Spiritual Always

March 18, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons, Video available

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
March 18, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Spirituality may be even more important to us if we are facing challenges to our quality of life, or even our own mortality. How do we face difficult decisions in ways that maximize our agency, quality of life, and our ability to maintain our spirituality?

Call to Worship

We enter, now, into this place of renewal.

We join together, now, in this community that sustains and upholds.

We imagine, now, a world with more compassion, more justice, more love.

We worship, now, that which is greater than us, and that holds our aspirations, our fortitude, our faith, our hope.

Now, we enter into this shared spirit of gratitude and community.

Now, we worship, together.

Reading

CHRISTMAS AT MIDLIFE
-Mary Anne Perrone

I am no longer waiting for a special occasion; I burn the best candles on ordinary days.

I am no longer waiting for the house to be clean; I fill it with people who understand that even dust is Sacred.

I am no longer waiting for everyone to understand me; It’s just not their task

I am no longer waiting for the perfect children; my children have their own names that burn as brightly as any star.

I am no longer waiting for the other shoe to drop; It already did, and I survived.

I am no longer waiting for the time to be right; the time is always now.

I am no longer waiting for the mate who will complete me; I am grateful to be so warmly, tenderly held.

I am no longer waiting for a quiet moment; my heart can be stilled whenever it is called.

I am no longer waiting for the world to be at peace; I unclench my grasp and breathe peace in and out.

I am no longer waiting to do something great; being awake to carry my grain of sand is enough.

I am no longer waiting to be recognized; I know that I dance in a holy circle.

I am no longer waiting for Forgiveness. I believe, I Believe.

Sermon

When we first got the call, we did not realize how serious things were. Our niece, Paige, had gone in for an adjustment to her pacemaker but suffered cardiac arrest during the procedure.

Paige was more like a sister to my spouse, Wayne, and for that matter to me. Her mother, and Wayne’s oldest sister, had been a lot older than Wayne. So much so, in fact, that Paige was much closer in age to us. She was almost exactly the same age as me.

Wayne made immediate plans to fly to where Paige was in the hospital. Not knowing quite how serious things really were, we agreed that I would stay behind.

The next day, Wayne called me. He let me know that Paige had died and been revived more than once after she had gone into cardiac arrest.

Her higher cognitive functioning was gone. Her kidneys were failing. Only the machines they had attached to her were keeping her body alive.

Wayne and Paige’s younger brother and one of Wayne’s other sisters (Paige’s aunt) were there. Her younger brother was faced with making the agonizing decision of whether or not to turn off the machines.

The family talked. He told the doctors to turn the machines off – to let her go.

Wayne called me later that same day to let me know she had died.

This is a scene that plays out all too often in hospitals across the country. We have the technology to keep people physically alive long after the person, the spirit, the mind is no longer. And even when consciousness is still there, we can far too easily trade away quality of life for vague hopes of extended life that too often go unfulfilled.

In Paige’s case, she had left a real spiritual gift to herself and to those of us who loved her. Perhaps because she had developed congestive heart failure at a relatively early age, she had put into place the documents that detailed her wishes should various medical circumstances develop. She had created a will that specified how she wished her values to continue to be expressed in the world after her death.

As importantly, she had discussed these wishes with key members of her family.

So when the time came, her family, her younger brother already knew what she would want them to do. I can only imagine how much harder it might have been had they not known.

Paige left our world having known that she had empowered the people she loved to enact her wishes in circumstances where she could not express them herself. There is an agency to this that too that to me has a spiritual element to it.

I share this story partially because too often aging, death, disability are topics we avoid.

And yet who here this morning is immortal?

And I have more bad news. We are all only temporarily abled. Like all complex systems, wear and tear, illness and accidents will eventually begin to break us down.

I think Paige’s story is a great example of someone who did not avoid these inevitabilities – of preparing ahead of time so that her own agency reached beyond even her physical longevity.

In his book, “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End”, Dr. Atul Gawande addresses how the medical model for handling aging and disability that we have adopted can take away that agency – can rob of us of the spiritual development that might otherwise be possible as we age, face fatal illness and/or disabilities.

He talks about alternatives that would prioritize quality of life over absolute safety and squeezing out a few more days of life.

Now before I go on, I want to acknowledge that there are likely people who are confronted with one or more of these challenges here today or whom have loved ones who are. Know that I know one of the reasons we avoid these topics is because they are difficult. They are emotional. Please know that I am available to you to talk further later on if need be.

My fellow Unitarian Universalist Minister, Jennifer L. Brower, outlines a number of spiritual tasks and opportunities for spiritual growth that we encounter as we age, many of which we also face if confronted with a fatal illness or the loss of one or more of our physical abilities. She defines spiritual in a way that I really love, so rather than paraphrase, I want to read you her actual words:

“If we understand the ‘spirit’ to mean the animating or vital force within each person — ‘spirit'” derived from the Latin spiritus, meaning ‘soul, courage, vigor, breath’ — then the spirit is our vital center or our core. And the ‘spiritual’ are those things which support that center; those things which enliven us and give us a sense of courage, or heart, for our living. Spiritual experiences are those events in life and moments in relationships which attune us to that vital or animating force within and which give greater meaning and depth to our day-to-day living.”

As we face aging, end of life issues, disability or some combination of these, we often need these spiritual experiences even more so. They can help us make sense of what is happening to us, find meaning and agency even within our new circumstances and maintain the relationships that sustain and comfort us.

As I mentioned earlier though, the problem, Dr. Gawande addresses in his book is that our “medicalized” model for handling disability, fatal illness and caring for the aged can and often does take away our very ability to engage our vital center, our spirit.

He tells heartbreaking stories of people in nursing homes in a room with someone they do not know and placed on a schedule that prioritizes the nursing home’s need for safety and efficiency over the residents’ agency and quality of life. Understandably, family members also often prioritize the safety of their loved ones without being aware of how extreme safety measures can so restrict quality of life.

Likewise, he tells wrenching stories of people with a fatal illness being given treatments and medical procedures with a false hope of extended life, at the cost of such treatments themselves causing misery and robbing them of quality of life. Too often, he asserts, healthcare providers find it difficult to describe the true direness of the situation and end up offering additional medical treatment instead.

Dr. Gawande points out that it does not have to be this way. He describes true assisted living facilities. One where each person has their own apartment where they can lock their door if they wish. They can establish their own priorities regarding their safety versus their agency. If they want to risk having a cocktail at night and end up falling down because of it, it is their decision. Regardless, the assistance will be there is they need it.

He describes other facilities that feature individual bedrooms and bathrooms arranged around a homelike central living and kitchen area. Again, agency is prioritized over safety. The residents make their own decisions and schedules to the extent that they are able. Pets and other life are allowed within the facilities.

Similarly, Dr. Gawande describes the hospice movement that has arisen in the U.S. and tells of how it has given people facing death the chance for a greater quality of life and has reduced their suffering. Hospice staff can also greatly help family members through the decline and loss of their loved one.

One study even found that people who went into hospice care actually survived longer on average than people in similar circumstances who were put on aggressive therapies.

My stepfather, Ty, was in my life for over 40 years. In many ways, he was more my father than my actual dad. He too developed congestive heart failure. For Ty it was in late 60s and early 70s. I am so thankful that the last trip he was able to make was to be here at this church for my ordination just over three years ago.

Ty’s condition quickly deteriorated after that though, to the point to where his heart was no longer pumping sufficiently. He had trouble breathing. His feet swelled with fluids.

He and my mom went to Houston and spoke with a specialist who talked with Ty about having an artificial heart transplant.

I am also so thankful that upon his return back to the Beaumont area where they lived, Ty spoke with his regular cardiologist, who had the courage to tell Ty about how low the chances that the transplant would be successful. He told about the many ways that the transplant procedure itself could go wrong with a person in Ty’s condition and could lead to even greater misery.

Eventually, Ty decided not to have the procedure – to live out whatever time he might have left with as much quality of life as could be made possible with palliative treatment only.

Those were difficult conversation he and my mom and the family had, but they were necessary conversations. They let Ty have agency and enjoy what he could even in his waning days.

I remember my mom calling me one time – I can tell you this because she and I have talked about it – she called me worried that she was making Ty mad by pestering him about his continued cigarette smoking. He had been a lifelong smoker and continued it even after deciding he would seek no further treatment for his heart other than hospice care.

I was like, “Mom, leave him alone. He enjoys it. What harm’s it gonna do now?”

She let it go.

I remember visiting mom and Ty near the end of his life. Ty was in his favorite reclining chair in their living room. Home hospice care had him on a pretty high dose of morphine because he was having a lot of trouble breathing and it helped keep him from suffering because of it. He could not talk much.

Still, he greeted me with that famous smile of his that could still light up the room, and after exchanging pleasantries, I sat down in the chair next to him.

We just sat for a while together, not saying much and even in our silent being together saying everything that mattered.

It was for me a spiritual experience, and I hope and think it was for Ty too.

Again, I share Paige and Ty’s stories with you because I think that they both demonstrate one of life’s important spiritual practices.

They put their wishes in writing. They had the difficult conversations with loved ones before it was late.

And this is something we all can do that will give us agency later on when we might not otherwise be able to exercise it and, as it was with Paige, can also be a great gift to those we love.

Getting our wills together that express how we would like our values to be expressed beyond our time here one earth, creating our health care directives and power of attorney documents and perhaps most importantly having these discussions with our loved ones now, so that this is already all in place when need it is actually a spiritual endeavor.

While there are absolute guarantees, having those difficult discussions with loved ones about what types medical procedures and life support we would want i under what conditions makes it much more likely our wishes will be fulfilled and that our loved ones can do so with far less anguish.

Letting our loved ones know what types of assisted living facility we would want and again under what circumstances can ease the decision making process later and give us the best chance for a higher quality of life as we reach the end stages of life. Would you prefer agency over safety? Have you purchased a long-term care policy for in home care? If so, do your loved ones know all of this?

Here are the additional spiritual challenges and growth possibilities we may go through as we age or face physical decline as outlined by Rev. Brower:

Bereavement – learning to cope with the loss of significant persons in our lives and those who had been with us during earlier, life-shaping events and yet remaining able to form new, close, intimate relationships.
Redefining our sense of purpose in life – what do we do to find meaning after we retire – after raising a family is no longer part of our purpose in life?
Reconciling our sense of self with a body and mind that may begin failing us in some way.
Reviewing our life – are there things we have left undone, unsaid, unresolved that we might like to address?
Resolving our questions about the nature of God, or what is ultimate or the nature of human existence, as well as resolving anxieties about death and the process of dying.
Our relationship to religion and our religious community. For older and disabled folks, just getting to church on Sunday, even if given a ride, can be a difficult if not almost impossible chore.

Yet the desire for religious community often remains strong. I am so glad that Rev. Ellis at this church goes to the Westminster assisted living facility and provides a worship service once per month for several of our members who reside there.

Spirituality and agency remain basic to our human needs throughout life, even as we face our own physical limitations and our own mortality.

