the unthinkable, we are creating new worlds of possibility… We must love each other and protect each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.

– adrienne marie brown

Sermon

NOTE: This is an edited ai generated transcript.
Please forgive any omissions or errors.

Rosie:

In Chalice Camp this week, we learned our camp creed and learned about a different line of it each day. It goes,

“It’s a Blessing we were born.
It matters what we do.
It matters what we do together.
What we know about God as a piece of the truth.
We don’t have to do it alone.”

I think maybe adults should be learning this creed too. A lot of people forget these things or never learn them in the first place. We all deserve the freedom to search for our truth, to know we are born worthy and to connect with the people around us. I hope maybe we can remind you.

Sol Cornell:

Thank you Rosie.

Hello. My names are Sol and Shanti. I am a small white human with short blue hair and I’m also the manager of religious education here at First UU Austin.

Over The past week, I got to plan, direct, and run our chalice camp, a week-long summer day camp for kids in kindergarten through sixth with counselors from seventh through twelfth. It focuses on introducing the beginnings of spiritual development, practicing presence and grounding, and asking some really big questions in between crafts, games, and various levels of joyful chaos.

Let me tell you, this has possibly been the most intensive, demanding and exhausting project I have ever taken on, and I am so, so glad that I did. I’ve wanted to work with kids for a long time, but I hadn’t considered working with them in this particular capacity, helping them explore spirit and meaning and self until pretty recently. And I’m finding it to be a calling that fills my soul beyond any work that I’ve done before.

There’s something sacred about the way that kids move through the world. They’re honest. They’ll tell you exactly what they think and feel. Sometimes while sitting quietly in communal reverence and sometimes while running in circles, demolishing a bag of cheez-its.

Kids ask fantastic questions, Some big and some small. I heard a broad array over the past week from, “How old is that Eye of the tiger song?” All the way up to “How is God real, but also not real?” I learned some of the most interesting facts from Googling a curiosity that someone had, and I sat with some of the deepest questions that Google simply can’t answer.

At one point, a camper asked me, “Why do you like working with kids? They’re really loud.” She’s not wrong, but I answered honestly and I said, “I think it’s the coolest thing in the world to watch you all become who you are.” Working with kids gifts me a sense of joy, curiosity, and peace.

Children are unburdened by the spiritual baggage that many of us carry and they invite us to put some of it down just for a little bit. It’s an honor to teach our newest humans about something so big and personal as spirituality. And in doing so, they teach me too.

In the midst of all the chaos, the paint and the pipe cleaners and the occasional bout of tears, I found something quietly blooming in my soul, a deep sense of freedom, the freedom that comes from having a passion instead of just a job, the freedom that comes from doing something that feels right, that fits, that brings me home to myself. I get to wake up every day and do something that truly fills my heart and soul. I never knew I could have this life.

And I want to be clear. That kind of freedom, that kind of joy, isn’t just for me. We all deserve it. You deserve it. And sure, maybe it won’t come in the form of directing a children’s camp but there’s something out there that will make your heart sing. I promise you. Seek it, find it, grab it with both hands, and pull it from the ether if you have to. Because when we do that, when we find and bring the whole of ourselves into community, we create something powerful. Not just a group or a congregation, but a living, breathing, deeply human kind of togetherness.

So thank you for being part of that. Thank you for letting me be a part of it too and for trusting me with something so important. Let’s keep chasing the things that fill us up. Let’s keep asking the big questions. And let’s remember that we’re all still growing as long as we live and that that’s a beautiful thing. As the Camp Creed tells us, “We don’t have to do it alone.”

Blessed be and amen.

Chris Jimmerson:

I think I’ll grant myself the freedom this morning to not sermonize a lot about the taco tyrant in the White House and his enablers, nor the Texas tyrants in control of our state government.

French philosopher and author Albert Camus said that,

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”

I think Camus is expressing there what I call “soul freedom,” a sense of deep internal freedom that can’t be taken from us and that we need to sustain ourselves to persevere when we must rebel against tyrants who would rob us of our societal freedom. 

Indeed, this soul freedom is what allows us to flourish, to live our lives most fully and fearlessly. It is what has empowered people throughout the ages to thrive, even when forced to endure the harshest of repressive conditions, concentration camps, slavery, colonization, racism, ongoing systemic oppression.

