What’s the difference between Sunni & Shiite?

January 10, 2016 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
January 10, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

“What’s the Difference?” This is the first in a sermon series on differences between one historical, political, or spiritual perspective and another. In this installment, we’ll look at the difference between Sunni and Shiite Islam.

This text was created by talk to text, so any spelling incongruities, any sentences which contain ridiculous content are due to the fact that my telephone misunderstood the words I used. In addition to that, these are simply the notes for the sermon, not the sermon itself. Click the play button above to listen.

The sermon itself can be seen on the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin Facebook page. The podcast is also available on iTunes.

Sermon

Muhammad was born in what is now Saudi Arabia, in the town of Mecca, in 570 ce. His father died 6 months before he was born, and then his mother died when he was 6 years old. He lived with family, with an uncle, learning to be a merchant, and grew up as a member of that powerful merchant family. He married, had children, and used to go to the mountains to a cave on a solo retreat once a year. The angel Gabriel began talking to him on those retreats and the things Gabriel said, Mohamed memorized and told to a few people who started following him. The main thing that Gabriel had to say was that there was only one God. This was quite different from the culture surrounding Mohammad, where every rock, tree, and River has a spirit. Animism is the name of that religion. Sometimes people call it polytheism.

The first visit from Gabriel came in the year 610. Muhammad was 40. His followers began writing down the things he would tell them, and that is what became the Quran. After 3 years of quietly speaking to his followers, Muhammad began to preach in the town of Mecca in the year 613. He did not only preach that there was one God. That would have been fine with everyone, I guess. He preached that all the other gods and images of the gods were idols and should be destroyed. People did not receive this sweetly, and his followers began being killed. Muhammad would have been killed too, but he belonged to that prominent family and had privilege that kept him alive. In the year 622, Muhammad took his wife and children and fled to the town of Medina. This is known as the Hegira, and it is celebrated with rituals at the the first day of the Muslim year.

In Medina, Muhammad continued to preach and gained more of a following. Threats against the Muslims continued, but the new religion spread. Its is unclear how much of its spread was due to good ideas and how much was due to the followers of Muhammad behaving somewhat like an army, threatening and the lives of those who did not convert. All of the perspectives, I imagine, describe this process somewhat differently. The people of Mecca, losing prestige as Islam began to grow, launched an attack on Medina in 625, defeating the Muslims. 5 years later, Muhammad returned with an army of 10,000 followers conquering Mecca for good. By the time Muhammad died in 632, Islam had spread through the entire Arabian Peninsula.

Muhammad’s death created a terrible problem, he had not appointed a successor as leader of the Muslim world, which now numbered in tens of thousands of followers. Who was to teach the true meaning of the religion? Who was to hold the authority for the faith? He had been the father of many children, but only one, Fatima, had lived to adulthood.

The largest group of followers thought that the elite of the faith should choose the next leader, or caliph. This is the way the Pope is chosen and Roman Catholicism: the elite vote. This is what the majority envisioned, and they thought the best successor would be the father of one of Muhammad’s wives. This man’s name was Abu Bakr.

The second, smaller group thought that authority should be handed down through the family. They wanted Ali, Fatima’s husband, who was also a cousin of Muhammad’s. The bigger group won, so Abu became the caliph. Ali watched from the sidelines, and his supporters simmered. Abu got sick and died, and before he died he appointed another successor, who was the second caliph. The second one, also conquering more territory, including Persia, ruled for 10 years before he was assassinated by the Persians he had just conquered. Abu has not only appointed his successor, he had appointed his successor’s successor, who then took over as the third caliph, and ruled for 12 years before he was assassinated. So the first three caliphs, Abu and the two successors that he appointed, ruled for the first 25 or so years after the death of Muhammad.

After the assassination of the third caliph everybody agreed that Ali, the original choice of the people who thought it should stay in the family, should be caliph. . He ruled for five years, and everybody was reunited and it felt so good. Ali, the choice of the people who voted to stay in the family, appointed his son Hassan to be the fifth caliph. Unfortunately, he was soon overthrown by another person from the group that saw the elite should decide who ran the place. This split the group for good, and while the majority followed the rebel who had overthrown Hassan, the group that felt that the divine line should run through the family followed Hassan’s son, Hussein. Since they had wanted Ali from the beginning, they counted Ali as their first leader, and they called him an imam, Hassan was their second and hussein was their 3rd imam. The first three choices of the majority group had just been a delay.

The 7th Caliph of the majority group beheaded Hussein, and the minority group started following the son of Hussain. All of this happened in the seventh century, and this is at the root of the split today. The majority group are the Sunnis and the minority group are the Shiites. Both sides of this division are all over the world. The Shiites are running iran, In Iraq, Saddam Hussein was in the Bath party, which is a branch of the Sunni. The people who run Saudi Arabia are a fundamentalist sect of the Sunnis called Wahabi. ISIS is a Sunni group.

It seems to me that the main point of the split is the question of where authority resides Is authority conferred by the vote of the group or is it conferred by God through making the next leader be born to the current leader? This may seem petty but when you are searching for answers to questions like how to pray, how to eat, how to die, what to forgive, but not to forgive, how to keep your society in line, it becomes very important that your answers have the weight of authority. If you don’t believe that your leaders have been chosen the correct way, their decisions do not have that weight and society disintegrates.

This whole story is a lot longer, but I’m going to stop here for a moment and bring the focus to us. The Sunnis and the Shiites are living in a polarized world. Is there any polarisation in our world? The latest studies show that 33% of Democrats would be horrified if their children were to marry Republicans. It is 49% on the Republican side. What is that all about? Why does it sound odd when someone stands in the middle between the Republicans and the Democrats sees sensible policies on both sides? What does it sound strange when are Democratic politicians say that some of their dear friends at work are Republicans, and they are trying to work together? We are used to mocking one another, washing our hands of one another, imagining one another as misguided and foolish, and describing one another that way. We are not beheading each other though, which is good.

Most of us do like a simple framework from which to see the world and understand it. We grab on to one that works for us and we use it as a lens through which to interpret things that happen to us and other people. The lens tells us how the world should be, and how to get from here to there. For some people the way to get from here to there is to stamp out everybody who disagrees with our plan. This is seen by that group of people as a strong stance, unambiguous and pure. Other people think the way to get from here to there is to discuss, to compromise, to explore, maybe two use several different lenses through which to view things. Both ways can be helpful and both ways can be useless.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin has a very famous essay called The Hedgehog and the Fox. He divides human beings into two groups. ( By the way I like people who say there are two kinds of people in the world, this is he divided people that have two kinds of people and those who don’t.) Anyway, Berlin says that there are hedgehogs, who stay in one place, and know one thing very well, and look at the world through that one decision they made, or that one over arching article of faith. For example, everything is about love. Or everything is about sex. Or everything is about power. That is a hedgehog view.. And there’s the Fox who knows many things and draws from many sources. It is not a bad thing to have one overarching truth. It is mainly limiting in that it can make you feel that other people need to get out of your way and let the truth be universally accepted. There are hedgehog people who go through the world understanding that the earth is the most important thing, and working on green issues is the most important thing. Everyone else should drop what they’re doing and work on that. If they don’t they are misguided. Other people say that welcoming the stranger is the most important thing and everything should be about that, or everything should be about getting rid of the racist structures of our society or everything should be about the class struggle. Mother Jones famously was against suffrage for women because she thought it detracted from the class struggle. Many of the women during times of the abolitionists were asked to let go of their work on suffrage because the work on abolition was more urgent.

There are hedgehog people and Fox people in all religions. Even within the Sunni and Shia groups, there are multiple varieties from fundamentalists to mystics to fairly secular folks. The problem is that the people with the guns, the people who are using their knives to behead other people are hedgehog people who think everybody who is not like them should be destroyed. Isis is a Suuni group. Sometimes when they stop a bus full of people they have questions that they ask to tell whether someone is Shiite or Sunni. You can sometimes tell by the names. If someone is named after Hassan or Hussein, it is likely that they are Shiite. Not always, though. Mohammed could be either. You ask them how they pray. Sunnis cross their arms over their bodies and the Shiites keep their arms more extended as they rest their hands on their thighs. You can ask where someone comes from, as there are Shiite regions and Sunni regions, Shiite towns and Sunni towns.

The reason Saudi Arabia supports Isis is that both are Sunni. This is why Iran, which is Shiite in its power structure, is helping the US, its enemy, fight Isis, because isis is Sunni. It’s really a war between Iran and Saudi Arabia that we are naively floundering around in the middle of. Because beheadings. And now our ally, our buddy, Saudi Arabia has just done a bunch of the beheadings of its own, horrifying us, but because they are our ally, we don’t say anything.