By working to advocate for a society that treats these as human needs and not simply a medical problem, we can give ourselves and others the best chance to be able to meet those needs.

By knowing what spiritual challenges may lie ahead for us, by doing our best to prepare for them, by having the difficult but holy conversations around them with our loved ones, by making our wishes known, we may best be able to turn those challenges into lifelong spiritual growth.

Thank you, Paige. Thank you, Ty, for helping me learn this.

Amen.

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

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

Hacking Transcendence

March 11, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons, Video available

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
March 11, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Neuroscience and other research is learning more and more about what is happening in our brains and in our bodies during spiritual / transcendent / flow / peak experiences. Organizations from the Navy Seals to Google have been exploring ways to help their people reach these altered states more easily and more quickly, as such experiences can increase creativity, productivity, and team cohesion.

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.

Readings

THE NIGHT HOUSE
– Billy Collins

Every day the body works in the fields of the world
Mending a stone wall
Or swinging a sickle through the tall grass-
The grass of civics, the grass of money-
And every night the body curls around itself
And listens for the soft bells of sleep.

But the heart is restless and rises
From the body in the middle of the night,
Leaves the trapezoidal bedroom
With its thick, pictureless walls
To sit by herself at the kitchen table
And heat some milk in a pan.

And the mind gets up too, puts on a robe
And goes downstairs, lights a cigarette,
And opens a book on engineering.
Even the conscience awakens
And roams from room to room in the dark,
Darting away from every mirror like a strange fish.

And the soul is up on the roof
In her nightdress, straddling the ridge,
Singing a song about the wildness of the sea
Until the first rip of pink appears in the sky.
Then, they all will return to the sleeping body
The way a flock of birds settles back into a tree,

Resuming their daily colloquy,
Talking to each other or themselves
Even through the heat of the long afternoons.
Which is why the body-the house of voices-
Sometimes puts down its metal tongs, its needle, or its pen
To stare into the distance,

To listen to all its names being called
Before bending again to its labor.

THE GUEST HOUSE
– Jellaludin Rumi

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Sermon

In a remote area of northeastern Afghanistan, an elite team of the already elite Navy SEALS special forces was on the move. Known as the Special Development Group, or DEVGRU, their mission was to capture Al-Wazu, an Al-Qadea terrorist who had recently escaped a U.S. detention facility. Al-Wazu could provide invaluable intelligence, so it was essential that the team capture him alive.

As they moved stealthily toward a compound of buildings where they knew Al-Wazu was hiding, a switch flipped within each of them. Their brainwave patterns began to synchronize. The composition of the neurochemicals in their brains changed in similar ways.

Suddenly, they were a collective, not individual actors. In this state of altered consciousness, this group flow state, they were able to move both quickly and quietly, communicating without verbalizations and with minimal physical gestures.

Their movements became synchronized. Their division of scanning for potential enemies, side to side, ahead and behind became automatic. The person best positioned to take leadership changed as needed without discussion or debate.

As they approached the compound, they automatically split into teams that would surround it, as well as an assault team that would enter the the compound and attempt the capture.

The first room the assault team entered was empty, but the next room was crowded with armed guards mixed in with unarmed women and children. It was vital that the assault team be able to disarm the guards with as little fire fighting and unarmed casualties as possible.

And in their state of altered consciousness, they were able to do exactly that – read even minute facial expressions or body movements; sweeping in to capture each of the guards quickly and disarm them.

Leaving a couple of their team behind to watch over the guards and civilians, the remainder of the team entered the next room, only to immediately encounter Al-Wazu himself, sitting in a chair, an AK-47 rifle in his hands.

It would have been so easy to react immediately and fire upon him. In a normal state of consciousness, anyone of the team might have quite rationally thought, “better to strike immediately than to give him time to open fire with the automatic weapon in his hands”.

But they didn’t. In theIr altered state, each of them had processed almost instantaneously that Al-Wazu’s eyes were closed. He was fast asleep.

They made the capture without firing a shot, without any bloodshed.

And they could do so because they had been selected and trained for this ability to enter into a group flow state.

Back in the U.S., an artist was installing her interactive sculpture, sound and light experiential art piece.

As she worked, she lost all sense of time. Time seemed to slow or perhaps to just lose all meaning.

Her sense of self dissolved into an experience of being part of something larger than her – something that was luring her to create the piece of art that was coming to be all around her. The act of creation felt effortless, and she felt a great sense of richness, a vividness, an aliveness.

In this flow state, she experienced a sense of right place and well being. She felt a great sense of belonging and connection, even though at the present moment she was physically completely alone.

If someone could have scanned her brainwave patterns at that very moment, they would have looked almost identical to those of that DEVGRU team during their mission in Afghanistan.

Interestingly, though she would not have used this same terminology, she had designed her art installation to stimulate virtually the same neurological responses.

In a lab in another part of the country, a neuroscientist who specialized in neurotheology was studying long-term meditators and other spiritual practitioners to examine what was happening with their brainwaves, neurochemicals, breathing, heart rates, etc. when they entered a state of altered consciousness that these practices could bring about.

These states have been described as nirvana, transcendent, an experience of the holy and in many other ways depending upon the religion involved.

Had this scientist been able to compare his neurological and biological findings from these spiritual practitioners with our artist and our Navy seals team, once again, he would have discovered remarkably similar results.

The neuroscientist as well as many others have also taken these findings and created biofeedback mechanisms that can help newer meditators, for example, reach the desired state of altered consciousness much more quickly than the years of practice it can otherwise sometimes take. By providing instantaneous feedback on heart rate, brainwave patterns, and the like, scientists have been able to help people more quickly focus their spiritual practices.

And this may be consequential, because other research has found that more frequent experiences of such altered states are associated with increased life satisfaction, a greater sense of belonging, increased compassion and empathy and higher levels of cooperative social behavior to name just a few of the potential benefits.

Maybe that is why Google has worked with Stephen Cotler and Jamie Wheal of the Flow Genome Project to install a prototype research and training center dedicated to helping Google’s employees experience such altered states of consciousness.

They call it “Flow Dojo”. Cute, huh?

Now, it turns out, experiences of art, music, nature, beauty, extreme physical activity, strong connections with others and certain types of sound and visual stimuli can also spontaneously generate these altered states of consciousness.

So, the Flow Dojo” prototype combines training in classical techniques such as meditation with biofeedback, art, music and the like, along with machines that can safely simulate the gravitational, centrifugal and other forces associated with extreme sports.

You see, while extreme sports can be be one of the most powerful ways of inducing an altered state of consciousness, a flow or transcendent or peak experience, they can also be, by their very nature, very dangerous. Take for example, wing suit gliding through mountain caverns and caves.

This is a sport wherein one straps on a suit that creates more bodily surface areas by stretching fabric between the legs and under the arms, essentially creating winglike structures that allow one to glide like a bird after launching from a high altitude, in this case swooping through the narrow, rock wall crevices of mountainous caverns and caves.

You can probably already imagine the potential problem. It is far too easy to make a navigational error that sends the extreme sports enthusiast smack into one of those rock walls.

For me, smashing into a rock wall at a high rate of speed followed by falling to my death on the rocky ground hundreds to thousands of feet below, would just ruin any peak experience I might just have had.

So the Flow Genome Project and Google provide machines that allow folks to experience the state of mind induced by this and other extreme sports but to do so safely.

Why are Google and other companies investing in how to help their employees experience these altered states of consciousness more deeply and more often?

Why are the Navy Seals and other areas of the military hacking transcendence?

Because it turns out the advantages they can convey upon individuals are also beneficial to the workplace and in combat situations.

These altered states have been shown to increase creativity in the workplace even after employees have returned to a more normal state of consciousness.

The sense of selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness and richness that occurs while in a state of flow, like I mentioned with our artist earlier, can also create a sense of cohesiveness and cooperation in the work place, increase job satisfaction, enhance productivity and deepen commitment.

Google employees have reported that after undergoing training at the Flow Dojo center, they found themselves more often slipping into a flow state at work and at home without even trying.

Now I should mention that Cotler and Wheal, in their book, “Stealing Fire” and elsewhere, describe certain types of excessive sex, drugs and extreme breath holding that can also induce an experience of transcendence.

To my knowledge, Google hasn’t been training their employees in these areas, and I should note that I am in no way recommending excessive sex, drugs, extreme breath holding or any combination thereof as a means of obtaining transcendence.

And no, I don’t know how “excessive” is defined in this context.

Researchers also warn that there are also potential dangers in all of this knowledge we are gathering about what happens in our brains and bodies when we experience a flow state.

For example, advertisers could insert in their ads visual, sound and other cues that tend to induce these brain wave patterns, to manipulate us into associating I their product with the heightened sense of wellbeing that often results.

Extreme sports and some of the drugs that can lead to experiencing flow, can also be highly addictive.

It is possible that such altered states of consciousness can themselves become addictive as people learn to more easily enter into them. Their is some early evidence of this.

The thing is, we can’t function if we live in these states of transcendent experience all of the time. The idea is that we carry out of them values and understandings that enhance our day to day functioning and state of mind. Jack Cornfield, American Buddhist, author and teacher writes about this in his book, “After the Ecstasy, the Laundry.“

As a minister, I worry that these scientists, the military and Google learning more and more about how to hack transcendence are going to put me right out of my job.

In fact, I was going to call this sermon, “Google is Really Pissing Me Off,” but I wasn’t sure if I could say that in the sanctuary.

Oops. Actually I think that these things we are learning from science can help inform how we do church and can supplement and enhance our personal spiritual practices.

Maybe I’ll have one of those extreme sports contraptions installed in the back parking lot.

And though we are learning much about what is going on neurologically and biologically when we have these experience, for me at least, this in no way robs them of a spiritual dimension nor does it remove a sense of awe, wonder and mystery.

We still have much to explore about why we have this ability to enter these altered states and why it seems beneficial to us to do so. This may be yet another area where religion and science have the potential to inform rather than be in conflict with one another. After all, it is entirely possible that religious rites and rituals may well have been among the earliest ways we learned to hack transcendence.

And I do think that especially for us as Unitarian Universalist, these peak or transcendent experiences are a core element of our faith going back at least to our transcendentalist forbearers.

We list them as the first of the six sources of our faith. Here in this church, we list first among our religious values that we read together earlier – “Transcendence – To connect with wonder and awe of the unity of life”.

So the rituals, music, sermons, readings, fellowship opportunities and other activities we engage in here at the church are intended at least in part to help lead us into this type of experiences.

I know for me, very often our music program moves me into an altered and wonderful state of being. Another recent example was when Meg talked about the “me too” movement and then offered a ritual folks could participate in afterwards.

It was moving and powerful and difficult and cathartic, and I suspect for many of us it forever altered our consciousness about the subject.

And I think that a key reason we seek such experiences when we have gathered as a religious community is that they can help move us toward and even into another of our religious values transformation, which we define as “To pursue the growth that changes our lives and heals our world”.