Our children at Camp UU this past week, as you’ve heard, have been learning about our Unitarian Universalist Theological Heritage and Identity, an identity that is deeply rooted in this soul freedom from the early Unitarians that claim the freedom to reject religious dogma and to form their own personal relationship with the God of their understanding to our universalist forebearers that freed us from fearing a judgmental and punishing God centered us instead in liberatory universal and communal love now.

One of the things that we you use have discovered along the way is that there is a potential paradox in developing soul freedom a tension between individualism and communalism. Communities can sometimes stifle our personal freedom, the expression of our true selves, can’t they?

And yet, as both of our readings highlighted this morning, we are interdependent. We need one another. We need love and support to fully become who we are meant to be, to find the sense of fierce love and belonging that sets our hearts and souls free.

So we have to form communities that accept and support each of our individual whole and fully creative selves, while at the same time each of us as individuals must choose to accept constraints, obligations that actually free us to contribute toward the love relationships and communal belonging we so desire.

Here’s another seeming paradox. Soul freedom requires surrendering. Surrendering to the fact that we are only the co-authors of our life stories, that much of the plot involves events that are well beyond our control. Our freedom lies in creating the narrative about how we interpret and respond to these events, Surrendering all that isn’t really important to us so that we are left with only the needs and boundaries that really matter to us, and this again frees us to then fiercely and fearlessly immerse ourselves in love and belonging.

So what we surrender is really only that which we have been telling ourselves mattered to us that really didn’t. And so often these things are things we absorbed and internalized from misguided, repressive societal norms that subjected our true selves in the first place.

Author Virginia Woof once put it:

“The eyes of others are prisons, their thoughts, our cages.”

Here’s a part of my own personal narrative that I think might illustrate much of all of this.

When I was seven, my dad developed severe depression that required repeated hospitalizations. By the time I was 12, he had divorced my mom. And because of all this, I became a sort of child parent to my younger siblings, a sort of child co-head of household with my struggling single mom. I had to learn to give love, to help, support, nurture, parent, protect. And some of that has become a valuable part of who I am. It’s a big part of what led me to become an activist for justice, to work in social support organizations, eventually to become a minister.

What it didn’t allow me to see as a part of my story nearly as much, though, is that I also need to be nurtured, helped, supported, protected to let myself want, accept, and ask for these things to enjoy and recognize being loved. Add to that a small-town culture in which I grew up that derided males for admitting a need for things like help and protection, and the eyes of others became a prison of sorts.

Flash forward to last year when my spouse of 33 years died. I grieved the loss of me loving him. I even felt gratitude for having loved him all those years.

But somehow I was still stuck. I was having trouble moving forward. I was just going through the motions of life without the joy that it used to bring me, unable to even entertain the idea of romantic love again.

It was only after several months of reexamining that self-story I had learned as that seven-year-old with lots of counseling and lots of support from loved ones, that I realized I was stuck because I hadn’t been able to let myself grieve the love, support, nurturing, and protection he had given me.

It was only then after I began to surrender that nearly lifelong self-narrative to allow for a more full, whole self-image that accepts being loved and nurtured, that I found the freedom To open myself to new love and to life again.

My beloveds, we will all sometimes fall into the traps that life can put in front of us.

Our soul freedom comes from allowing ourselves love and belonging accepting our interdependence because that, that is what helps us to rewrite our narrative and steer our story in a new direction more of our own choosing.

And sometimes we have to allow ourselves some time, some freedom to learn, And to unlearn some of those cages, the thoughts of others and/or our own, have trapped us within. The learned habits that can be so very hard to surrender.

I leave you with a poem by singer, songwriter, actress and author, Portia Nelson that I think illustrates this last idea in a kind of fun way. It’s called:

AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN FIVE SHORT CHAPTERS.

Chapter 1
I walk down the street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in. I am lost. I am hopeless. It isn’t my fault. It takes forever to find a way out.

Chapter 2
I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don’t see it. I fall in again. I can’t believe I’m in the same place, but it isn’t my fault. It still takes a long time to get out.

Chapter 3
I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it there. I still fall in. It’s a habit, but my eyes are open. I know where I am. It is my responsibility. I get out immediately.

Chapter 4
I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it.

Chapter 5
I walk down a different street.
The end.

Amen.

Extinguishing the Chalice

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

Benediction

Go now into daily life free, not only of that which holds you back, but also free to choose that which ignites your mind, body, and soul.