This is the start of a sermon series called what’s the difference? What’s the difference between Sunnis and Shiites? Now you know. Where does authority lie for us? Within the individual. It is the ring of truth that tells us what we follow and what we don’t. For Christians of most stripes, it is the Bible. For Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Anglicans and Episcopalians, it is both the Bible and the church. Where the authority lies is not a trivial matter. Getting rid of the impurities, waging war against disagreement, this is not a trivial matter either, and we have trouble with it the same way everyone else does. We liberals have the same lust for certainty, the same intolerance of ambiguity, the same tendency to disrespect those with whom we disagree. Stay humble my friends. As I say often to you, that flush of self righteousness is the precursor to bad behavior. Start many sentences with the words “I could be wrong.”

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 16 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.

2016 Sermon Index

January 3, 2016 by tom Posted in Indexes

2016 Sermons

Sermon Topic	Author	Date
Christmas Day Service	Rev. Meg Barnhouse	12-25-16
Christmas Pageant	Rev. Meg Barnhouse	12-18-16
Star of Truth	Rev. Meg Barnhouse	12-11-16
A clear mind and an open heart	Rev. Meg Barnhouse	12-04-16
The fruits of the spirit, the gifts of age	Susan Yarbrough	11-27-16
Great Fullness	Rev. Chris Jimmerson	11-20-16
Acceptance and encouragement	Rev. Meg Barnhouse	11-13-16
Right speech	Rev. Meg Barnhouse	11-06-16
Honoring the ancestors	Rev. Meg Barnhouse	10-30-16
Right intention and the 10-10-10 rule	Rev. Meg Barnhouse	10-23-16
I got the music in me	Rev. Chris Jimmerson	10-16-16
The final form of love, which is forgiveness	Rev. Meg Barnhouse	10-09-16
We begin again	Susan Yarbrough	10-02-16
Mom, He started it	Rev. Meg Barnhouse	09-25-16
Abandon Hope and Fear	Rev. Meg Barnhouse	09-18-16
Ritual and Remembrance	Rev. Chris Jimmerson	09-11-16
Water communion service	Rev. Meg Barnhouse	09-04-16
The deep end of the heart	Rev. Meg Barnhouse	08-28-16
Big Gay Sunday	Rev. Marisol Caballero	08-21-16
What holds us together?	Rev. Meg Barnhouse	08-14-16
What I learned on my summer vacation	Rev. Meg Barnhouse	08-07-16
Principled Magic	Rev. Marisol Caballero	07-31-16
Paving the road to Hell?	Andy Gerhart	07-24-16
Sacred promises	Rev. Chris Jimmerson	07-17-16
Making sense of the senseless	Rev. Chris Jimmerson	07-10-16
Who’s calling, please?	Susan Yarbrough	07-03-16
It ain’t broke… but we can still fix it	Rev. Nell Newton	06-26-16
Tender Mercies	Rev. Marisol Caballero	06-19-16
Revolutionary Love	Rev. Chris Jimmerson	06-12-16
Talking to the trees	Rev. Meg Barnhouse	06-05-16
Flower Communion	Rev. Marisol Caballero	05-29-16
What’s the difference: Venting vs Lamentation	Rev. Meg Barnhouse	05-22-16
Finding the divinity in the Mundane	First UU Youth Group	05-15-16
Make New Mistakes	Rev. Meg Barnhouse	05-08-16
Prayer beads for UUs	Rev. Meg Barnhouse	05-01-16
Will the real me please stand up?	Rev. Marisol Caballero	04-24-16
What’s the difference: Trinitarian and Unitarian?	Rev. Meg Barnhouse	04-17-16
Transformation	Rev. Chris Jimmerson	04-11-16
Punk Theology	Rev. Meg Barnhouse	04-03-16
Pretty Yellow Flower Day	Rev. Meg Barnhouse	03-27-16
The man comes around	Rev. Meg Barnhouse	03-20-16
The fire of commitment	Susan Yarbrough	03-13-16
Bee Yard Etiquette	Rev. Meg Barnhouse	03-06-16
Courage	Rev. Chris Jimmerson	02-28-16
What’s the difference: Protestants and Catholics?	Rev. Meg Barnhouse	02-21-16
So many songs about love	Rev. Meg Barnhouse	02-14-16
Respecting the Fire	Rev. Meg Barnhouse	02-07-16
Animal Blessing Service	Rev. Marisol Caballero	01-31-16
Forgiveness	Rev. Meg Barnhouse	01-24-16
Compassion	Rev. Chris Jimmerson	01-17-16
What the difference between Sunni & Shiite Islam?	Rev. Meg Barnhouse	01-10-16
Burning Bowl	Rev. Meg Barnhouse	01-03-16

Burning Bowl

January 3, 2016 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
January 3, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

We begin the year by thinking about elements in our lives which are doing us a disservice. We write those things on paper and burn them together, scattering the ashes to the wind.

Reading:

Burning the Old Year
Naomi Shahib Nye

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

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

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

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

Sermon

On the first Sunday of each new year we do a Burning Bowl together. On a piece of paper, we write (or just think) a word or two representing what we would like to jettison as the new year begins. Yes, it’s three days into the new year, but here is a secret. You can start again any time. In burning the representation of something we’d like to let go, we are speaking to that part of our brain that thinks in images and actions rather than in words.

What are the things you do that don’t work for you any more? Do you try to control things that can’t be controlled? Do you try to manage lives other than your own? Do you tell yourself you can’t make a difference? Do you look to someone for blessing who does not have it in them to bless you? Do you look to someone for approval who does not have it in them to approve? Do you seek to make someone happy who would prefer to be unhappy?

You need to fill the space left by what you let go with an intention. What quality would you like to invite in to your life to replace this? If you are letting go of controlling things that can’t be controlled, you might replace that with openness, or with the courage to tackle your own life instead of managing someone else’s. You might replace anger about someone just being who they are with the quality of compassion for the life they have to live, being who they are. The way to invite a quality into your life is not by willing it in, but by wondering it in. I got that piece of wisdom from one of my teachers whose name is Wendy Palmer. Just wonder “What would my life be like with more compassion?” What would this moment be like if I were more loving?” Wondering doesn’t wake up the inner mule that starts working against you as soon as you make a resolution. Wondering is the way to bring that intention into your life.

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

Community

December 27, 2015 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Nell Newton, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson and Rev. Nell Newton
December 27, 2015
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

“Community: To connect with joy, sorrow, and service with those whose lives we touch.” In this second in our sermons series on our church’s religious values, former First UU member Rev. Nell Newton joins Rev. Chris in exploring the foundations for building religious community.

Call to Worship

Now let us worship together.
Now let us celebrate our highest values.

Transcendence
To connect with wonder and awe of the unity of life

Community
To connect with joy, sorrow, and service with those whose lives we touch

Compassion
To treat ourselves and others with love

Courage
To live lives of honesty, vulnerability, and beauty

Transformation
To pursue the growth that changes our lives and heals our world

Now we raise up that which we hold as ultimate and larger than ourselves.
Now we worship, together.

Sermon

Rev. Nell Newton

“We Gather In Community”

When people chose those words – and it was a collaborative effort – this congregation was at a terribly beautiful moment. It was terrible because many people were still mad and hurt and angry and sitting far out on the edges. And beautiful because other people were crowding in close to see what they could do to be of help, how they could make things better. But let’s back up to what was going on before these words were chosen. Let’s start with a story….

Once upon a time there was a congregation that went looking for a minister. But not just any minister – no, they wanted a wonderful minister. They wanted a minister who would be bold and preach the paint off the walls. They wanted someone who would stick around and not just use them as a lower rung on his or her career ladder. They wanted someone who would challenge them! And that is exactly the kind of minister they got. It was wonderful and terrible. It was wonderful because the minster could preach the paint off the walls, but then terrible because it was hard to keep the walls painted. It was wonderful because the minister settled in and showed no inclination to leave them to better his or her own self-interests. But it was terrible because the minister didn’t show any inclination to leave for the congregation’s best interests either. It was wonderful because the minister challenged them. And it was terrible because, well, sometimes people need to be comforted too.

Ministers! But there was something else that was happening that the congregation had not experienced in a while. The minister drew people in – lots of people. Standing room only crowds of people who came to hear the minister. It was very exciting! But after the services, many of those people just got back in their cars and left. They were happy enough to hear the great sermons and watch the paint peel off the walls. They didn’t stay around afterwards to help repaint the walls or read stories to the kids or wash dishes after potlucks.