In describing transformation this way, we are basically talking about creating the Beloved Community.

Now the term, “Beloved Community” get used fairly frequently in religious circles. Today though, I am using it with specific meaning.

Part of that meaning is the community of love, compassion, empathy and care we work to create here at the church. We do so through our covenant – a set of promises we make to one another about how we will walk together in the ways of love.

And this is not a sappy, sugary-sweet view of beloved community. It acknowledges that creating such a religious community is hard work. We need our covenant precisely because we will fail each other and ourselves sometimes, and our covenant helps us get back to the ways of love and right relationship.

We do so because it is worth it. As one theologian put it, the divine is to be found in the messiness of making and maintaining loving religious community together.

Another part of the meaning of Beloved Community is our participation-in a much broader movement to create more loving and just relationships and institutions in our larger world. This is the Beloved Community which Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King envisioned.

Here is how one of King’s followers described Beloved Community, “an inclusive, interdependent space based on love, justice, compassion, responsibility, shared power and a deep and abiding respect for all people, places and things that radically transforms individuals and restructures institutions.”

So, beloved community calls us to dismantle racist systems and institutions for instance – indeed it calls us to work for justice against all forms of oppression as well as the betterment of all living creatures and our environment.

It requires transformation that changes our lives and heals our world.

“An inclusive space based upon love, justice, compassion, responsibility, shared power and a deep and abiding respect for all people, places and things… “

Wow. I think creating that might be yet another way we could hack transcendence, radically transforming ourselves and revealing our path toward restructuring our institutions to benefit all people and our world.

That is transcendence beckoning us toward transformation.

That is the power of Beloved Community.

And amen to that.

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

Faith for UUs

March 4, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 4, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

When some people use the word faith, they are talking about faith in a personal God, or faith in the trustworthiness of another person. When someone refers to “the Unitarian Universalist faith,” what are they talking about?

Call to Worship
Alfred S. Cole

Go out into the highways and by-ways
And give the people something of your new vision.
You may possess only a small light, but uncover it and let it shine.
Use it to bring more understanding to the hearts and minds of men.
Give them not Hell, but hope and courage.
Do not push them deeper into their despair,
But preach the kindness and the everlasting love of God.

Reading
By Max Kapp

Often I have felt that I must praise my world.
For what my eyes and ears have seen these many years,
And what my heart has loved.
And often I have tried to start my lines: “Dear earth,”
I say, And then I pause.
To look once more.
Soon I am bemused. And far away in wonder.
So I never get beyond “Dear Earth.

Reading The Rock of Ages at the Taj Mahal,
Meg Barnhouse

ALL WILL BE WELL

All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.” This is one of the mantras used in the Christian meditation tradition. Don’t think it comes from a dewy-eyed Pollyanna. The woman to whom it is credited, Dame Julian of Norwich, is the same one who, when her mule got stuck on a mountain road in a rainstorm, dismounted, shook her fist at the sky, and shouted, “God! If this is how you treat your friends, it’s no wonder you don’t have many!”

Lately I have been experimenting with repeating, “All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.” I try it out in different situations. Sometimes I feel stupid affirming that all will be well. What about things that aren’t well and don’t look like they’re ever going to be well? It’s hard to see the whole picture from where I stand at this moment in my life.

There is a story of a Chinese farmer who had a fine horse show up in his pasture one day. “How marvelous!” all the neighbors said. “Maybe,” said the farmer. His son tried to ride the horse and the horse threw him, breaking the son’s leg. “How awful,” said the neighbors. “Maybe,” replied the farmer. Then the Emperor’s army came through town to draft young men for war. The farmer’s son was spared because of his broken leg.

I can’t tell, in the grand scheme of life, whether things are turning out well or not. To affirm that “all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well” is difficult for me. There are child abusers and torturers and AIDS and oil spills and a multitude of other horrors in this world.

Here is what I do know. I know that I have a choice between hope or despair when viewing the world and my future. Each choice has equal evidence in its favor. Each is affirmed and underscored by my life experience. How do I decide between them? I choose the one that brings the most joy, the most healing, the most compassion to my life and to the world. In despair I’m no good to anyone. I stop functioning well, I drag through the days, I deal with horrors that haven’t even happened yet. I don’t enjoy my children, food, sex, or any of the other dazzling pleasures of my life.

When my mother was dying of cancer, she said to me, “Meggie, everything that happens to me is good.” That was a statement of her faith. I was a cynical twenty three year old seminary student. My mother’s faith sounded naive and silly. I was in despair over her suffering, but she was not in despair, and it was her suffering. Suddenly, it seemed presumptuous to despair over her suffering when she was choosing not to.

As I experiment with this mantra and risk feeling stupid, which is a feeling I despise, I ask myself, “Which is more stupid: to despair my whole life just in case things aren’t going to end well, or to live in joy and hope my whole life, whether or not things turn out well” I’m going to keep singing this mantra to my fears. All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.

Sermon

Faith struck me at the beginning of such a Christian word. I think that is because I grew up in a Christian background. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen, the writer of the book of Hebrews says. The more I thought about that the more I didn’t understand what it meant. Faith, I always used to teach, is acting as if. Acting as if something you believe to be true is actually true. I act as if I have an inner wisdom that guides me. I act as if the truth will ultimately be revealed. I act as if the other drivers on the road are relatively sober during the day.

UU writer Jeanne Harrison Niewjaar, in her book Fluent in Faith, talks about faith has something on which you comfortably rely, a place or an attitude in which you feel at home. She tells the story of a rabbi who asked a school full of students at the synagogue whether they believed in God. No one raised their hand. When he asked have there been times when you have felt close to God? Many hands were raised. And the church I grew up in, the Apostles Creed, which we said every Sunday, started by saying I believe in God the Father Almighty, Etc. It was a list of things Christians, Protestant Christians were supposed to believe. These are not things in which I felt particularly at home, not things on which I comfortably relied. I never thought about it that way. I thought I just needed to try harder to think those things were true. Is believing different from knowing? Does faith necessarily imply something which cannot be proved? I don’t think so. I know that Carl Jung, when asked whether he believed God, answered “I don’t believe — I know.” Or is faith a choice?

Maybe Unitarian universalists can reclaim the word faith by thinking of it as something we rely on with our bodies and our spirits, something were we act as if it’s true, whether we know it for sure for sure or not. Maybe we think of it as a choice of what world we want to live in. I choose to believe that all will be well. I choose to believe that there is a spark of the Divine and every person, every animal, every rock and tree, every grain of sand, every atom. This requires me to consider that there it’s the Divine in the cancer cell. That is hard for me. I don’t know if you all know Peter Myers song Everything Is Holy Now, but I want the world I walk around in to be a world in which that is true.

On what do you rely? In what do you have faith? The goodness of other people? Until they show you otherwise? The goodness in yourself? The Ring Of Truth? The senses of your body? Most Unitarian Universalist would say that we have faith in the community. If we take that apart a little bit, it is not just in gathering next to each other that we have faith, even though Rabbi Jesus said where two or more of you are gathered there am I in the midst of you. There is something quite powerful about gathering together. Yet it is not just in gathering together, but it is in a shared and living mission that we find power, and shared effort, and shared experience, and shared word and song, enjoyment, ritual, conversation, it is in shared history. There is power in sharing our stories together. There is power in striving to refine and strengthen our spirits. There is power in nourishing one another’s souls. There is power in transforming our own lives, the lives of others, and the culture of Institutions that there is power where we make an effort together. There is power in US. One of my Bedrock articles of faith is that, in order to make the world the one that we want to be living in, we must expand our sense of who is included in that word “us.”

Look around you. This is us. But there are people who are not here today. They are also us. What about the people who used to come but now have moved away or go to other churches? Are they still us? Are UUs in other churches across the country us? What about the people who will belong to this church in the future? We are here. My faith and my experience tells me that we will still be here 10 years from now, 30 years from now, 50 years from now. Some of you have been with this church for 30 years. (maybe ask people in the congregation how long they have been coming, on and off or steadily)

The UUA has issued an invitation to think about leaving our legacy. Leaving a part of our treasure to us. To the us that will be here in fifty years. We want to see our values transmitted to the next generation. And yet my wife Kiya, the resident scholar in our house, in her master’s work for her Master’s in cultural studies, wrote that each generation hands to the next their precious treasure. The generation they hand it to smashes it to pieces, then puts it lovingly back together in that generation’s way. We may grieve that, but we may also have faith in that. I want to ask you the question — Do you have faith in us?

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

Be the Spark

February 25, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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

Fire is one of the central metaphors and symbols of our faith. The fire of commitment, the warmth of community, the spark of truth, the spark of the divine inside us all. What reignites your spark when it is going out? How might we tend one another’s spark?

Call to Worship
Albert Schweitzer

Sometimes our light goes out but is blown back into flame by another human being. Each of us owes deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this light.

Reading
Clarisa Pinkola Estes

Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do is intervene in a stormy world, standing up and showing your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, build signal fires.

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.

Powerful Moments

February 18, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
February 18 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

We have experiences in life that we remember long afterwards and that often were moments that changed us. Are there common characteristics that create such moments? If so, can we create more such experiences in our lives?

Call to Worship
In This Moment – by Chris Jimmerson

In this moment, we gather together, in this our beloved community.

In this moment, we gather to know the power and beauty of ritual, music and the blending together the loving presence we each have to offer.

In this moment, we gather to glimpse that which is greater than us but of which we are part.

In this moment, we gather to worship together.

Reading
Moments – by Chris Jimmerson

The instances that capture us, hold us in stillness, rootedness, timelessness:
A glimpse of an eagle soaring high above,
The gentle touch and soothing words of a loved one just when we need them,
Sunsets, rainbows, waterfalls, mountain vistas, peaceful shorelines,
The surprise visit, the surprise act of kindness, the unearned blessing, the offering of a blessing to another.
These and so many more are the powerful moments that are waiting for us to recognize them and immerse ourselves within them.
And beyond these, are the momentous moments we have yet to co-create together.

Sermon

Chris Hurn was trying to console his young son. The boy was distraught and could not go to sleep because he had accidentally left behind his best friend and constant companion, a giant, stuffed giraffe named Joshie when leaving a family vacation at the Ritz Carlton on Amelia Island Florida.

Like many a desperate parent before him, Mr. Hurn considered all of his options and decided on the best one available to him.

He lied.

“Joshie is fine,” he told his distraught little boy, “He’s just taking an extra-long vacation at the resort.”

His son seemed to buy it and eventually drifted off to sleep.

Later that night, Hurn spoke over the phone with an employee at the Ritz Carlton and to his great relief learned that Joshie the Giraffe had been found. Hurn fessed up to the white lie he had told his son and asked if the folks at the Ritz Carlton could do him a favor and send a picture of Joshie vacationing at the hotel when they returned him.

The next day, Joshie returned home resting comfortably on a plush Ritz Carlton towel in his overnight delivery package surrounded by a Ritz Carlton frisbee and nurf football, along with a binder full of pictures.