Choose to revel in our interdependence.

Choose community. Choose to love fiercely, fearlessly.

This is our revolution. This is our journey toward freedom.

May the congregation say amen and blessed be.

Go in peace.

SERMON INDEX

Most sermons during the past 25 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link above to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

PODCASTS

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
May 4, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Unitarian Universalism recently centered our faith in love. But this is not an abstract, overly sentimental love that allows us to linger in a liminal space, feeling it only from the sidelines. It is a love that calls us to action – to engage in our world, grounded in a self-love that empowers us to boldly create and demand even more love and justice. It is a fierce love that has the power to bring about the revolution our world so desperately needs.

Chalice Lighting

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

Call to Worship

SEE NO STRANGER:
A MEMOIR AND MANIFESTO OF REVOLUTIONARY LOVE
by Valerie Kaur

In our tears and agony, we hold our children close and confront the truth: The future is dark.

But my faith dares me to ask: What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb?

What if our America is not dead but a country still waiting to be born? What if the story of America is one long labor?

What if all the mothers who came before us, who survived genocide and occupation, slavery and Jim Crow, racism and xenophobia and Islamophobia, political oppression and sexual assault, are standing behind us now, whispering in our ear: You are brave? What if this is our Great Contraction before we birth a new future?

Remember the wisdom of the midwife: “Breathe,” she says. Then: “Push.”

Let us make an oath to fight for the soul of America – “The land that never has been yet – and yet must be” (Langston Hughes) – with Revolutionary Love and relentless optimism.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

FIERCE LOVE, A BOLD PATH TO FEROCIOUS COURAGE
AND RULE-BREAKING KINDNESS THAT CAN HEAL THE WORLD
by Rev Dr Jacqui Lewis

I invite you to believe assiduously in how lovable we each are, and in the love between us and among us because, actually, believing is seeing. Believing is seeing our connection; we are one.

This is the kind of fierce love to which we are called. This kind of love is not a feeling or sentiment; it’s radical transformative action that takes risks to seek the common good. It sees our neighbor better than they see themselves. It makes sacrifices, it creates a way out of no-way. It’s the Black folk religion I grew up with – for all of the people. It’s the fiercest love of all. This fierce love is not for the faint, the indolent, or the idle! We can’t just feel love, we must give love, we must do love, we must be love ourselves. Our calling is to see something, and, seeing it, to call it out and do everything we know is good and just and vital to heal our souls and the world.

Sermon

NOTE: This is an edited ai generated transcript.
Please forgive any omissions or errors.

I wasn’t supposed to be preaching this morning. As many of you know, the plan was that a candidate to become our other called co-lead minister would preach today. We didn’t find a suitable candidate during our search, and so here we are. You get me.

Three days after returning from a two-month sabbatical. Anyone ever notice how things don’t always go as planned? That’s okay. We have now instead brought in Reverend Carie Holly-Hurt to be our assistant minister. Anyone ever notice how sometimes things go better than planned?

I’ve been thinking a lot about how long this church has been in somewhat of a liminal space, a time during which there has been much transition and change and uncertainty. If you’re new to the church, here is a little bit of that recent liminal church history.

Back in 2018, after a successful capital campaign, we ended up tearing up large portions of our church building to complete some renovations and an expansion. And while the result of that is Wonderful and beautiful, it did put us in a somewhat liminal space for a while, literally. And of course, not long at all after that, in 2020, we were forced to close our beautiful, newly renovated church for almost two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

And after we were finally able to return to the building in early 2022, our much-beloved lead minister at the time, Reverend Meg Barnhouse, was forced to announce her retirement because of health issues. And so we entered into yet another liminal space, an interim transitional ministry period and a search to call a new lead minister.

I appear before you this morning still grateful to be the one who received that call in late 2023, but not done with living in a liminal, uncertain space. In 2024, the church continued interim ministry after deciding upon a second search, the one I mentioned earlier to consider the possibility of calling a second co-lead minister. Oh, and in the midst of that there was this thingy called an election, which has resulted in a time of great anxiety and uncertainty in our nation, which brings this back to this morning and my not-according-to-plan appearance in this pulpit.

I want you all to know how much it thrills my spirit, nourishes my soul, that this religious community through all of that liminal space, all of that uncertainty, has kept the church and that mission we say together every Sunday alive.