Now, in all fairness, those people were probably feeling pretty good about everything. They probably were feeling happy that they’d finally found a minister to listen to, so they could say that they had found a church. But what they hadn’t yet figured out is that sermons are not church.

Really. Church – if you do it right – is a verb, not a noun. And the folks who were just showing up for the sermons were missing the really hard, challenging, transformative part of church.

So, when things finally went “kaboom”, which happens if church is a verb, all of a sudden, the minister was gone! And the people who were there to watch the minister’s show, well, a lot of them just left. And that’s probably okay. It was a little sad to see the empty spaces where they had been sitting.

But, some of them didn’t leave. As the dust swirled and settled, they blinked, and as if waking from a magic spell, an illusion, and they began to notice that even though there was no minister, CHURCH continued.

And some of them began to recognize that the underlying, the foundational ministry in the church was the congregation. Those people they’d been sitting next to? They were all ministers. And good ones too.

It was during this time that the congregation – everyone who was still showing up – got to really see church as a verb – a process of creating and becoming together. It was pretty cool.

And when they set out to identify their mission, the reason for doing this church stuff, they all agreed that the most important part of what they were doing was simply coming together, gathering in community. Because while individuals are amazing and powerful, there are some things that you can only build where two or more are gathered.

I used to think of church as a wonderful banquet with welcoming tables, deeply satisfying food, and genial company. In this analogy the minister helps people find their place and points out good things to eat while the congregants take turns serving, eating and washing the dishes. The covenant serves as the house rules and there is a place for everyone at the table.

That’s a pleasant image, but it doesn’t include all of what really happens at church. It doesn’t include that radical bit about change.

These days I think of church more as a laboratory – a place where people can come and learn new ways of seeing and being. We’re building a new way and as we work sometimes there is a flash of light and a puff of smoke!

In this vision of church I see us conducting experiments with such titles as “Being Well Together” and “Walking and Talking”. Higher level experiments are also being conducted in “Not Walking and Not Talking”, and “Letting Go”. Church then becomes the place where we work at becoming a people so bold — a place where we change ourselves in order to change the world!

This version of church is explicitly a challenge to the people who identify as “SBNR” –“spiritual but not religious”. That’s how a lot of folks will explain why they don’t do church. They are just fine with their spirituality, no need to complicate things with institutions, or really, other people. Not even other SBNR people. Because, well, people. They can be so people-y. They can be so challenging.

And, there’s the problem with trying to do spiritual but not religious: if you’re off doing it all alone, there’s no one around to call you on your nonsense or useless abstractions, or self-indulgences that don’t ask you to look closer, work a little harder and become the best version of yourself. And there’s no one around to point out other versions of the holy, or new ways of giving thanks. Sometimes you need a near perfect stranger to point out the gaps in your theology.

So, come into this community of love and learning and falling down and getting up and starting over. It’s how we are doing our theology. Gathered in community.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson

Community – to connect with joy, sorrow and service with those whose lives we touch.

That’s our topic for today’s second in a series of sermons on this church’s religious values. Values that are at the core of this religious community and out of which our mission that we say together every Sunday arose.

I’d like to start by talking about what we mean by community – how we create and sustain religious community within the church, because I think sometimes when we talk about community we kind of have this Hallmark view of community where we’re all going to love each other all the time, and we’re only going to have joy and hugs and fun together, sipping coffee, munching on delicious bonbons and singing Kumbaya together.

And, no, we are not singing that today. Or ever; at least when I am leading worship.

Anyway, I think all of that is part of it. One of the things that I love about serving this church is that we do have fun – that we do demonstrate physical affection with one another – that we share a great sense of humor and joy.

Like, with a lasting marriage though, I think there’s more to it than that. I think that we also have to be aware that there will be struggles – that we will disagree – that we will have conflict from time to time, and in fact I would be wary of a religious community that never had conflict because it could signal that perhaps what we had actually created is a club of like minds, not a true religious community.

We have to be committed to and willing to do the work of maintaining relationship – of sustaining an ever-evolving, ever-changing religious community.

In fact there is a theology that says that God or the divine emerges out of the messiness of creating community. Now leaving aside for a moment that this theology envisions a supernatural version of the divine, which I don’t, I will say that I was fortunate enough to see exactly the process this theology tries to capture occur here in this very church after, what Meg refers to as the time of trouble had occurred. At a specially called congregational meeting, the congregation had voted by a fairly narrow margin to dismiss the person who was then senior minister.

It was messy. We had disagreements. We had hurt feelings. And yet leadership emerged that was wise enough to bring in outside help and to provide opportunities for members of the community to begin to speak with each other, both on and intellectual and an emotional level.

This community began the long process of forming a covenant of healthy relations that describes how we will be with each other – what promises we make to each other within the religious community. This community began to discern our values and to create our mission that gives us common purpose.

Out of the messiness and disagreement and hurt feelings, because some folks this religious community stayed in the struggle with each other and did the work of building and rebuilding relationship, this became a church even stronger than it had been before – a church that is providing a religious and spiritual home for more and more people -a church that is making real differences in our larger community and in our world – a church that I am so proud to serve.

Now, that’s an example from an extraordinarily challenging and thankfully rare situation. However, I think this willingness to stay in the struggle with each other – this willingness to embrace that true community will sometimes involve messiness – is necessary even during times such as the one that this church is undergoing right now, when things are going well, when there is joy and goodwill within our membership.

Because smaller but potentially destructive disagreements and conflicts will still happen that if left unattended and unspoken can fester and grow into larger problems. Because we are all human, and we will sometimes unintentionally fail one another.

And so, even during times such as this, religious community demands of us that we abide by our covenant with one another – that we ask for help when we need it -that we speak with one another directly and from the heart even over our smaller hurts and disagreements. Here at first UU church of Austin, we are fortunate enough to have a healthy relations ministry team that can help when doing so seems difficult.

It can be difficult. It can feel very vulnerable.

And perhaps that’s the key point. Without vulnerability, there can be no real religious community.

Only through being vulnerable with each other, can we create that true sense of religious community – can the divine emerge from among us.

Earlier, I talked a little about Community within our church walls. Now I’d like to talk about living this value Beyond them.

As many of you know this past summer, our church provided sanctuary to Sulma Franco, who had sought asylum in the U.S. because she feared persecution for having spoken out and organized on behalf of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights in her home country of Guatamala. Due largely to her immigration lawyer making a mistake and the systemic injustice of our immigration system, she had been held 9 months in a detention center and was facing an imminent order of removal or deportation.

Working with a coalition of local immigration and human rights groups, other churches and faith leaders, we engaged in a campaign to pressure Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) to do grant Sulma a stay of removal so that she could remain in the U.S. while her immigration legal case could proceed. In August, the ICE office in San Antonio told Sulma’s new lawyer that they would grant the stay, but that Sulma would have to accompany her lawyer inside the ICE offices to sign the required paperwork. Not surprisingly, Sulma was afraid that if she went in the ICE offices, they might put her back into detention and deport her instead.

After much planning with our allies, and after our Senior Minister, Meg, received assurances from the officer in Charge of the ICE Office that Sulma would not be detained, we made plans for a whole entourage of folks to go to the San Antonio, where were joined by more folks from San Antonio outside the ICE building and several members of the press, whom we had invited.

We hit a snag when the ICE officer told us over the phone that by ICE policy he could not come outside and state in front of the press, that they would not detain her, so Sulma had to decide if she would still go in, with only the private assurances he had made to Meg. She decided that if Meg and I would lock arms with her, one of us on each side of her like this, and go in with her and her lawyer, then she would do it.

The ICE officer met us as we entered the building. Sulma was trembling. I could actually feel her shaking with fear. I only hope that if I ever had to, I could summon the courage it took her to walk in that building.

She was too terrified to let go of either Meg or me for any reason. To go any further, there was one of those metal detectors and X-ray belts you have to put your cell phones and bags and such on. The ICE officer took mercy on us as we fumbled around trying to figure out how to get things out of pockets and onto the conveyor belt while still locked arm and arm. He told us we could just go around but the space between the screening area and the wall though was very narrow so to get through still connected with Sulma, we had to kind of do this sideways shuffle.

I looked around, and there were these long lines of folks, almost all of whom where people of color, waiting and waiting to see someone about their immigration status. I thought, they must wonder who this woman is being escorted right past the lines and into a private office area, locked arm in arm with two white people one of them wearing some strange, bright yellow scarf. I thought, many of them must be terrified too.