Joshie the Giraffe lounging by the hotel pool.

Joshie driving a golf cart.

Another picture was of Joshie hanging out with the hotel parrot, and yet another featured Joshie in the spa, complete with cucumber slices over his eyes. There was even one of Joshie monitoring the security cameras in the hotel’s control room.

Needless to say Chris Hurn and his wife were thrilled and their young son was ecstatic.

Employees at the Ritz Carleton had created a wonderful experience for the Hurns and most likely for themselves also in the process.

Now, you might think our story would end here, but no, there is a part two.

A couple of years later, Joshie the Giraffe had gone missing once again, after attending a soccer tournament with the family. Once again, the Hurn’s son was distraught over the loss and having trouble going to sleep at night.

During this time the family happened have planned another vacation at the same Ritz Carlton.

One morning they mentioned how wonderfully the hotel had treated them when Joshie the Giraffee had been left behind and were surprised to learn that every employee at the hotel seemed to know the story of Joshie. The hotel employees were saddened to learn that Joshie had recently disappeared again.

Later that afternoon someone knocked on the door of their room and handed the Hurn’s son a bag with his name on it. The bag contained another stuffed giraffe with a small note attached introducing him as “Jeffie,” a long-lost cousin of Joshie’s. The note said that Joshie had gone off on a worldwide adventure, and Jeffie would be honored to be the Hurn’s son’s new companion. It also said that Jeffie liked warm hugs.

Once again, the staff at the hotel had created an amazing moment for the Hurn family.

The Hurn’s story is a really fun example of what Chip and Dan Heath call defining or powerful moments in their book, The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact.

We all have such powerful moments in our lives – meaningful experiences that stand out in our memories and that sometimes can change the direction of our lives.

What I love about their use of the Hurn’s story as one example of a powerful moment is that it demonstrates that such moments don’t necessarily have to occur during one of life’s major events or involve some spiritual/religious transcendent experience, though these of course are also often defining moments.

They can also be smaller moments, like when the employees of that hotel made extra efforts to create two wonderful experiences for the Hurn family.

Here is another example of such a moment.

Several years ago, my spouse Wayne and I were vacationing in Switzerland. We had rented a car and decided to make a drive over a mountain pass in the Swiss Alps. We had reached almost as high as the road went, when we entered one last small valley before the mountain rose sharply to its peak. There was a small village in the valley. The houses and buildings looked exactly as one might imagine for Switzerland Ñ wooded exterior walls with plant boxes full of greenery and flowers hanging below each window.

There was a large heard of cattle in the village, and the cows were unfenced, roaming freely around the little town. Each cow was wearing a large bell.

And suddenly, it began to snow.

The snow settled in like a fog, limiting how far we could see, wrapping us tightly into the village. It began covering everything around us in a stunningly beautiful crystalline white blanket.

I pulled our car over to the side of the road.

We could still see light glowing from some of the windows of the houses, when through the quiet of the snowfall, the cows began shaking their heads and ringing their bells. We opened our car windows slightly to hear them better, and sat, enshrouded by the little Swiss village at the top of the mountain, listening to the bells ringing and watching the snow fall.

It was like suddenly finding ourselves in the front cover of a Hallmark card.

That’s the thing about our powerful moments. Sometimes they can seem absolutely magical!

Of course, being good, reason and science based Unitarians, we know that there is not really any magic involved.

Although, looking back on that experience, my Universalist side really wants to believe that there might have been at least a little magic going on.

Don’t tell anyone.

We actually had another much less positive moment when we realized we had to drive down the other side of the mountain in what had become quiet a snowstorm. Wayne’s oh so helpful comment was, “If you kill us by driving off the side of this mountain, I am going to be very mad at you.”

Now, let me tie this back to the Heath’s research, in which they found that powerful moments are created from one or more of the following elements:

Elevation: “Defining moments rise above the everyday. They provoke not just transient happiness, like laughing at a friend’s joke, but memorable delight”. For example:

Opening the overnight package to find not only Joshie the Giraffe but extra gifts and a photo book full of Joshie enjoying all the pleasures of a resort hotel;

The mesmerizing sensory experience of bells ringing amidst an entrancing snow fall in a beautiful village nestled in a valley near the top of a mountain.

Insight: “Defining moments can rewire our understanding of ourselves or the world”.

The Hurn’s faith in the potential goodness of other people was no doubt enhanced by their experience with the employees of that Ritz Carlton, and I’ll bet they instantly developed a brand loyalty too!

Experiences like the one Wayne and I shared in that snowfall remind us that there is great beauty to be found in our world, and it surprises us sometimes if we take care to fully notice it.

Connection: “Defining moments are social: weddings, graduations, baptisms, vacations, work triumphs, bar and bar mitzvahs, speeches, sporting events”. In addition to these life passages and large group events, smaller moments that we share with others and that more deeply connect us can be quite powerful also.

The Hurn’s suddenly felt connected to a group of hotel employees they did not even know, as well as a strengthening of their own family bonds.

When Wayne and I experienced such beauty high up in that mountain valley it deepened and enriched our connection with each other.

Pride: “Powerful moments capture us at our best – moments of achievement, moments of courage”.

It is easy to imagine the pride the employees of that hotel must have felt because of going the extra mile to make a distraught young boy happy again.

I drove all the way down the side of that mountain without once killing us by driving off the edge of it.

The striking image on the cover of your order of service is of Leshia Evans, a 35 year old nurse and mother of a five year old child, who courageously stood her ground on behalf of her and other people’s right to peacefully protest police brutality against African Americans. Even when confronted with being arrested by two Baton Rouge police officers clad in paramilitary gear, she remained calm and peaceful, and this image of her became iconic of the peaceful movement in which she was participating – a powerful moment for us all.

Leshia Evan’s story brings up another aspect of our defining, memorable moments. Though we have been concentrating on positive powerful moments, it is important to acknowledge that sometimes our defining moments can be those we experience as negative or even painful at the time.

Leshia Evans must have experienced great fear even as she exhibited such pride and courage.

The Heath’s share the story of Lea Chadwell, who despite her love for the animals she helped care for as a veterinary technician, began day dreaming about opening her own baking company.

She found great joy in baking delicious dessert items for others, and eventually, she was able to open her own baking store, which she named, “A Pound of Butter”.

At first she was thrilled, but the store did not make enough for her to leave her veterinary job, so she worked constantly between the two. Additionally, she found that she did not like the organizational and financial management aspects of running a business.

The fun of baking for others was turning into stress and dismay. One day, she realized that in a rush to deliver a wedding cake to a customer, she had left the front door of her empty baking store wide open. In a lightening bolt instant, she had an insight. “I’m making self crazy, and I am not enjoying this”, she thought to herself.

Lea Chadwell closed her store and went back to doing only the job she really loved, caring for animals. Eventually, she re-found her joy in baking for loved ones also.

Sometimes, though admittedly not always, even our negative powerful moments can provide us with insights that may eventually change our lives for the better.

Elevation. Insight. Connection. Pride.

These are the characteristics that comprise our powerful moments, sometimes singularly – more often two or more of them combined together.

The Heaths go into much more detail and provide much more nuance about these in the book than I can cover today, so I’ll close with a few of the larger take aways.

Knowing these elements of our defining moments can help us be more alert for them when they come our way – to slow down and let ourselves experience them, like Wayne and I did during the snowfall.

Now let me admit that I didn’t know these elements at that time, so my pulling over to the side of the road was the likely the fortunate happenstance of not being able to see very far ahead because of the snow.

In fact, Wayne would probably tell you that I can have a bit of a manic personality style and am normally more likely to be like, “Of yeah, wow, that’s very beautiful, now let’s go” and then slam my foot down on the accelerator.

Maybe now that I know these elements, he’ll get to enjoy more beautiful scenery inspired powerful moments, even when I am the one driving.

The music, rituals, sermons, readings, candle lighting, singing together and the many other activities we engage in here at church are intended to engage these elements with the hope of creating powerful experiences that are their best may even be transcendent.

You see, knowing these elements, we do not have to wait for defining moments to randomly come our way, we can create them.

And even in our daily lives away from this, our beloved religious community, you can create them for yourself and those you love.

Like the employees of that Ritz Carlton, you may even find opportunities to create them for people you do not know very well or at all.

And the cool thing is, very often while trying to create a powerful moment for others, we end up experiencing one ourselves as we do so.

Providing extra kindness to elevate a moment or decorating your office at work during a holiday to provide a surprise elevated sensory experience for your fellow staffers.

Searching for insight and listening deeply to others to help them find it.

Opening ourselves up, allowing ourselves to be vulnerable and share our stories to create greater connection. Recognizing and slowing down to experience shared moments with others that have the potential to be powerful ones.

Complementing and rewarding the admirable traits and the successes of others to arouse their sense of self pride. Doing the same for yourself, which sometimes can be even harder.

These are just a few examples of how we might engage these elements to create such moments.

Finally, the Heath’s discovered that powerful moments are always active – we gotta do when the spirit says do.

The hotel employees deciding to do something special for a young boy by staging and taking photos of Joshie the Giraffe.
Pulling over to the side of the road so that the power of a moment can fully wash over us.
Standing with courage and pride against a highly armed and highly agitated police force.
Having the insight and courage to shut down a business that was once but is no longer a dream.

Our powerful moments involve doing. They involve staying alert for the moment. The old truism is still true – We must seize these moments.

Some interesting research found that these powerful moments alter our sense of time. We perceive them as lasting much longer than they actually do and weight how we rate the whole of our experience much more heavily toward them. At their most powerful, we experience them as timeless.

This is one reason that time can seem to go by more quickly as we age. Many of our powerful moments brought on by first experiences are front-loaded into our earlier years – making our first best friend, beginning school, graduating the various levels of schooling, our first love, marriage, having children for example.

We can slow down our sense of time throughout our lives by being alert for and even actively creating defining moments.

Elevation. Insight. Connection. Pride.

These are our tools for creating moments that will allow us to experience a timeless life within the one precious, finite life that we have been given.

So, seize the moments my beloveds, seize the moments.

Amen.

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

Why do bad things happen?

February 11, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 11, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Why do bad things happen? Are there evil people? In the “Question Box” sermon a couple of years ago, this was one of the most frequently asked questions.

Call to Worship
– Adrienne Rich

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.

Reading
Rev. Erik Walker Wikstrom
September 18, 2001

For if they are evil and we are not, if that’s how we see things, then we are committing the same kind of error which led to this tragedy. That’s the problem of evil. Not so much that it exists–in that it’s really just a fact of life, or a force of nature. The problem of evil, as I see it, is that we are so readily tempted to imagine that it’s out there, separated from us over here; that it belongs to them and not us. And that, I believe, is ultimately the root and the design of evil–to make us categorize the world into us and them rather than recognizing our common kinship.