As a result of that election that I just mentioned, though, we find ourselves in a different and almost infinitely more dangerous world where the very core of our faith, the love and sense of interconnectedness that is the essence of our humanity is being threatened like never before. And so, though not entirely according to plan, I also appear before you this morning to offer what IS, I believe the calling of our Unitarian Universalist faith, the calling of this church like never before.

Being in a liminal space by necessity requires a certain amount of internal focus and reassessment And we have done that work admirably, as I said, all the while, also keeping our faith alive in the world.

Now, though, now forces that would desecrate love and interconnectedness have seized power. So we must leave behind that liminal space, even in this time of such uncertainty, we must answer a clear and certain clarion call from the very core of our religious faith.

Love. Yes, really, it is that simple. And that complicated. Because this is not not a sentimental sit on the sidelines feeling all gushy kind of a love. No, it is a fierce love that calls us to first love ourselves and then to turn our attention beyond ourselves and confront actions that subvert love and justice anywhere that we find them. It is a fierce love that calls us to create a love revolution in our world.

Here is how Valerie Kaur, as Margaret said, founder of the Revolutionary Love Project, the source of an adult religious education series the church will be offering. Here is how she describes this kind of love.

Love has been so abused in our culture. Love has been mistaken as a sentimental emotion, a feeling that comes and goes, ebbs and flows, but love is more than a rush of feeling. Think of your deepest relationships. Love is what you do for one another, how you care for each other. I define love as sweet labor, fierce, demanding, imperfect, life-giving, a choice we make again and again. And if love is labor, then love contains all of our emotions. Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love. Anger is the force that we harness to protect that which we love.

 

When we choose to love like that beyond what evolution requires, When we love beyond our inner sphere, then love becomes revolutionary. I define revolutionary love as the choice to enter into labor for others, for our opponents, and for ourselves.

Revolutionary love begins with the choice to look upon the face of anyone and say, “You are a part of me I do not yet know.” When we do that we expand our circle of care so that we leave no one behind.

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that God is love and in order for us to bring that divine love that revolutionary love into our world, we must first recognize the divine within ourselves. We must love ourselves up against the many, many messages we get in our world that can lead us to question our own worth.

Listen. Please listen. You, each and every one of you, you are worthy. You are deserving of love just as you are.

So, practice self-love.

• Stop several times a day to think to yourself just how worthy of love you really are.
• Put a reminder in your calendar.
• Surround yourself with folks who support you and recognize your worth.
• Find what brings you joy and engage in it often.

Now self-love can, and soon will be, a whole other sermon. For now, though, know that self-love is where answering the call to fierce love starts and make self-love a verb, an ongoing spiritual practice.

So next, I think we can answer the call of love, foster it in our world through consciously engaging in small acts of kindness and compassion on a daily basis. My maternal grandparents kept romantic love alive in their relationship throughout the 60 years they were married by doing just this. In fact, the only time I ever saw them argue was over who got to do the next loving thing for the other. My grandfather brought my grandmother coffee in bed every day over all of those years. My current beau and I text each other what are sometimes called sweet nothings throughout the day. We text good morning each day and night night every night.

The thing is, sweet nothings are not at all nothing. They help keep love alive as our story earlier showed us those words matter. And we can offer such loving words and actions to all of the loved ones in our lives, maybe even to our fellow churchgoers.

And out in our daily world we can offer this loving kindness to all those we encounter. We can engage with co-workers, the cashier at the grocery store, restaurant workers, complete strangers. Too often we go about our world completely ignoring and barely acknowledging one another. Maybe if we put our phones down and actually talk to folks as we move through our world, we will create more love in that world.

Once again, sometimes it really is that simple.

Now, here is where it can get more complicated. Fierce love calls us to confront those who have strayed from the path of love, who would use their power to commit grave injustices, thwart love, divide us into those they say are worthy of love, and those who they believe are not.

I don’t have to tell you all the war against basic human dignity and rights. People’s very autonomy over their own minds and bodies being waged in our state legislature right now. Fierce love calls us to confront such anti-love legislative proposals and say no. No in the name of love, as so many of you have already been doing. And far, far too many actions of the Trump administration in their first hundred days defile the very idea of love. And once again, fierce love is calling us, each of us, our Unitarian Universalist religion, this church to confront these actions, to cry “No” in the name of love, to say “These things you will not do in our name.” Fierce love calls us to speak the truth, even when it is hard.