After what felt like hours, ICE provided Sulma with the paperwork legally stating they would not deport her, and we left the office, Sulma holding her documents of freedom high in the air as her supporters cheered and celebrated her.

I think that on that day what Martin Luther King called “Beloved Community” had arisen. Now, I think that’s a term that gets overused, but as King used it, it involves a community of radical love, justice, compassion and interdependence. And to make the beloved community, we needed others. Our individual efforts to do justice are wonderful and needed AND our mission says that we gather in community to do justice. We have so much more power to do justice when we act together. We have so much more power to create the beloved community when we act with our interfaith partners and our larger denomination and a broad coalition of folks, some of them religious and some not, like we did that day in San Antonio.

Because we do these things not just to save one person, though that is vital and important, but to shine a light on our broken and inherently racist and LGBT oppressive immigration system, so that one day, if can build larger and larger coalitions, we might bring the change that will free all of those other terrified folks we passed by in that ICE office that day.

Building the beloved community requires, in the words of our great UU theologian James Luther Adams, the organization of power and power of organization. That’s why we gather in community to do justice.

That’s how we create the conditions for the divine to emerge in this world – in this time – here and now.

Benediction

As you go back out into the world now, know that there is a love that you carry with you beyond these church walls.

Know that our interconnectedness contains seeds of hope for justice and compassion to be made manifest.

Know that together, with one another and the many others who would join us to create a world wherein each is truly beloved, together, almost unlimited possibilities are still ours to create.

Go in peace. Go in love. Go knowing that this religious community awaits you and holds you until we are together again.

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

The Christians and the Pagans

December 20, 2015 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
December 20, 2015
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Yule is a holiday that shimmers with elements of different cultures. There has been more interaction among peoples, cultures and religions than we sometimes know.

Call to Worship
From Rainer Maria Rilke

You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.
But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fire, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them!
powers and people,
and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.
I have faith in nights.

Meditation reading:
Star Hawk

Hear the words of the Star Goddess,
the dust of whose feet are the hosts of heaven,
whose body encircles the universe:
“I who am the beauty of the green earth
and the white moon among stars
and the mysteries of the waters,
I call upon your soul to arise
and come unto me.
For I am the soul of nature
that gives life to the universe.
From Me all things proceed
and unto Me they must return.
Let My worship be in the heart that rejoices,
for behold-
all acts of love and pleasure are My rituals.
Let there be beauty and strength,
power and compassion,
honor and humility,
mirth and reverence within you.
And you who seek to know Me,
know that your seeking and yearning
will avail you not,
unless you know the Mystery:
for if that which you seek,
you find not within yourself,
you will never find it without.
For behold,
I have been with you from the beginning,
and I am that which is attained
at the end of desire.”

Sermon

Good Yule to you all, and Merry Christmas! Along with our sisters, brothers and cousins in all Christian churches around the world, we are getting ready to celebrate the birth of the Baby, the Divine Child, the light of the world. We have all heard the story of this birth. This morning I want to talk about that story as the story of the divine seed in us, the wise baby spoken of in many cultures throughout the world.

In our Unitarian Universalist tradition we try to approach all scripture with respect, and with a broad sense of its possible meanings. One way we can do that is to approach the stories as if they were true in a transcendent way if not necessarily in an historical way. In other words, they tell truths, not about the world of history, but about the world of the soul.

Listen to the story of the birth of the Divine Child Yeshua in Bethlehem. His mother Mary had a visit from an angel who announced that she would give birth to a savior child. When it came time for the birth, the family was visiting Joseph’s home town of Bethlehem so they could pay their taxes. Born before Mary had been with a man, the baby was laid in a manger. Angels and shepherds attended his birth, and some time later three magi came from far off lands to pay tribute to the new king born in Israel. The magi had stopped in at the palace, asking King Herod where the new king was. The wicked King Herod quickly ordered all the males under the age of two in the town killed, so this royal child would not grow up to threaten his power. Warned by an angel to flee the slaughter, Joseph and Mary and their baby went for a time to Egypt, where they were safe.

The story of the Divine Child is repeated in many cultures throughout history. This information should let you know how important this birth story is, what the writers were saying about the baby by including these elements. They were saying he was a god-king, in a code the people of that time would hear and understand.

The Egyptian God Horus was born of the virgin Isis; as an infant, he was visited by three kings.

In Phrygia, Attis was born of the virgin Nama.

A Roman savior Quirinus was born of a virgin.

In Tibet, Indra was born of a virgin. He ascended into heaven after death.

The Greek deity Adonis was born of the virgin Myrrha, many centuries before the birth of Jesus. The Buddha is said to have been born of the virgin Maya, who was impregnated by a white elephant putting its tusk into her side. Those stories are from 500 BCE.

The most striking parallels are between Krishna and Christ (I say Christ because I want you to hear how like “krishna” it sounds, and also because that is how Christians talk about the divine aspect of Jesus, reserving the name “Jesus” for his human aspect.

Yeshua and Krishna were called both a God and the Son of God.

Both were sent from heaven to earth in the form of a man. Both were called Savior, and the second person of the Trinity.

Their mothers were holy virgins, who had similar names: Miriam (Mary) and Maia. His adoptive human father was a carpenter.

A spirit or ghost was their actual father.

Krishna and Jesus were of royal descent.

“Krishna was born while his foster father Nanda was in the city to pay his tax to the king.”

Both were visited at birth by wise men and shepherds, guided by a star.

An angel issued a warning that the local dictator planned to kill the baby and had issued a decree for his assassination.

Both were identified as “the seed of the woman bruising the serpent’s head.”

Jesus was called “the lion of the tribe of Judah.” Krishna was called “the lion of the tribe of Saki.”

Both were considered both human and divine.

I don’t tell you these things to shake anyone’s faith, in fact, many scholars are now cautioning us about making comparisons between religious stories that are too facile. I’m telling you that there are some similarities to lift up that this is a nearly universal human story that tells a truth about the life of the soul. The story of the Jesus, the Divine Child, has all the elements of every divine/human being’s story: Born in a miraculous way, threatened after birth but saved, visited by those who could see his light, a precocious child… the temptation, death and resurrection are part of all the stories too, but that is not what we are talking about here. In fact, what I want to talk about is the Divine Child in each of us. I want to say that maybe we are all divine and human at the same time.

The image of the Divine as a baby is so rich. I invite you to let go of your hold on the Judeo-Christian God you believe in or don’t believe in. Open up to an understanding of the Divine as Love, as Light, as Spirit. When God is a baby, no one has to fear Him. No one has to tremble before His wrath. No one has to wonder what they have done wrong, how they have disappointed Him. The thought of a baby lets you start new, before anyone got a picture of what you are like. Before you got defined and diagnosed. Before you made any mistakes, before there were any misunderstandings.

A baby love, a baby light, a baby spirit carries within itself all that it will become, like an oak within the acorn, like a mighty river that starts as a spring welling out of the earth in a high and quiet place. The light starts as a tiny sliver, something you care for, something you nurture, you are careful with it. You delight in it.

What if this is a story about the soul entering the world of our body? The light of spirit and wisdom, the Divine Seed (to use a traditional Unitarian phrase) being planted in a human being? Most of the founders of our free religion believed that the seed of God, a tiny sliver of the light, was in each of us. Maybe it enters into us when we are in the dark of our mother’s womb.

Do you sometimes have the experience of the Divine seed glowing within you? Does it sometimes come in a midwinter time of life, when it is dark, when it is difficult to see in front of you? When you are in a time of not knowing, uncertainty? In the dark, even the tiniest light is visible.

The Divine seed, the wise baby, is within all of us, containing the whole of divinity in itself, yet needing to grow.

Antoine St. Exupery says: “the seed haunted by the sun never fails to find its way between the stones in the ground.” (“Flight to Arras”) We have the experience of being able to feel the light, however faint, as it shows us the next step to take. When our souls are seeds “haunted by the sun,” we can grow. Is our soul the seed, or is it the light? Both. Do we long for the Divine, or are we Divine ourselves? Both. Do we search for God or is God within us? Both. That is my belief. You, as always, are free to believe about this what makes sense to you.

In times of confusion and doubt, see us able to visit our soul like the magi, the wise magicians, kneel before it with gifts of quiet, respect and love. We can nurture the light, the seed of God within us. We can protect it from the forces of power over, the forces of fear and control. The Herod power, the light-killing, love-killing power of the outer world (and of our inner world as well.) I wish for you all at this time of the rebirth of the light that the light be reborn in you, that love be cradled in your heart, that your spirit be tenderly cherished.