Sermon

This old world is filled with sorrow. All you have to do is stack up some years on this planet and you will face your share. Living in a mortal body brings pain and limitations, children get caught up in addiction, jobs are awful, or they are lost, war sweeps through and people lose their lives, or they lose their humanity. Arms dealers foment unrest so they will have a market for their weapons. Dictators strip their nations of treasure and dignity, pitting people against one another, with truth and fairness the first casualties.

One of the members here was involved in a car wreck yesterday. I went to see her in the trauma ICU. She squinted up at me and said “Why do bad things happen?” Banged up, drugged up and still a smart aleck. A real question for her at this point too. And for me, looking at her. She had done nothing to deserve this.

This question has been debated for at least 20,000 years. We know this from excavations in the Indus Valley which uncovered fragments of Hindu scriptures. The Hindus among us say that evil is a part of God. Shiva is the creator and the destroyer. Kali-Ma creates by destroying. There are demons, but they roar and devour on assignment from the gods. All destruction isn’t bad, after all. Any gardener pulling up leggy, spent plants will tell you that. Destruction makes room for the new. Seeing God in a cancer cell or plague virus is a difficulty for me, but it solves the problem of why do bad things happen. They happen because God did it. For some reason. You are living out your karma. Maybe you were bad in a former life, or maybe you just need to suffer now for some reason.

Buddhism grew out of Hinduism. So the concept of karma is still there. The Buddhists say evil is illusion. If you can see through the illusion, becoming enlightened, you will be free. Bad things happen because people are attached to their picture of how things should be, to the outcomes of certain actions. We desire security, health, good relationships, admiration, long and happy lives for ourselves and our children. Since we are attached to those things through desire, we make ourselves unhappy when they don’t happen the way we want them to. If we could let go of desire we would suffer no longer. If only we could just enjoy our health, our families, our eyesight, our money, our minds as long as they last and let them go with peace in our hearts we would be fine.

One of the oldest books in the Hebrew Scriptures is the book of Job, and the question of why bad things happen to people is what the whole book is about. In that story, Satan is at God’s side, and they are talking like colleagues. “I bet Job wouldn’t be such a fine upstanding servant of yours if he weren’t so healthy and wealthy,” Satan says.

“You go ahead and test that theory,” God says, and Job’s sufferings begin. After he has lost all of his children, all of his possessions and his health, and is sitting on top of an ash heap letting the dogs lick his sores, his three friends come to him and deliver their best religious opinions of why he is suffering. “Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward,” one says. “God corrects and disciplines his people…. God wounds but he also bind up. You have to trust. You are not more righteous than God.” The second friend is shocked at Job’s questioning God. “God is always just. Your children must have sinned against God. Even now, if you become pure and upright, he will restore you. ” Job says “I have done nothing wrong … but how can a mortal be blameless before God? His is powerful and mighty. How can I argue with him? Then he goes on to argue some more … The third friend reiterates the argument that Job must have done something wrong. Even if he didn’t before now, these rude questions and arguments are bad enough to deserve all the punishment in the world. “Job still stubbornly says. “God is wise and powerful, and he is God. I want to talk to God himself about this.” So God comes down. Jung says it’s because God knew that God had done wrong. (In fact Jung talks about the death of Christ as God’s answer to Job.)

Here is the answer God gives in the book of Job. I am God. Who are you? I don’t owe you anything. Then Job repents. God tells the friends that they have not spoken correctly about him as Job has, he makes them repent too. Then he restores all Jobs property and gives him more children. Seven sons and three daughters, to whom he grants and inheritance along with their brothers. We find beauty and sophistication in the arguments of this ancient text. But not an answer.

Is God responsible for evil? Did he create it? Those who say “yes” to that are the ones who believe, if God is Omnipotent, that He is in control of everything. He must therefore be “allowing” evil. The question, for those who want to believe that God is both all-loving and all powerful is best put by Archibald McLeish in his play about Job called “J.B.” He writes “If God is good, he is not God. If God is God, he is not good.”

There are those in the three religions of the Book, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, who say evil is a result of the Fall, which is what they call the story of Eve and Adam in the Garden of Eden, choosing consciousness, choosing the knowledge of good and evil. All pain, all cruelty, all war and pestilence came into being after the Garden.

There are those who believe that all evil is a result of free will. We suffer because we decided to marry the wrong person or didn’t have the skills or the knowledge to work a relationship out, or we were too stubborn or too prideful, etc. People die in floods and earthquakes because greedy or lazy developers continue to build along fault lines or on flood plains. We get cancer because we eat food that’s processed with chemicals or have to breathe air that companies have polluted or because we live too stressful a life. Children are molested because their molesters were molested.

People make bad choices with their free will. Progressives are rooted in the Romantic Era’s philosophy that children are born a blank slate, and that if they have the right nurture they will grow into good people. People would make better choices if they had peace in their homes and neighborhoods, if they had good schools and consistent parenting. So we work to make those things better in order to decrease the suffering in the world. The UU thinking is that we are good in our nature, but capable of doing evil. The Humanist Manifesto of 1933, which was extremely influential in Unitarian thought, asserts that our living conditions and training have a big effect on our ability and tendency to choose good. If we can make these conditions better for people we will see more people choosing to do good.

There are those who say a lot of evil comes from “Natural Law.” Nature doesn’t take our hearts into account at all. If you are a living organism and you stay outside in sub-zero temperatures, you will freeze. Natural Law. If a woman decides to hit someone over the head with a two-by-four, it’s not the wood’s fault. It is, in fact, the wood’s job to be hard and unyielding. Natural law says if one hard unyielding object hits another one, the softer one will get a dent in it. We count on that law on a day to day basis, as we mash potatoes and cut paper. Our world would be chaos if wood were hard when you want to build with it and soft when you try to hit with it. If cars were strong when you load them down with your family and their luggage, but soft when they run into someone on a bicycle.

Nature makes a lot of organisms that are not viable. Other organisms break down and die. Nature doesn’t discriminate. Some of these organisms are microscopic. Others are us or our children. We use our free will to deal with what comes with as much grace, love, and compassion as we can muster. For some people this makes sense, but they feel the loss of a God who can protect and defend us and our children against the heartlessness of Nature.

“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green age, that blasts the roots of trees is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooken rose, my youth is bent by that same wintry fever.”

-Dylan Thomas.

Is most of what we call evil simply an interaction between human free will used badly and natural law, or are there people (or dogs and cats, for that matter) who are just born bad?

Is there a force of evil that exists outside of us, beyond us?

For people who believe in a personification of evil, in a devil, explanations are simpler, and the big picture has a drama and a story line that satisfy. Even if you just believe in some kind of an energy or force of evil, it helps explain a lot. As in most matters of belief, you end up choosing what you believe and acting as if it’s true. Those among us less comfortable with belief in he spiritual realms would say what choices made in the context of cultural and societal influences. Those among us comfortable with beliefs in spiritual unseen forces believe that there is an energy that wants to tear life down.

For us, the decision to be on the side of that which builds up, that which heals, to be on the side of love is our spiritual path. When terrible things happen, we lean on one another for strength and comfort. They will try not to say mean things like “How did you attract this suffering into your life? Or “Everything happens for a reason.” When bad things happen, We keep our kindness, if we can, through the panic and the pain. We look for the helpers.

Our friend in the hospital’s answer. “You have to have the bad so you can appreciate the good.” What’s your answer?

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

Love, like a carefully loaded ship…

February 4, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 4, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

As we begin to look for a new Director of Faith Development, how do we describe their job? What do we want our program to look like?

Call to Worship
Stephen Sondheim, Into the Woods

How do you say to your child in the night?
Nothing’s all black, but then nothing’s all white
How do you say it will all be all right
When you know that it might not be true?
What do you do?

Careful the things you say
Children will listen
Careful the things you do
Children will see and learn

Children may not obey,
but children will listen
Children will look to you for which way to turn

Reading
by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

In a house which becomes a home,
one hands down and another takes up
the heritage of mind and heart,
laughter and tears, musings and deeds.
Love, like a carefully loaded ship,
crosses the gulf between the generations.

Therefore, we do not neglect
the ceremonies of our passage:
when we wed, when we die,
and when we are blessed with a child;
When we depart and when we return;
When we plant and when we harvest.

Let us bring up our children.
It is not the place of some official
to hand to them their heritage.
If others impart to our children our knowledge and ideals,
they will lose all of us that is wordless and full of wonder.

Let us build memories in our children,
lest they drag out joyless lives,
lest they allow treasures to be lost
because they have not been given the keys.

We live, not by things,
but by the meanings of things.
It is needful to transmit the passwords
from generation to generation.

Sermon Exerpt

-Robert Cole, “The Child as Pilgram”

So it is we connect with one another, move in and out of one another’s lives, teach and heal and affirm one another, across space and time — all of us wanderers, explorers, adventurers, stragglers and ramblers, sometimes tramps or vagabonds, even fugitives, but now and then pilgrims: as children, as parents, as old ones about to take that final step, to enter that territory whose character none of us here ever knows. Yet how young we are when we start wondering about it all, the nature of the journey and of the final destination. These are things about which children want to speak, about things they want to think.

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

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 17 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

The Power in the #MeToo Movement

January 21, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
January 21, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

The cover of Time magazine featured the “silence-breakers.” Why is this movement so revolutionary?

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.

Legacies

January 21, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
January 14, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Despite his life being taken from him early, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. left behind a legacy of human/civil rights advances and a strong call toward justice. What will the legacy of this generation of Unitarian Universalists be?

Reading
– Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. Even a superficial look at history reveals that no social advance rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.

Sermon

I’d like to begin the sermon this morning with another passage from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

“I am sure that most of you have read that arresting little story from the pen of Washington Irving entitled “Rip Van Winkle.”

The one thing that we usually remember about the story is that Rip Van Winkle slept twenty years.

But there is another point in that little story that is almost completely overlooked. It was the sign in the end, from which Rip went up in the mountain for his long sleep.

When Rip Van Winkle went up into the mountain, the sign had a picture of King George the Third of England.

When he came down twenty years later, the sign had a picture of George Washington, the first president of the United States.

When Rip Van Winkle looked up at the picture of George Washington – and looking at the picture he was amazed – he was completely lost. He knew not who he was.

And this reveals to us that the most striking thing about the story of Rip Van Winkle is not merely that Rip slept twenty years, but that he slept through a revolution. While he was peacefully snoring up in the mountain, a revolution was taking place that at points would change the course of history – and Rip knew nothing about it. He was asleep.

Yes, he slept through a revolution.

And one of the great liabilities of life is that all too many people find themselves living amid a great period of social change, and yet they fail to develop the new attitudes, the new mental responses, that the new situation demands.

They end up sleeping through a revolution.”

Dr. King’s legacy is that he led a revolution in civil and human rights. Though incomplete, the gains he was able to bring about by waking people up have made real differences in real people’s lives every since.

And though as is clear from current events in our news, we still have far, far to go Ð though there have been efforts every since to curtail and find ways around the civil rights gains he and his movement brought about, still, I believe he led a powerful and peaceful revolution.