The removal of people, often without any access to even basic legal rights and processes, to place them into a prison in El Salvador, which is nothing short of a concentration camp, is such a violation of divine love that we cannot, we cannot allow this to be done in the name of our country and thereby condone the existence of a concentration camp anywhere in our world.

The forced deportation of a citizen, a four-year-old child with stage 4 cancer without even the medications necessary to sustain their life violates the very idea of love. Fierce love calls us to cry out “No, No, No.”

The administration is aggressively dismantling any and all efforts toward diversity, equity and inclusion as if those are dirty words rather than love and justice in action. Even further, they are systematically attempting to remove the history and accomplishments of BIPOC folks, LGBTQ folks, women, and so many others, they deem less desirable from websites, textbooks, the very historical records of this country. This is an attempt at erasure. It casts certain people as less than. It is domination and abuse and domination and abuse are not love.

The administration recently destroyed a Center for Disease Control program that shared education and data regarding HIV disease that has helped so many, Advanced our knowledge about the disease saved lives. They destroyed that program because they thought it was too truthful about HIV disease and LGBTQ folks, HIV disease, and people of color.

My spouse of 33 years, Wayne, who died last year, was on an advisory group that helped the CDC create that program many years ago. So it feels like they have erased him. And thereby, a part of me.

Our services go out over television and the internet so folks that I love closely may well see this sermon at some point. To those whom I love, who may still support a government that does these things, fierce love calls me to say, “I love you, and I will not be abused. I will not be made less than – I will not be erased.”

Truth-telling, even with or maybe especially with those we love most closely is no longer optional because this is no longer just politics. This is authoritarianism. This is subjugation, xenophobic cruelty, a sacrilege against what makes us human.

What is happening desecrates love and is therefore a blasphemy toward God. It is the very opposite of the divine love toward which Jesus Christ and all of the great religious leaders of our world have called us.

Recently, I have been blessed by romantic love coming into my life again. His name is Woodrow, and I know that he wants our love to support me. Be the impetus and the spiritual practicing ground through which I strive to become the fullest, most creative, best, and purest self and soul I can possibly hope to become. And I know he knows I want the exact same for him. This is the essence of love. This is the essence of the God love we are called to bring into our world and to actively offer to all of humanity and creation.

Sometimes it really is this simple.

We are called as a church to bring into our world divine love, love that only wishes for all of us to thrive, and we are called to confront any forces that would subvert that love. I am so proud of the work for love and justice so many of you are already doing at the state and national levels. I encourage everyone to join in with this religious community to do justice in our world. I’ve posted some information on how you can join in at www.austinuu.org Of course, feel free to talk with me after the service also.

So my beloveds, a fierce love is calling us. The time is here. The time is now. It is our time as a religious community to answer that call, like never before to show up more mightily than ever before, to allow ourselves to be swept into an ocean of love that is the creative source of our universe, to wade in those holy waters, to cry out, even to those who have wandered so far away from love. Come, join us, dive right in, the water’s fine. This water is divine.

Extinguishing the Chalice

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

Benediction

by Rev. Dr. Jackie Lewis

You want to know what fierce love is? Fierce love is ferocious courage and rule-breaking kindness that can heal the world. Fierce love understands that we are inextricably connected one to the other. Whatever affects you affects me. I’m responsible to make sure that we fix that together. Fierce love will go across the line, all the way to the edge of what’s comfortable, to make sure that we improve the lives of everyone, together.

Here’s what fierce love looks like. It’s buying a ticket and going to the border to stand up for immigrants. It’s marching down Fifth Avenue on Pride Sunday, even if you’re straight. It’s standing up for Black Lives Matter, that are what your ethnicity is. That’s what it looks like.

All the world’s major religions have some teaching about love your neighbor as yourself. Do unto others as you want done unto you. But you can’t love the other unless you love yourself. You’ve got to start with loving yourself. Start there. That’s the beginning of the love and we need to heal the world.

Can you imagine a life where we all show fierce love? I can. When a child is hungry, my stomach growls. If an Asian auntie is being abused on the street, it’s not like she’s kind of like my grandmother, she is my grandmother, so I must stand up against that injustice. When someone is being treated unjustly, my job is to bring justice to the fore. That’s what it looks like. That’s what it feels like. That’s the kind of love that is fierce enough, courageous enough, audacious enough to heal us and the world.

Go with fierce love. Go in peace.

SERMON INDEX

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