Here is a poem by the 17th century Muslim Sufi poet Hafiz that says what I want to leave you with:

We have not come here to take prisoners,
But to surrender even more deeply
To freedom and joy.
We have not come into this exquisite world
To hole ourselves hostage from love.
Run, my dear,
From anything
That may not strengthen
Your precious budding wings.
Run like hell my dear,
From anyone likely
To put a sharp knife
Into the sacred, tender vision
Of your beautiful heart.

Hafiz

1. William Harwood, “Mythology’s last gods: Yahweh and Jesus,” Prometheus Books (1992), Page 257.

2. Rev. Phil Greetham, “3: Where did our Magi come from?”

3. “Mithra,” Barbara G. Walker, “The Woman’s encyclopedia of myths and secrets,” Harper & Row, (1996), Pages 663 to 665.

4. Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy, “The Jesus Mysteries: Was the ‘Original Jesus’ a Pagan God?,” Thorsons, (1999).

Author Kersey Graves wrote a book in 1875 titled “The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors.” It lists 346 “striking analogies between Christ and Chrishna.”

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

Christmas Pageant

December 13, 2015 by tom Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse, Rev. Marisol Caballero, Gillian Redfearn, Vicki Almstrum
December 13, 2015
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

We present our annual Christmas pageant in an intergenerational, all-ages service. Our children perform in costumes of their choosing.

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.

An Upside-Down World: A Hymn of Reversal

December 6, 2015 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
December 6, 2015

As the choir is singing Bach’s beautiful Magnificat, the sermon will give background on Mary, her words, and the radical social, political and personal layers of this most ancient of Christian hymns.

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.

Saying Grace, Being Gratitude

November 29, 2015 by tom Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons, Video available

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Susan Yarbrough
November 29, 2015

Beyond focusing on gratitude once a year, how can we do more than simply be periodically grateful? How can we practice gratitude so consistently that we not only live into it, but actually become it?

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.

Family Life as a Spiritual Path

November 29, 2015 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 22, 2015

Can we gain more understanding of our place within our family? Why are we the way we are? How can we love those around us more capably?

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.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

November 15, 2015 by tom Posted in Audio available, Marisol Caballero, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Marisol Caballero
November 15, 2015

Our Covenant of Healthy Relations emphasizes treating each other and visitors with hospitality and respect, but “respect” means many things to many people. As we move toward becoming a multicultural church, let’s consider together various ways of treating others with respect.

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.

The ugly duckling

November 8, 2015 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 8, 2015

Another in the fairy tale sermon series, why do we sometimes feel that we don’t belong, that we don’t fit? What are the blessings and curses of being different from those around us?

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

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

At the threshold

November 1, 2015 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 1, 2015

What is it like being at the end of one’s life? What do people think and write about? On this All Saints Day, we’ll say the names of loved ones we have lost.

Call To Worship

Our call to worship today is an adaptation of a poem by Birago Ismael Diop, a Senegalese veterinarian, diplomat, poet, and storyteller whose work revived interest in African folktales. He died in 1989, and many of you will recognize his words in the song “Breaths” by the African American women’s singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock.

Listen more often to things than to beings,
Listen more closely to things than to beings.
‘Tis the Ancestor’s breath when the fire’s voice is heard,
‘Tis the Ancestor’s breath in the voice of the waters.
Those who have died have never, never left.
The dead are not under the earth.
They are in the rustling trees, they are in the groaning woods,
They are in the crying grass, they are in the moaning rocks.
The dead are not under the earth.
Those who have died have never, never left.
The dead have a pact with the living.
They are in the woman’s breast, they are in the wailing child.
They are with us in our homes, they are with us in this crowd.
The dead have a pact with the living.
The dead are not under the earth.

Reading

A Parable of Immortality by Henry Van Dyke

This is a poem by Henry Van Dyke, an American author, statesman, Presbyterian clergyman, and professor of English literature at Princeton University until his death in 1933.

I am standing upon the seashore.
A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze
and starts for the blue ocean.

She is an object of beauty and strength,
and I stand and watch until at last she hangs
like a speck of white cloud
just where the sea and sky come down to mingle with each other.
Then someone at my side says,
“There she goes!”

Gone where?

Gone from my sight … that is all.

She is just as large in mast and hull and spar
as she was when she left my side
and just as able to bear her load of living freight
to the place of destination.

Her diminished size is in me, not in her.

And just at the moment
when someone at my side says,
” There she goes! ”
there are other eyes watching her coming …
and other voices ready to take up the glad shout …

“Here she comes!”

Sermon

I was at the bedside of a man in my congregation. He was dying. “I don’t know how to do this,” he said. He had been a professor, a scientist. He’d been mean to his wife, mean to his grown kids, mean to the people in the congregation. I was surprised at the openness of this moment.

“I don’t either,” I said. “I’ve sat by a lot of people while they were dying. It looks like you just go farther and farther away, and your body shuts itself down. Maybe it’s like falling asleep. You’ve done that plenty of times, right?” He was fighting, kicking at death like he had kicked at life. One thing I’ve noticed over my thirty-five years of being a minister is that people seem to die the way they live. Some want to be no trouble, they slip away when no one’s looking. Some want to be surrounded by family and friends, some want to be sung to, read to. One man who was well loved in the congregation died in the hospital, and his nurse that night happened also to be a member, and his wife was there. She held one hand, Greg, the nurse, held the other, and I held onto his feet as he breathed his last.

My mother died at home. She’d been sick for five years, and she’d asked to come home to die. We made a pallet by the couch where she lay. I slept there that night. Sometimes when she’d called out, I’d said “I’m here.” Once, she said, “Just a second, I’ll be right there,” as if she had a long way to come back to where we were watching with her. One gardener said he just hoped he wouldn’t outlast his legs. When his legs went, he was ready to go. He was 92, and he said he’d thought he would like to get to 95, but now that he was looking at it from a wheelchair, he didn’t care to get there so much any more. My great-grandfather, the preacher who had been at his church fifty-four years, who retired when he was 80 by saying, after the sermon, “no one should preach past their 80th birthday, so today I retire.” As the buzz in the congregation died down, he asked Brother Matthew to pray, and while everyone’s head was bowed for the prayer, he walked down the aisle of the church and out the front door. That was his last day of work. When he lay dying, his family kept watch on the porch. Through the open windows they heard him saying “Isaiah, I’m James Hearst Pressly, from Statesville, North Carolina. I’m pleased to meet you. Jeremiah, James Hearst Pressly, Statesville, North Carolina. Pleased to meet you.” Then he died.

The end of life is a threshold time, meaning that it is a time when things come up for review, when changes are made more easily. Families can reconcile or break apart. Often, emotionally wrenching decisions have been made. Atul Gawande, in his book “Being Mortal,” talks about people weighing treatment options. How much pain are you willing to endure to add two months more of life? Medicine can prolong technical life for so long – what measures do you want them to take? How do you decide? How much does being at home matter to you? Who do you want to talk to? Do you have any regrets you want to take care of, if you can?

Some people’s thoughts have been mostly of the people they were leaving behind. They worried about how they’d get along. Some people get right to the point of dying and they haven’t made any plans, any arrangements. Everyone’s been talking to them about “fighting,” and no one has just gone on and asked what they would like to have happen at the end. That’s sometimes the minister’s job. “What do you want for your memorial service?” You might ask. It’s good to give it some thought, that way you get to pick readings that say something about you, songs you like. No one who is crazed with grief has to figure all of that out.

I’m asking you to think about these things. Talk about them with your family before you get sick. Take care of your relationships so you won’t have any regrets that could have been fixed. Practice accepting help so you will be graceful to your caregivers, rather than surly. When you’re angry at having to be helped, your helpers have a double job of helping you and reassuring you, or helping you and enduring your surliness. What questions do you want to ask your medical team? How can you communicate to them what things are important to you? Think about that now. They will want to extend your life. What do you enjoy in your life? What do you want to hold on to? Write them down and stick them in your freezer, or email them to me. I have a file I’m keeping of people’s wants and wishes for their memorial services. I have a form you can fill out if you’d like, that I can send to you. Me, I want the song Skylark at the beginning of my service. It’s a sad song, and it’s going to be a sad time. At the end, “Blue Skies.” And I want people to cry. Dying is scary, but we are brave, and we can talk about it together.

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

Transcendence

October 25, 2015 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
October 25, 2015

Transcendence: to connect with wonder and awe of the unity of life. In this first of a series of sermons on the religious values that are the foundation of our religious community, we will explore the meaning and experience of transcendence.