And I believe that if our democratic laws and institutions hold up against the assault they are currently under, we may be living in a time when the potential for another powerful and peaceful revolution is brewing.

So we, each of us, must decide what our legacy may be.

Will we stay awake for this revolution?

All around us, it seems that a sleeping giant is awakening. Disturbed and dismayed by the racist, classist, misogynistic, bigoted behavior and policy making of so many of our political and other leaders, oppressed peoples and their allies are engaging at a level not seen since perhaps the days of Dr. King’s movement.

Now, I want to pause here to say that I know that we likely have folks here today with a wide spectrum of political points of view. We likely have folks who would prefer not to hear about politics and public policy from the pulpit, and I can understand that. I can understand the desire for spiritual nourishment during worship and I return to the subject later.

And yet, I also feel compelled to talk about what is happening in our society at large on this Sunday before Martin Luther King Day because our mission that we say together every Sunday states that we gather in community to nourish souls, transform lives and do justice.

Our Unitarian Universalist principles say that we affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. We affirm and promote justice, equity and compassion in human relations; The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large; The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all; Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

So, for me, I cannot, as a Unitarian Universalist minister, feel that I am living out that mission and fulfilling our principles, let alone providing religious leadership, and yet ignore racist statements like the also ugly and vulgar one Mr. Trump made just three days ago, much less the policy making being attempted both administratively and through legislation that has the real potential to harm people.

For me, this is a spiritual matter.

There is a revolution brewing that sides with love, that recognizes we are “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny”, as Dr. King said.

There is a revolution brewing that is congruent with our religious values, and I can’t sleep through it without damaging my spirit, my very soul.

All around us Indivisible chapters and many, many other groups, are making phone calls, organizing town hall meetings and conducting visits to government officials offices to resist harmful legislation.

All around us, disparate human rights movements are joining forces like never before to build more power for demanding justice.

All around us, committed folks are identifying ways to counter the forces of hatred and tribalism with love and communalism.

The “me too” movement that Meg will be talking about next Sunday resulted in millions of women and also many men sharing their stories of sexual harassment and assault, powerfully demonstrating just how large this problem is.

In response, 300 prominent women in the entertainment industry formed the “Time’s Up” movement to combat sexual assault and harassment through a legal defense fund set up especially to help less privileged persons, advancing legislation to combat harassment and through several other initiatives. The women wearing black you may have noticed at the Golden Globe Awards, did so at the request of the Time’s Up leadership to raise awareness about these issues.

In special elections in Virginia, Alabama and elsewhere, people of color, especially African Americans, younger people, and women, particularly single women, voted in huge numbers for candidates that ran against the forces of oppression.

In Virginia, such candidates swept all of the statewide offices.

Also in Virginia, an openly transgendered female defeated an anti-LGBTQ incumbent to become the first openly transgendered person to be elected to a state legislature in the United States.

Virginians also elected the first two Latina women to their state house, as well the first Asian American woman and the first openly lesbian woman.

In Alabama, Doug Jones defeated Roy Moore, a vocal anti-LGBTQ bigot, who had also made racist statements and stood accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with several women, some of whom had been under-aged at the time. <> Doug Jones is a former federal prosecutor who put away the Ku Klux Klan perpetrators of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four African American girls.

He also has a son who is openly gay and who attended his swearing in to the U.S. Senate by none other than Mike Pence.

I’ll admit that I enjoyed watching that.

Immensely.

Folks, these are the seeds of a powerful, peaceful revolution, if our democratic institutions stand. I fear that those who are trying to undermine those institutions might well heed the words of John F. Kennedy – “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible”, he said, “will make violent revolution inevitable.”

So, I believe the possibility for that powerful and peaceful revolution is upon us, and that our religious principles, values and mission are calling us to stay awakened for it.

But how do we do that? Especially when it can seem like there is this constant barrage of anger and conflict coming at us and so many issues to address that it can become so tiring and seem so overwhelming. How do we avoid freezing up, retreating to the comforts of our homes and families and, like Rip Van Winkle, sleeping through the revolution?

Well, let me be the first to admit that I don’t have all of the answers. I admit that I feel like hiding in my living room with Wayne, my now three dogs and a glass of chardonnay myself sometimes.

But I think it can sometimes help with the sense of being overwhelmed, the constant barrage blaring from our televisions, to get engaged in some way. Taking some sort of active role can help restore a sense of at least some personal agency when our world starts feeling so tumultuous.

I know many of you are already actively working for justice and to improve our communities and our world in so many terrific ways, and I am so thankful to you for all that you do. I hope that it brings you a sense of fulfillment and spiritual nourishment.

And if you are not as engaged as you might like, know that you do not have to become an out-front, outspoken social justice or political activist to be a part of revolutionizing our society for the better.

There are great organizations with which to volunteer. You can help register people to vote. You can make a difference just by showing up at events like the Martin Luther King Day Celebration tomorrow or the Women’s March next Saturday.

There are all kinds of ways to get involved with some our social action and community support activities here at the church. Just talk with the nice folks at the social action table after a service sometime to find out more.

You can also support or get involved with any number of our national Unitarian Universalist groups, such as “Love Resists”, which works to resist criminalization of people of color, migrant, Muslim, LGBTQ and other targeted communities. This is just one example of the many opportunities you can find out about by going to www.uua.org on the web.

OK, public service announcement over now.

Once we each have found our way to get engaged, I think the other way we stay awake is to take care of ourselves spiritually, emotionally and physically.

Some of you have heard me say some of this before, but it bears repeating in times like these.

Building a revolution, a true legacy of change for the better, is long-term and can be challenging sometimes, and it is easy to get burnt out or even collapse into cynicism or despair.

That makes it even more important if you have a spiritual practice that nourishes and sustains you to create the time to engage in it on a regular basis and to think about picking one up if you do not currently have a spiritual practice.

Meditating, praying, chanting, singing, knitting, simply sitting in quiet contemplation, being in nature, it doesn’t have to be anything complicated or even overtly religious as long as it soothes your soul.

Based on recent personal experience, I recommend getting a new puppy.

Puppy breath as a spiritual practice is the greatest.

Identify where you experience beauty and spend some time there whether it is by the ocean, a creek, a river a lake, the mountains or in an arts museum. Make time for beauty in your life.

And let yourself experience joy. Whether it comes from playing with your kids or your kitties or both, making music or art or whatever brings you joy, we need the experience of joy in our lives to sustain and enliven our spirits.

Every Sunday, we say that we come from a long tradition of seeing a spark of the divine in every person.

I like to think of that as a light that is unique to each of us. I encourage you to tend to that light in these ways so that you can shine it out most brightly to better our world in the way that only you can.

Combined together, our unique lights and those of so many others working for justice and a more sustainable world can radiate out into that world and fuel a powerful and peaceful revolution.

We are witnessing forces of racism and bigotry emboldened in our society right now. Almost as terribly, we are also witnessing leaders from across the political spectrum who are failing to speak out forcefully against this and are thereby complicit in it.

However, in response, we are also witnessing a potential revolution based in compassion, community and solidarity.

My beloveds, our faith is calling us not to sleep through that revolution.

Let our legacy be that we awakened and became the revolution.

May each of our sparks of the divine unite and shine brightly together with many, many others to light our way.

Amen.

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

How to invite changes in your life

January 7, 2018 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
January 7, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

How are those resolutions? Still holding strong? Do you make the same ones every year? What might some good ways be of sneaking change past that mule that wakes up and resists everything different?

Reading
“The Intuitive Body”
Wendy Palmer

Our compost pile needs to be turned over. And at the right time, this rich mixture of broken dreams, pain, and fear and the fermented wisdom of our past seasons is spread upon the ground to enrich the soil and nourish our new crop of insights, ideas, and visions. Birth, growth, change, fruition, death, decay, and rebirth lead to more growth in a continuous, ongoing cycle. All of this happens naturally, whether we like it or not. It is our choice, our human prerogative, to open to life, to appreciate it, be awed by it …. or not. The choice is ours.

Sermon

Here we are at the beginning of 2018, and many of you came to the Burning Bowl service and thought about what you wanted to let go of and what you might want to call into your life. Lots of us use the time after Christmas as a time of reflection and evaluation. Who would we like to be? What would we like to become as the new year blossoms?

Some people still make New Year resolutions. The Zumba classes are full, it’s hard to get a free lane at the pool, people are working on themselves. Most diets last 72 hours, so those are mostly done with. I have a friend who had the same resolution every year when she was young: Grow out her nails, lose weight, get a tan.

I fell into the habit of waiting for a resolution to appear. These resolutions were short but deep. “Be quiet” was one of the first ones. “How can I do that?” I thought. I talk for a living. Yet, as I danced with that thought throughout the year, I realized that there were lots of situations in which I could choose quiet. In groups, I used to be what people call “early dominant.” I would speak my ideas easily, have an opinion about everything, jump into every debate. As it turned out, I didn’t have to express every opinion. I didn’t have to start every discussion. Being quiet honored the other people in the group.

The next one was “Tell the truth.” Well, I’d always told the truth. However, as with the “be quiet” resolution, I found ways in which this idea could have room to grow. While being truthful with other people, I sometimes lied to myself, telling myself something didn’t matter when it did, or maintaining that I was fine when I wasn’t. There were a lot of little lies that smoothed over social situations. I learned to say “Oh yes, that touched me in a way I’m seldom touched.” I was glad when that year was over!

Last year’s was “drink more,” but that didn’t add up to much.

One of the problems with making resolutions is that we humans are made up of many layers: out childhood training, our interests and passions, all of the “shoulds” that rule our thinking, and then, as some wise ones taught, the layers which are below the level of consciousness. Those are the layers from which dreams come, where the elements that drive us without our awareness. Those are the places where our shadow side lives, where the qualities of our personality we aren’t happy with reside. If someone is constantly self-sabotaging, making choices that mess up their lives, where does that come from? St. Paul, in one of his letters, wrote “I do the things I don’t want to do, and I don’t do the things I want to do.” Well said.

Let me talk to you about two elements in the unconscious which operate in your as you try to make changes in your life. One is the critic. People have different names for the Inner Critic, but we all have experience with it. That’s the voice that growls “You can’t dance, why do you even try?” “You look bad in these colors, I can’t believe you thought you could pull this off.” “Why did you just say that to your boss, don’t you realize how it sounded?”

As soon as you start trying to make changes, the critic starts grinding on you. “Why even try?” It lays out all the times you’ve tried to do something before and failed. One teacher suggested that you take your critic and give them a class room with stadium seating and fill it with brilliant UT students who will nod and ooh and ahh and take notes as they speak eloquently about what a loser you are. Meanwhile they are out of your way and occupied.

The other element that awakens when you try to make changes is the resistance. I picture this as the Inner Mule. “I must eat more vegetables,” you say, and the mule wakes up and says “I want pizza!” I was very glad to find a way, not to make change, but to invite change into your life. Author Wendy Palmer is an Aikido master.