Call to worship

Come into this place of worship, where we live our values and mission together:

Transcendence – To connect with wonder and awe of the unity of life

Community – To connect with joy, sorrow, and service with those whose lives we touch

Compassion – To treat ourselves and others with love

Courage – To live lives of honesty, vulnerability, and beauty

Transformation – To pursue the growth that changes our lives and heals our world

Come into this place that, through our values, we make sacred together.

Reading

Paradox
by Chris Jimmerson

I am in the leaves glowing green from backlit sun. I am in the freshly mown grass, and I flow throughout all in drops of water.
I expand through distant galaxies and rise upon stormy winds.

And yet, I am not.

I am one and many.
Here, where time has no meaning, or perhaps, all times exist at once.
Here, where place has no meaning and yet it is possible to exist in all places at once.

And yet, I am not.

I cease, melting into nothingness and yet into everything.
I know the heart of the raven and the swift reflexes of the dolphin,
even as these, too, blend into the whole.

Light. Darkness. Movement. Stillness. Glowing fires. Freezing snow. Hurricane. Blizzard. Stones. Mountains. Sand. Oceans.

Unity.

I am.

Sermon

Several years ago, I was serving on the board here at First Unitarian Universalist – this was before I went to seminary – and we were in the middle of a series of sessions with the congregation to discern what are now our values and our mission.

The folks on the board had gone through one of the sessions first. Our job after that was to listen deeply at other sessions, as other church members participated in the process.

I’ll never forget the first session where I was there to listen. I walked into Howson hall on a Saturday morning to find a group of folks who I knew were almost all self-identified atheists.

Now, I also knew from having already been through the process, that a major part of it involved people sharing their “experiences of the holy”, so I was thinking to myself, “I wonder how this is going to work?” Twenty minutes later, we were passing around boxes of tissue, as people told of times when they had felt connected to something larger than themselves, when they had experienced awe and wonder, when their hearts had expanded. So, there our group of atheists sat, in a church fellowship hall, dabbing tears from their eyes over sharing stories of experiencing the holy.

It was beautiful and moving and, well, holy.

What this exercise did was help us determine what values we had in common, as revealed through these experiences, as well as to reclaim that word “holy” for ourselves. Then, combining these values with the results from some other exercises we did, the board was to suggest what the congregation held as its key purpose or mission. That’s how we got the statement we still have on our wall and say together every Sunday.

I start with that story because we do not talk about our values as often as our mission, nor about how both came to be determined – that the values came first – the mission emerged out of our values. It will be important to remember this process as we live out and continue to assess our values and mission, as we grow into our future.

So, this morning, I am beginning a series of sermons on each our five religious values, starting with the one we list first, because you know, “Transcendence in Twenty Minutes or Less”, easy, no problem.

I actually do think it is important that we start with our religious value of transcendence, because I think there are good reasons we ended up citing it first.

Here is one of them. After those sessions I just told you about, we compiled the number of times each value was expressed by folks in the congregation and created one of those Word Art graphics that shows those that were mentioned the most often in a larger font size. Perhaps partially as a result of the way the sessions were structured, this is what we got.

Transcendence (and related words people had used to describe their experiences of it) were clearly the largest in the graphic.

It is important here to describe what folks meant by transcendence because one meaning of the word can be to overcome, to rise above, and certainly, we do, for instance, try to transcend oppression through our social justice efforts. What people were talking about here though was more of an experience of transcendence, an experience outside of their day-to-day experience of life, an awe and wonder of the unity of life.

Science has begun to examine these types of experiences and has found that what people label as transcendent experiences vary as to what seems to cause them, the exact nature of the experience and the degree of intensity. However, there does seem to be a common set of characteristics to them that includes:
– a sense of belonging and connectedness with others and with all of creation
– Closely related to this, a sense of both dissolution of self and a flowing or expansion outward toward a sense of unity with all that is
– An altering of one’s normal sense of space and time
– An acceptance of paradox
– A perception of beneficial changes in perspective and behavior afterwards.

These characteristics are remarkably similar to the way our folks described their experiences on that Saturday morning in Howson Hall.

Here is another reason why I don’t think it is all that surprising that transcendence as a value emerged so strongly here at the church. While as Unitarian Universalists, we come out of a tradition that has certainly always had a strong element of rationality and reason, so too has our tradition always contained a strain of finding truth and beauty through personal experience. And these two can sometimes be at odds.

Our Transcendentalist forbearers provide the obvious example. In the 1800s, people like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker got themselves into trouble with, not just the conservatives of their time, but also their fellow Unitarians, by saying things like the miracles ascribed to Jesus in the bible didn’t literally happen. Reason says that doesn’t make any sense. Parker even went on to say that true Christianity would exist even if it were to turn out that Jesus had never lived.

Tell that to a fundamentalist even today. Then run away very, very quickly. And yet, the Transcendentalists were also reacting against the overly rational, dry worship and preaching styles of the Unitarians of their time. They found it devoid of personal spiritual experience. Emerson left his ministry and found what he clearly described as transcendental experiences through self-reflection and nature. He wrote:

“Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”

I have always thought that is a beautiful passage. Well, except for the transparent eyeball part. That’s just kind of Éweird. But then when he went on to explain it as “I am nothing; I see all” it sounds very similar to “the sense of both dissolution of self and a flowing or expansion outward toward a sense of unity with all” that I mentioned earlier.

This influence is with us even today. Our Unitarian Universalist association of congregations lists six sources from which we draw wisdom and spirituality. The very first source is stated like this: “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.”

I think Emerson has also handed down to us a tradition of pushing back against the idea of hierarchical or vertical transcendence wherein our experience of it can only occur through a God that is “up there”, and they can only be mediated by the institution of the church and its religious authorities.

That’s how the little Southern Baptist church we went to when I was a child was. God existed in some elevated, holy realm, while we sinners wallowed down in the physical realm. The preacher and the deacons at the front of the church were holier than the rest of us, so we were not allowed to go up there except to get saved (or if we were part of the cleaning crew). The communion was brought to us lowly ones there in our pews.

Now, even then I didn’t like this, so, one Sunday when I was six years old, the time came in the service where you could go up front and say that you had been saved that day, so up I went and got saved. I don’t really remember having some transcendent experience of Jesus washing my soul clean or anything. I was six. I think I just wanted to be up their with the holier than thou people, the cool kids. And, please, no cracks in receiving line about me later becoming a minister.

Emerson believed in a very this worldly God that, to oversimplify a bit, was both the unity of all things and that also existed within all things. There was a spark of the divine in every person, so one did not necessarily need a church to experience transcendence.

Jerome A. Stone, a current day Unitarian Universalist theologian take this a step further by removing God from the experience altogether. Citing a perspective called religious naturalism, Stone speaks of these experiences as horizontal rather than vertical transcendence. He gives two examples.

In the first, he tells of the time that he got a call letting him know that his father had died. His daughter, who was eight years old at the time, came into the room where he had slumped into a chair. She asked what was wrong. When he told her, she said, “Oh daddy”, got in the chair with him, and wrapped her arms around him. Stone says he had the experience of transcendence as is typically described, only its source was the gift of love and comfort offered by his daughter, rather than by the grace of some God.

Similarly, he tells of having another of these experiences during the late 1960s. He was participating in weekly marches to demand a housing ordinance regarding racial equality in the city where he was busily attending graduate school. He says that he was pulled to do so by a moral demand coming, again, not from some God, but from a sense of ethics and compassion.

Interestingly, the theology that appeals greatly to me personally maintains this idea of horizontal transcendence but also includes a concept of the divine. Process relational theology, to oversimplify a bit again, conceptualizes the divine, as an ever-evolving process that is itself the sum total of every process of becoming (or evolution and change) throughout the entire universe. These processes of becoming include me, you, the rocks, the plants – all that is – we are all ever-changing and interconnected in ways that are beyond our normal, every day understanding.

The divine, whether seen as a metaphor or an actual presence, also holds all of the creative possibilities that are available to us in each moment. In this worldview then, we experience transcendence when we get a glimpse of the true depth and complexity of that interconnectedness – a sense of deep belonging that drives in us a love for all of creation and that lures us toward creativity, justice and beauty.

Hey, it’s a pretty theology, whether you agree with it or not! So that’s just a few of the ways some Unitarian Universalists have thought about these experiences. There are many, many other ways of viewing them throughout the world’s religions and, more recently, through various psychological and neurological theories about them.

So, as I thought about this first of our values, I struggled, not so much with their source nor what may be going inside with them, but instead with why they seemed to be of such value to us. What do they do for us? I was reading shame and vulnerability researcher Dr. Brene Brown’s latest book when I had a realization about these experiences that I really did not want to accept at first. That happens to me a lot with Dr. Brown’s work, so she pisses me off. And bless her for doing so.

I think at least one of the things we draw from these experiences is a greater capacity and willingness to allow our hearts to break wide open – an ability to love wholeheartedly, even though doing so will inevitably involve loss and heartbreak.

A while back, it was a very cold night, so we had the fireplace going. At the time, my spouse, Wayne, was suffering the worst of some very serious, potentially life-threatening health issues. He was lying on the couch across from the fireplace, covered with a blanket, sleeping. Our two ridiculously spoiled Basenji dogs had curled up on the couch beside him. It’s funny how our animal friends know when we are not doing well. They were 13 and 14, about as far as their expected lifespans go.

I sat in a chair looking at them, thinking about the thousands of years dogs and humans have been gathering together next to a fire and how many times a similar scene must have been occurring across our hemisphere in that very moment.

And I had that transcendent experience – that sense of deeper connection and belonging – that sense of self both dissolving and expanding outward toward an ultimate love and a beautiful unity.

And yet, it was achingly beautiful, because my heart was breaking over the potential for loss in my immediate, very real, every day world.

And my heart grew larger – large enough to withstand such loss – filled up with a deep understanding that I would not give up one single moment of the pleasure and joy and love they have brought into my life.

Now, I want you to know that Wayne is doing much, much better and that so far the pups are still going, still spoiled and still misbehaving.

If we think back to all of the examples of these experiences I have talked about just in this sermon, they all involved this sense of our hearts breaking wide open: our folks in Howson Hall moved to tears by one another’s stories; Jerome Stone’s story of being offered grace by his young daughter over the loss of his own father; his story of participating in marches because the world as it was what not the world he longed for; even Emerson’s description of our experiences of transcendence through being in nature, I think involve a sense of loss, because we know it is all temporary – all of the life around us will also end and be replaced – and even the very rocks in the hillsides will eventually dissolve away and be transformed into something new.

Abraham Maslow, who founded humanistic psychology, called these experiences “peak experiences”, and he thought that they generate within us a set of values that are more life-giving and life-fulfilling – values that have to do with connection and belonging.

I think he was right. And if I am correct that these experiences help us to break our hearts wide open so that they grow and can love more fully even though we will know loss, then perhaps the biggest reason we put transcendence first on our list is because the rest of our values emerge out of it. It takes courage to love wholeheartedly, knowing our hearts will be broken and yet also knowing that it is still worth it.

Loving whole-heartedly is the very essence of compassion. It is at the heart of the empathy required to create community.

Together, these make possible the ultimate reason I think we gather in community, transformation – the growth that changes our lives and heals our world.

Throughout time, ritual, prayer, music, poetry, meditation, art, singing, working together for a just cause, intentional silence, the things we practice here at this church, have all been known to be capable of generating this state of transcendence.

It’s pretty fantastic then, that we have chosen to value it so much.

Hallelujah and amen.

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

Dialogue with Conservatives

October 18, 2015 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 18, 2015

It has become more and more difficult to have fruitful conversations with people who are different from us in their view of the world. How do we talk to one another?

One of the winners of the auction item inviting a suggestion of a sermon topic suggested that I preach on how she could better talk to her conservative relatives. We all have family members who think very differently from the ways we do. This sermon is a series of suggestions and some crucial bits of information about how liberals can talk to conservatives. This is as much a roadmap of how Republicans should argue with Democrats too.

Hard Wired

The news from science about changing a person’s mind through rational discourse is this: When someone feels something strongly, you can talk yourself blue in the face and not make a dent. You can post the wittiest and most cogent memes on Facebook, you can email jokes and facts and charts and not make a dent. You won’t make a dent in you and their memes won’t make a dent in you. We almost can’t help it. Study after study is showing that the very brains of liberals, conservatives and moderates are wired differently. In a study at University of Nebraska, the scientists follow people’s involuntary responses, including eye movements, when they are shown scary, neutral, pleasant or disgusting photos. It turns out that conservatives react more strongly to the pictures which might create fear or disgust. John Hibbing, of the University of Nebraska, says conservatives are more attuned to fearful or negative stimuli. So the conservative focus on a strong military, tough law enforcement, resistance to immigration, and wanting the widespread availability of guns may go with an underlying threat-oriented biology. John Jost from NYU drew a lot of backlash from conservatives when his studies seemed to show in 2003 that conservatives have a greater need for certainty and an intolerance of ambiguity. Their funding was looked into, but so many peers were finding the same results that it makes everyone safer. The correlations between the body’s reactivity and political ideology are so striking that they can predict a person’s political views from simply watching the eye movements they make when seeing the aversive photographs. There is a common sense evolutionary imperative for threat-oriented wiring. Conservatives also tend to be happier, more emotionally stable. Liberals a bit more neurotic. Being sure of things, having strong ideas of what’s familiar and an aversion to what’s strange or icky keeps you happier, apparently, than being open to new experiences, being bothered by inequality and fretting about the suffering of others. I’m not saying conservatives don’t fret about the suffering of others. They just have a more certain, rule oriented plan for what should be done. I think, since there seem to be almost even numbers of those on the right and left, that nature decided we need people with their foot on the gas and people with their foot on the brake, in terms of social change.

Moral Code

It’s hardwired. The only way to change someone’s mind is to show them that their behavior or practice is counter to their own moral code. Not counter to your moral code, their own. But other studies show that the moral codes used are different. In a study by Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt, and Brian A. Nosek University of Virginia, liberals cared more about fairness and compassion. Conservatives cared about those two sets of moral imperatives too, but also measured things in terms of respect for authority, the purity and sanctity of ideas and institutions and in-group loyalty. Those last three were less important to liberal’s thinking.

Steps to Change

Talk about the FBI hostage negotiators about this. What they know is that arguments are emotional. It is rare that someone you’re arguing with will change their mind due to a rational argument. Negotiators have diagramed what they call the Path to Behavioral Change. The first step is active listening. When a Republican is talking to a crazy liberal, or a liberal is talking to your wacky uncle who listens to Rush, the first step in changing someone’s mind is active listening. So you would say “tell me more.” You would say “How did you come to this view?” As they talk, you don’t evaluate: “hm, that’s a good point,” or “I’m not sure your facts are straight….” You just say small encouraging things. “hm.” Or “I hear you.” You might ask open ended questions, like I mentioned before “How did you come to that view?” “What do you think about the front runners?” “What policies really feel important to you?” You can also just, without being weird about it, repeat the last phrase they said. If they say “I just think this is the stupidest group of leaders we’ve ever had.” You could say “the stupidest we’ve ever had?” Using pauses can be extremely effective. When the Moonies and I were talking about their beliefs, sometimes all I would need to do was stay quiet after they had said something and let their words hang in the air. “You say Mr. Moon takes away your sins before he marries you? How does he do that, exactly? By dabbing some wine on your photographs Hm.” It also can help to name the emotions you hear. “That sounds like it was upsetting.” “That makes you mad.” “It doesn’t seem fair to you.”

It’s hard for even the most passionate and committed person to carry on a one-sided argument. You are listening, and not only that, you are showing them that you are listening. This is a rare enough experience for anyone to being to open things up between you. Empathy is the second step of the ladder to change. This doesn’t mean making understanding noises or saying an understanding phrase. This means really having empathy, emotionally relating, to the other person’s perspective. This is what the active listening is for, partially. To actually ask the questions which will help you get to a place of understanding. Rapport, when the other person feels in their body, their mind and their spirit, that you understand, when they begin to actually feel you with them, is the next step. See, this is hard. I rebel at this point. I don’t want to look at the places in me that actually relate to their fears, phobias, suspicion of the stranger, “disasterizing” about the future, cruelty to the suffering, what I see as lack of communitarian spirit. Without getting in touch with those places in you, conversation is not going to be fruitful. If you are a conservative talking to a crazy liberal, you may need to get in touch with the places in you that feel for other people, that want to help, that can face suffering and the reality that it isn’t always the person’s fault who is suffering, the idea that the world is big and overwhelming and our country might not be the greatest country there ever was, that we might have bad decisions, greed and cruelty in our history, that some of us are victimized by others, that security is an illusion, etc.

After rapport is established, then comes influence. It is at this point that you might be able to influence the thinking and feeling of another person. Since empathy, though, you are open to their influence as well. Our mistake is that we try to jump right into influencing other people. Things seem so clear to us. The facts seem to make our conclusion so obvious. One problem is that it seems everyone has different facts.