Try on different qualities. Not the “should” ones, but something that, when you say its name, you feel some good energy and interest in your body. Not “less of this or that,” but invite in. The way to invite this quality into your life is to wonder rather than to will.

Softness, gentleness, courage, awareness, openness, a sense of enough, playfulness, imagination, confidence

How would this work? Once you’ve chosen a quality to work with, just ask yourself in various moments “What would this moment feel like with more _________”

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

Jesus’ Grandmothers

December 18, 2017 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
December 17, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Lots of us are studying our DNA these days, finding out about ancestors. Who are the forebears of Rabbi Jesus, and what are their stories?

Call to Worship
William F. Schulz

This is the mission of our faith:
To teach the fragile art of hospitality;
To revere both the critical mind and the generous heart;
To prove that diversity need not mean divisiveness;
And to witness to all that we must hold the whole world in our hands.

Reading
Richard Fewkes

We lift up our hearts in thanks for the sun and the dawn which we did not create. For the moon and the evening which we did not make. For food which we plant but cannot grow. For friends and loved ones we have not earned and cannot buy. For this gathered company which welcomes us as we are from where ever we have come. For all our free churches that keep us human and encourage us in our quest for beauty, Truth, and love. For all things that come to us as gifts of being from sources beyond our selves. Gifts of life and love and friendship. We lift up our hearts in thanks this day.

Sermon

Some people call the genealogies in the Bible “the begats,” and they are hard to read. Why would I want to be reading you one? Well, because there are stories embedded in this one. Every name has a story (same with each of our genealogies) and I thought you might be interested in these. Women are hardly ever mentioned in these. This is the genealogy of Rabbi Jesus. Count on your fingers the women in this as I read it.

Matthew 1
THE GENEALOGY OF JESUS

1 A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham:

2 Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers,

3 Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar, Perez the father of Hezron, Hezron the father of Ram,

4 Ram the father of Amminadab, Amminadab the father of Nahshon, Nahshon the father of Salmon,

5 Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab, Boaz the father of Obed,whose mother was Ruth, Obed the father of Jesse,

6 and Jesse the father of King David.

David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah’s wife,

…. then 24 generations without the mention of a woman, then …

16 and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.

The usual genealogy in the Bible is a list of fathers. The mothers are rarely mentioned. In this genealogy of Jesus, there are a several items of interest. One is that it’s a list of Joseph’s forbears, which leads you to believe that the Virgin Birth didn’t mean the same thing to Matthew that it does to people today, but that’s another sermon. The second unusual thing is that there are four grandmothers mentioned in Jesus’ list of forbears: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, the wife of Uriah. Not only are they mentioned, but they are women with interesting stories, stories I would like to tell you today.

Matthew wrote this genealogy in a time when the rules for women were narrow and mean. There wasn’t much women who weren’t married to kings or emperors could do to distinguish themselves in the Greek and Roman cultures. The most you could go for was to be really good, stay under the radar, do what you were supposed to do, and not get yourself in trouble. It was easy to get in trouble. If you got pregnant without being married, if you didn’t get pregnant when you were married, if you got raped, if your husband died, all of those things were bad, and they were your fault.

Were these grandmothers of Jesus exemplary church ladies, following all the rules to the letter and making cautious moves so their lives could be free of turbulence and pleasing to those around them? NO. These women did not do the nice thing, pleasing those around them. What they did would now be called risk-taking. Doing the higher right thing, rather than the nice thing. Good rather than nice. These women embody the difference between being good and being nice.

TAMAR

Tamar’s story is in the book of Genesis (38:6-30). It was the custom of the day, if a man died leaving no children, his brother would marry the widow as one of his wives and have children with her to be counted as the children of his dead brother. That way the brother’s line would continue. Tamar’s husband was one of the sons of Judah. Judah was the one the whole nation was named after later.

Judah was a brother of Joseph, one of the ones who sold Joseph to the Egyptians and then told their father that Joseph had been eaten by a wild animal. They gave their father the coat of many colors, dipped in animal blood, as evidence. It wouldn’t have fooled CSI, but it was enough for Jacob, their father.

Anyway, Judah moved away and married, and had some sons and the eldest son married a woman named Tamar. The story says he was wicked in the Lord’s sight, so the Lord killed him. Judah told his next son, Onan, to have intercourse with her and make some children. He spilled his seed on the ground in front of her, refusing to make children with her. The god in the story gets mad at him for that, so he died too. We still have people whose beliefs about solo sex are shaped by interpreting this story wrong, and “Onanism” should be a term for refusing to do the right thing, instead of a term for having sex by yourself. Whew.

This is awkward to talk about, but that’s the scriptures for you. The third son was still too young to fulfill the brotherly obligation, so Judah told Tamar to go back to her father’s house and live there as a widow. He worried that the third son would die too, as it seemed to him that some kind of doom was emanating from Tamar

11 Judah then said to his daughter-in-law Tamar, “Live as a widow in your father’s house until my son Shelah grows up.” For he thought, “He may die too, just like his brothers.” So Tamar went to live in her father’s house.

12 After a long time Judah’s wife, the daughter of Shua, died. When Judah had recovered from his grief, he went up to Timnah, to the men who were shearing his sheep, and his friend Hirah the Adullamite went with him.

13 When Tamar was told, “Your father-in-law is on his way to Timnah to shear his sheep,”

14 she took off her widow’s clothes, covered herself with a veil to disguise herself, and then sat down at the entrance to Enaim, which is on the road to Timnah. For she saw that, though Shelah had now grown up, she had not been given to him as his wife.

15 When Judah saw her, he thought she was a prostitute, for she had covered her face.

16 Not realizing that she was his daughter-in-law, he went over to her by the roadside and said, “Come now, let me sleep with you.”

“And what will you give me to sleep with you?” she asked.

17 “I’ll send you a young goat from my flock,” he said.

“Will you give me something as a pledge until you send it?” she asked.

18 He said, “What pledge should I give you?”

“Your seal and its cord, and the staff in your hand,” she answered. So he gave them to her and slept with her, and she became pregnant by him.

19 After she left, she took off her veil and put on her widow’s clothes again.

20 Meanwhile Judah sent the young goat by his friend the Adullamite in order to get his pledge back from the woman, but he did not find her.

21 He asked the men who lived there, “Where is the shrine prostitute who was beside the road at Enaim?”

“There hasn’t been any shrine prostitute here,” they said.

22 So he went back to Judah and said, “I didn’t find her. Besides, the men who lived there said, ‘There hasn’t been any shrine prostitute here.’ “

23 Then Judah said, “Let her keep what she has, or we will become a laughingstock. After all, I did send her this young goat, but you didn’t find her.”

24 About three months later Judah was told, “Your daughter-in-law Tamar is guilty of prostitution, and as a result she is now pregnant.”

Judah said, “Bring her out and have her burned to death!”

25 As she was being brought out, she sent a message to her father-in-law. “I am pregnant by the man who owns these,” she said. And she added, “See if you recognize whose seal and cord and staff these are.”

26 Judah recognized them and said, “She is more righteous than I, since I wouldn’t give her to my son Shelah.” And he did not sleep with her again.

27 When the time came for her to give birth, there were twin boys in her womb.

28 As she was giving birth, one of them put out his hand; so the midwife took a scarlet thread and tied it on his wrist and said, “This one came out first.”

29 But when he drew back his hand, his brother came out, and she said, “So this is how you have broken out!” And he was named Perez.

30 Then his brother, who had the scarlet thread on his wrist, came out and he was given the name Zerah. She was good, not nice.

According to the Book of Ruth, this Peretz becomes the great great great great grandfather of Boaz, who is the great grandfather of David.

RAHAB

Rahab was a prostitute who lived in Jericho. The Israelites wanted to conquer that town, and their commander, Joshua, sent two spies to look it over.

Joshua 2
RAHAB AND THE SPIES

1 Then Joshua son of Nun secretly sent two spies from Shittim. “Go, look over the land,” he said, “especially Jericho.” So they went and entered the house of a prostitute named Rahab and stayed there.

2 The king of Jericho was told, “Look! Some of the Israelites have come here tonight to spy out the land.”

3 So the king of Jericho sent this message to Rahab:

“Bring out the men who came to you and entered your house, because they have come to spy out the whole land.”

4 But the woman had taken the two men and hidden them. She said, “Yes, the men came to me, but I did not know where they had come from.

5 At dusk, when it was time to close the city gate, the men left. I don’t know which way they went. Go after them quickly. You may catch up with them.”

6 (But she had taken them up to the roof and hidden them under the stalks of flax she had laid out on the roof.)

7 So the men set out in pursuit of the spies on the road that leads to the fords of the Jordan, and as soon as the pursuers had gone out, the gate was shut. …

She made a deal with the spies for the life of her family. “please swear to me by the LORD that you will show kindness to my family, because I have shown kindness to you. Give me a sure sign

13 that you will spare the lives of my father and mother, my brothers and sisters, and all who belong to them, and that you will save us from death.”

14 “Our lives for your lives!” the men assured her. “If you don’t tell what we are doing, we will treat you kindly and faithfully when the LORD gives us the land.”

15 So she let them down by a rope through the window, for the house she lived in was part of the city wall.

16 Now she had said to them, “Go to the hills so the pursuers will not find you. Hide yourselves there three days until they return, and then go on your way

21 “Agreed,” she replied. “Let it be as you say.” So she sent them away and they departed. And she tied the scarlet cord in the window.

She and her family were spared when Joshua and his troops took the city. She was good to her family, compromised herself for them and saved them.

RUTH

Ruth was a foreigner, from Moab. She married the son of Naomi, who was from Judah, Israel. Naomi’s husband died, then her two sons. She told Ruth and her other daughter-in-law Orpah (where Oprah got her name) to go back to their mothers and find other men to marry.

But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.

17 Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.”

18 When Naomi realized that Ruth was determined to go with her, she stopped urging her.

Isn’t it interesting that the words many people say at their weddings were originally said between a woman and her mother-in-law?

They got to Judah at the time of the barley harvest, and Ruth went to work in the field of a near kinsman Naomi pointed out to her. He wasn’t next in line for her, but second. Ruth reaped in the fields, and he noticed her. He offered her protection and food, and she stayed with his folks in the field. When the harvest was over, Naomi told her to go to the threshing floor where the men slept and lie down with him. He did not reject her. His mom was Rahab, remember from the genealogy? He was thrilled, but wanted to do the honorable thing, so he went and negotiated with the next in line so that he could take her as his wife. They made it happen the way they wanted it to, and she gave birth to Obed, King David’s grandfather.

BATHSHEBA

King David saw her bathing on the roof, and she was beautiful. Uriah, her husband, was off fighting David’s war. He called her to the palace and she slept with him. She found out she was pregnant, and David called her husband home for R and R. Uriah refused to go home while the war was still being fought. He slept at the gate of the city with his some of his men, like an athlete who won’t shave until the championship is won. David got him drunk and tried to send him home, but he slept with his men at the gate again. Then David placed him in the fight so he would get killed. He was killed, and Bathsheba mourned him, but she went to the palace and became David’s wife, and bore a son. The story says God was mad at David, so the son got sick and died. One of Bathsheba’s next sons was one of Jesus’ grandfathers.