It used to be that people thought facts were supposed to be – you know, factual. When JFK debated Nixon, though, he later confessed that he just made up the statistics he cited. Made them up. They sounded great. Now it seems that people will say things with great authority whether they are true or not. It used to be that media outlets had to give both sides of an argument. They had to seek out viewpoints on all sides, facts which supported all sides, present them to people so they could decide. During the Reagan administration, the Fairness Doctrine was abolished. I think that was 1987. In 1988 Rush Limbaugh started his radio show. These days, most people watch Fox news or MSNBC. They get red facts and blue facts. They hear about red issues and blue issues. You have to really work to hear both sides. Reasoned and civil discussions are not the style. It is easier and more fun for people to mock one another, to imagine that the people on the other side are ridiculous, crazy, clowns! All this does is to make you feel energized and good in a nasty way about your own side. I’m not asking us to stop that, but you have to understand that we can’t ask those who feel differently to stop their emails, jokes and memes either. It sounds like a lot of listening is recommended. And love even though they may not be able to see how right you are.

“In terms of their personalities, liberals and conservatives have long been said to differ in ways that correspond to their conflicting visions. Liberals on average are more open to experience, more inclined to seek out change and novelty both personally and politically (McCrae, 1996). Conservatives, in contrast, have a stronger preference for things that are familiar, stable, and predictable (Jost, Nosek, & Gosling, 2008; McCrae, 1996). Conservatives – at least, the subset prone to authoritarianism – also show a stronger emotional sensitivity to threats to the social order, which motivates them to limit liberties in defense of that order (Altemeyer, 1996; McCann, 2008; Stenner, 2005). Jost, Glaser, Sulloway, and Kruglanski (2003) concluded from a meta-analysis of this literature that the two core aspects of conservative ideology are resistance to change and acceptance of inequality. How can these various but complementary depictions of ideological and personality differences be translated into specific predictions about moral differences? First, we must examine and revise the definition of the moral domain.”

“Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt, and Brian A. Nosek University of Virginia How and why do moral judgments vary across the political spectrum? To test moral foundations theory (J. Haidt & J. Graham, 2007; J. Haidt & C. Joseph, 2004), the authors developed several ways to measure people’s use of 5 sets of moral intuitions: Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. Across 4 studies using multiple methods, liberals consistently showed greater endorsement and use of the Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity foundations compared to the other 3 foundations, whereas conservatives endorsed and used the 5 foundations more equally.”

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

Listening to Drag

October 12, 2015 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 11, 2015

For Coming Out Weekend, we’ll talk about the cultural and political statement of drag: men dressing as women to perform as entertainers. How is it subversive to the powers that be?

At first I was afraid
I was petrified
Kept thinking I could never live
without you by my side
But then I spent so many nights
thinking how you did me wrong
And I grew strong
And I learned how to get along

Every social movement has its songs, its gestures, its slang, its assumptions, infighting, and its sense of what’s wrong in the world. This morning, in honor of National Coming Out Weekend, we’re going to look together about the culture of drag and give it a salute for being one of the big-haired, heavily made up mothers of the new freedom, the growing normalcy of the LGBT movement. Drag is cis-men (that means men who were born male) dressing up as women for the purposes of entertainment. Well, sometimes they dress up as parodies of femininity, with exaggerated eye makeup, wigs that reach to the ceiling fans, and six inch heels. Sometimes they dress in torn punk clothes, with just a couple of items of female-identified clothing. Sometimes they are in a satin dress and pearls, sporting a full beard. Sometimes drag can be cis-women (women who were born female) dressed as men, expressing themselves in ways that our culture has identified as male. Sometimes they will have on makeup, eye shadow, a beard, girl jeans and a boy shirt, smoking a pipe…. Oh well. It’s complicated. RuPaul, the most famous drag queen in the world, says “We’re born naked, and the rest is drag.

A sociology PhD thesis by Elizabeth Kaminski analyses drag culture as a community. An oppositional culture, organized both to imitate and mock the dominant culture. In the had old days, which, in many places ended – um – last month, you could get thrown out of your family for being gay. In the early seventies, when some of you came out, you could still get thrown into a mental institution for being gay. About 40% of street kids are gay or transgender. You are three times more likely to commit suicide as a gay teen. A chosen family becomes the structure which holds you together. Sometimes drag queens will take in younger men, give them a place to stay and a start as a drag performer. They can be the “drag mother,” and you can be a performer at the drag balls from their “house.” You belong. There is love and drama and betrayal and cattiness, like there is in a lot of families. A created community has its own language. Your work may have its own language. Your family may have it’s own language. Some of you know a little drag language. What happens if I say “You – better – WERK!”

Not all gay people know about drag. Drag and trans are two separate things, with some overlap, of course. Trans is being born biologically one gender and feeling inside like the other. Of course, that’s oversimplified, because some babies are born with some characteristics of one gender and some of the other, but our culture doesn’t have space for a third gender, like some other cultures do, so parents have to choose for the child. All of this is over simplified, because gender is a continuum, but not as linear as that – you have how you like to express your gender, who you’re attracted to, And trans women aren’t performing, aren’t exaggerated, they just want to express the femaleness they feel at their core. Trans men are just being regular men, not performing. There is a little overlap, but the two things shouldn’t be confused. Drag culture expresses community. It makes a free space for an oppressed minority to express and experiment without apology or approbation, where the music evokes sympathy, humor, solidarity. Outrage, then agency/empowerment. Through songs, jokes, language. Drag shows are for gay folks, but they are also to expose heterosexuals to the culture, to give them a sense of being outsiders let inside.

Drag queens have had to be tough and funny. When you get beat up as a child, you learn to fight, or to take the beating. The GLBT revolution started in a bar where there were men dressed as women and women dressed as men. It was a free space, but not really, since the police raided it regularly. It was 1969, where being gay was still considered pathology. The patrons of the Stonewall Inn were gay men and lesbians, drag queens, transgender folks, and homeless teens. They were used to being raided by the police. Arrests were violent, gay bashing was the rule of the day, and that doesn’t mean verbal bashing. This one night, though, something snapped. The police raided, but the patrons wouldn’t run. Accounts vary, but many say it was the drag queens and butch lesbians who started throwing punches. Then bricks. People poured out on the street to protest police violence that had run unchecked for decades. Things began to change.

Social change happens when collective identity can be developed, and social action frames can shape understanding of what is wrong and what can be done to make it right. Then political protest can be energized. There must be a strong sense of “us” and an anger at what it wrong. Language and music helps with the sense of “us.” We are the ones who understand certain words. We are the ones who get it. We get strong among ourselves and then we act. Some will be drawn to our cause.

One thing sociologists haven’t talked about in the reading I’ve done is that, for social change to happen, there have to be the people who are respectable and the other scarier people. In the often-violent suffrage movement, Alice Paul and her followers chained themselves to the White House fence, were arrested, beaten, went on hunger strikes, and were force fed in jail. Carrie Chapman Catt was respectable and reasonable, and the legislators only dealt with her because on the other hand were the riot women. It looks like President Johnson dealt with MLK because Malcom X was on the other hand, looking scary. Gay organizations which had been working respectably in the culture were suddenly easier to deal with when images of foul mouthed drag queens with bricks in their hands were there for you to deal with if you didn’t deal with the respectable gays.

One song performed in drag shows is called “What Makes a Man a Man.” The performer presents as a woman, but, during the song, takes off the wigs, takes out the pads, and reveals himself as a man as the verses go on. The persona of femaleness is not just for performance – it’s an expression of soul. Some drag queens would dress up whether or not they were performing. Some say they wouldn’t. What they do for the culture is to make it clear to everyone that there are powerful biological drivers which determine gender, there are also certain agreed-upon elements of gender performance we all learn. What woman doesn’t remember someone teaching her to run like a girl, laugh in a lady like way, cross your legs when you sit. I remember my mother telling me to turn the steering wheel delicately, with a pretty bend in my wrist. She also told me not to beat a boy in ping pong or chess, that men had to be taken care of in that way. She was my gender performance coach. My dad too. Drag queens, in the ways they exaggerate femininity, pay tribute to the beauty of that gender performance, but mock it as well, putting the idea in the mind of the culture that they see the performance. They see the social construct. They play out the pathos of longing for love and losing it, gathering up the shards of a broken heart and willing yourself to survive.

A drag show is a place where a free space for an oppositional culture is created. Gender constructs are parodied, injustice is mourned, rage is sung, and spirits are empowered. The queens deserve our respect and our gratitude.
THE BEAUTY IN YOU

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