What are these women doing in this genealogy? Commentators have worked for years trying to figure out what they had in common. They all made choices that were risky. They gathered up all the dice and rolled them, changing their lives. Life pushed them one way and another. Loved ones were killed, but they chose life. They put themselves in danger of rejection and harm. They chose life. Especially Ruth and Tamar made a leap, instead of subsiding into resignation and bitterness over their fate. They didn’t shrug and say, well, I got dealt a bad hand, I’m just unlucky, or I’ve been done wrong. They took what power they had and used it to move their lives forward.

The gospel writer is telling the story of Messiah, the Redeemer. In the beginning of his story he embeds five women who chose to do a brave thing, even though it could get them into trouble. Is there something about redemption that takes guts? That takes a willingness to face rejection? Foreigners, a prostitute, a beauty who married King David, but is named in the genealogy as “wife of Uriah,” and Mary, the young woman who was with child before she had been with a man, yet her baby’s lineage is traced through her husband. Mystery comes into the world, redemption comes into the world with its own morality, with its own sense of the good that plays in all shades in between black and white. These are family stories that would not play well in some sweet Pleasantville. They are real families, real choices, real risks, and we learn that you never know how redemption will come to the world .

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

Grace

December 10, 2017 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
December 10, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

If our actions are our only true belongings, as we discussed last week, what about the bad things we’ve done?

Call to Worship
– Rabindranath Tagore

Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers
but to be fearless in facing them.

Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain
but for the heart to conquer it.

Let me not look for allies in life’s battlefield
but to my own strength.

Let me not crave in anxious fear to be saved
but hope for the patience to win my freedom.

Grant that I may not be a coward,
feeling Your mercy in my success alone;

But let me find the grasp of Your hand in my failure.

Reading
– Frederick Buechner

Grace is something you can never get but can only be given. There’s no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about anymore than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks. A good night’s sleep is grace and so are good dreams. Most tears are grace. The smell of rain is grace. Somebody loving you is grace.

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.

My Actions are My Only True Belongings

December 3, 2017 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
December 3, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

As the days grow darker, nature’s energy goes to the roots of growing things. The five remembrances of Buddhism direct our attention to the radical (meaning root) question of what in life has lasting value.

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

Call to worship
-The Rev. Barbara Wells

O Spinner, Weaver, of our lives,
Your loom is love.
May we who are gathered here
be empowered by that love
to weave new patterns of Truth
and Justice into a web of life that is strong,
beautiful, and everlasting.

Readings:

The Summer Day
-Mary Oliver

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

When Death Comes
-Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

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

Elijah

November 20, 2017 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 19, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

The job of preachers and prophets has often been described as “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Elijah’s story tracks his trials, tribulations and triumphs.

Sermon
These are notes only, and may bear resemblance somewhat to what is said. Click the play button to listen.

Ahab was king for 22 years, following a run of kings with shorter reigns, one for only 7 days. He was wicked, and to make it worse, he married Jezebel, who worshipped the god Baal, and he began to worship Baal as well, instead of the God of Israel.

Elijah shows up in the story telling the king that there won’t be any more rain in the land until the prophet says there will be. He went away then to hide in a ravine east of the Jordan River. God sent ravens to bring him bread and meat in the morning and again in the evening, and he drank from a nearby brook.

The brook soon dried up, as there had been no rain, and God said “go to this town and you’ll meet a widow. She will feed you.” He came to the town and saw a woman gathering sticks. He asked her for some water, and for some bread. She told him she only had a little flour and a little olive oil left. Her plan was to make a fire with the sticks, mix the oil and flour, make a bit of bread for her and for her son, and then they would die. Just make me a little loaf too, and then go do what you plan to do.He told her that her food would not run out until the rains came again. He came to live with the woman and her son, and they had enough to eat every day, since the flour and oil did not run out.

One day her son grew ill. He got worse and worse, and finally he stopped breathing, and she was angry with Elijah. Have you come to remind me of my sin and kill my son?” she cried. I don’t know what sin she was talking about. Elijah said “Give me your son,” and he took him up to the upper room where he was staying, laid him on the bed, and cried out to God, along the lines of “How could you let this tragedy befall this woman who took me in and fed me? He laid himself out on the boy three times, and said “Let his life return to him!” The boy began to breathe again. He carried the boy downstairs and said “Look, your son is alive!”

Three years of drought passed, and then the Lord told Elijah to go to Ahab and bring the rain again. He met Ahab on the road, and the king said “There you are, troubler of Israel.” The trouble is because of you and your evil ways, O King, said Elijah. This is an instructive moment, I think. When the Black Lives Matter protesters disrupt a rally or a highway, some people tsk at them and say they are making things worse for their cause. Disrupting is so rude. Disrupting is what prophets do, though. It’s the only tool of the powerless. The wrongs being done are the cause of the trouble, not the prophetic voices. No one likes a prophet, though. They are a lot of trouble. They demand change.

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

Checking out, Falling back, Overwhelmed

November 12, 2017 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 12, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

At times it all gets to be too much. How do we learn to rest rather than quitting?

Call to Worship
Apache blessing

May the sun bring you new energy by day,
May the moon softly restore you by night,
May the rain wash away your worries,
May the breeze blow new strength into your being,
May you walk gently through the world
and know its beauty all the days of your life.

Reading
My Help Is in the Mountain
by Nancy Wood

My help is in the mountain
Where I take myself to heal
The earthly wounds
That people give to me.
I find a rock with sun on it
And a stream where the water runs gentle
And the trees which one by one
give me company.
So must I stay for a long time
Until I have grown from the rock
And the stream is running through me
And I cannot tell myself from one tall tree.
Then I know that nothing touches me
Nor makes me run away.
My help is in the mountain
That I take away with me.

Sermon
These are notes only, and may bear resemblance somewhat to what is said.

One of my friends on social media said that she couldn’t feel anything after the shooting at the church in Sutherland Springs. All the usual outrage was posted, all the usual moments of silence and offers of thoughts and prayers went up, but she couldn’t muster any emotional response. So many of us are approaching that level of emotional fatigue. As Masha Gessen writes in the Washington Post, “we have settled into a constant, low level dread: a state in which one can function, but can hardly be creative or look into the future.” Yet we sing:

(sings) -by Holly Near
I am open
and I am willing
for to be hopeless
would feel so strange.

It dishonors
those who’ve gone before us,
so lift me up
to the light of change.

When I read about my friend who couldn’t feel anything, I was reminded of the study I read as a psych major about learned helplessness. I don’t want to describe the studies to you, as they are upsetting, but the conclusion was that if you randomly hurt a being for long enough without giving them any way to influence their situation, they will give up and surrender to the pain. After they give up, you can give them a way out of the hurtful situation and they won’t take it. They’ve lost their sense of being able to help themselves.

Many of us are feeling that way, faced with implacable politicians in thrall to the big donations of the gun lobby. We see former NY Mayor Bloomburg fighting, we see the Giffords fighting, and sometimes their efforts seem useless. Many of us are overwhelmed by the actions of people who seem to be ignoring or ignorant of the Constitution. We wake up in the morning like Captain Picard, asking for the Damage Report.

I’ve heard many of you say that you are having a hard year. You have been shocked, depressed, feeling constantly emotionally battered. Some sprang into action in the Resistance. Some woke up sick every morning, some stopped watching the news, trying to live by just paying attention to health, family, work. But we get tired, and still we struggle to sing

(sings)
I am open
and I am willing
for to be hopeless
would feel so strange.

It dishonors
those who’ve gone before us,
so lift me up
to the light of change.

We get tired. We fight and fight, we make phone calls and write emails, we work on grass roots politics. When I got to Spartanburg SC I was 26; There was no women’s shelter. I went to a meeting about starting a shelter. “I’m too tired, said the social workers. “I’m not tired, I said, and we went to work. We started with people who were willing to shelter women and their children in their own homes, private safe homes. I remember arranging pick ups for women in parks, at the mall, at the police station. I remember one woman yelling “DRIVE!” when she thought she saw her husband behind us. He had a shot gun, she said. I was president of it for four years. During that time we hired a director and rented an old house in an undisclosed location. Now the organization has a huge budget and helps hundreds of people. After four years I was tired. Burned out. I hadn’t known that I could say no to being president. I got so I couldn’t even open an envelope from them. I had forgotten to rest. So I quit.

That is the shadow side of justice work. What do we do with that? It makes us want to withdraw, turn our head, give up, if we have the option to.

Contemplative RC author Thomas Merton writes:

“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

Last spring I was felled by something that could not be influenced by wit, intelligence, or force of will. For months I just had to go through it, one day at a time. I love consulting the I Ching, a Chinese book of wisdom. It has been one of my wisdom companions since I was in high school. When I consulted it about the infection in my hip appliance, it said things were not going to go the way I thought they should go. It said I should not have goals, but instead I should give all my attention to process. Just do what I was supposed to do, day by day. That has been valuable in fighting a sense of despair or overwhelm.

(sings)
I am open
and I am willing
for to be hopeless
would feel so strange.

It dishonors
those who’ve gone before us,
so lift me up
to the light of change.

I know some folks who work in politics. Several of them embody the word “Steady,” which I’m reading about in Dan Rather’s new book. Their candidate wins, and they nod and go back to work on what’s next. They lose, and they nod and go back to work on what’s next. I admire that. It is more in some people’s nature to ride the rejoice and lament roller coaster. We need all of us to do what’s next. Then rest, then have a party with our friends, then come back and do what’s next.

Burn out is the shadow side of a big long struggle. The music this morning has been metaphorical, about wanting to be numb, not wanting to feel the tiredness, the overwhelm, the frazzle. It’s ok to rest. You don’t have to keep pushing 24 hours a day. There is no need for guilt if you fall back from the front lines, if you take an afternoon to have fun, if you find a way to laugh and dance in the midst of struggle. As Emma Goldman said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” The postlude will be an opportunity to laugh and dance to a statement of truth. Sometimes we want to be sedated. We look that feeling in the face, we look the shadow side in the face and acknowledge its truth. To stay open and willing, we must pay more attention to processes than goals, faithfully stay in the struggle, rest, and we must not forget the joy.

FIRE
– by Judy Brown

What makes a fire burn
is space between the logs,
a breathing space.

Too much of a good thing,
too many logs
packed in too tight
can douse the flames
almost as surely
as a pail of water would.

So building fires
requires attention
to the spaces in between,
as much as to the wood.

When we are able to build
open spaces
in the same way
we have learned
to pile on the logs,
then we can come to see how
it is fuel, and absence of the fuel
together, that make fire possible.

We only need to lay a log
lightly from time to time.

A fire grows
simply because the space is there,
with openings
in which the flame
that knows just how it wants to burn
can find its way.

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