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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
November 5, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

We tend to think of ministers as answering a calling, but all of us are called in some way to make a difference in our world. How will we live out our mission next?

Call to worship

First UU Church of Austin is an intentionally hospitable community where:

• All people are treated with respect and dignity
• All people of goodwill are welcomed
• People are supported in times of joy and need
• People find connection with one another in fellowship
• We are fully engaged and generous with time, treasure and talent
• We invite people of goodwill to find a spiritual home with us
• We engage as UUs in public life

First UU Church of Austin nourishes souls and transforms lives by:

• Engaging and supporting one another in spiritual practice and growth
• Providing worship, programs and activities that awaken meaning and transcendence
• Providing a caring, supportive and safe place to rekindle the spirit

First UU Church of Austin witnesses to justice in our personal lives and beyond, by:

• Practicing liberal religious values in the public arena
• Empowering all people to access the richness of life
• Providing leadership to the greater UUA community to expand the reach of our movement
• Partnering with the interfaith community to live our shared values

Reading

-Dawna Markova

“I will not die an unlived life. I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire. I choose to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me, to make me less afraid, more accessible, to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise. I choose to risk my significance; to live so that which came to me as a seed goes to the next as a blossom and that which came to me as a blossom, goes on as fruit.”

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

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

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

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
October 1, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Often we must make decisions and face challenges with incomplete information and limited options. Sometimes if we move into these situations with an open mind and heart, doing so can be transformative.

This past Friday morning, as I sat down to start writing this sermon, which I had titled, “leap of faith”, I glanced at the calendar on my computer and realized that it was exactly three years from the day I began full-time ministry here at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin.

So, it occurred to me that I probably ought to start by thanking our senior minister, Meg Barnhouse, for having taken a leap of faith on a fresh out of seminary new minister, who had only just received ministerial fellowship from our Unitarian Universalist Association three days prior to that first day of full- time ministry here at the church.

Thank you all for supporting Meg’s leap of faith.

The phrase “leap of faith” is thought to have derived from the Danish Philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, who actually used the term, “leap to faith”, which he thought was necessary in order to accept the contradictions and paradoxes present within the Christian belief system.

In my life, I eventually came to agree with him about those contradictions in Christian beliefs, so Ileapt to a different faith and became a Post-Christian Unitarian Universalist.

Anyway, I wanted to explore the ways in which we take leaps of faith and even what we mean by the phrase these days, with or without the religious connotation. I was curious about how much power the phrase might even still hold in our more secular era.

So, I conducted my own, rigorous, scientific study.
I put a post on Facebook asking folks to tell me about a time they had taken a leap of faith.

The post garnered 42 responses.

I told my trainer at the gym about this because he often likes to get into philosophical discussions with me as he puts me through exercises no one my age has any business attempting.

He said, “Wow! I didn’t think you had that many friends.”

Apparently, he’s a comedian too.

Anyway, some common themes emerged. Lots of folks had made a leap of faith to move somewhere to which they had always been strongly drawn – a place where they felt a peace and at home – often at great expense and often involving the sacrifice of lucrative careers.

Similarly, many people expressed having given up a career, often in mid-life or later, and making a leap of faith to pursue a strong sense of calling:

– Some, like me, had felt a calling to ministry and found themselves upending their lives to enroll in seminary.

– Many other people had made a leap of faith to switch careers and answer a calling to one of the other helping professions such as psychological counseling, social work and medicine.

– Other folks felt called to pursue a wide variety of creative arts fields, from writing to music to different types of design work to performance arts and many others.

People also talked about making all kinds of leaps of faith around parenting.

Another common theme people expressed was taking a leap of faith to allow themselves to love and be loved, as well as to leave a long-term relationship that was no longer working.

Finally, several Unitarian Universalists wrote of their struggles to allow themselves to even experience faith again after finding Unitarian Universalism, because they had been wounded by religion in their past.

Several themes around what taking a leap of faith is and is not and under what circumstances we most often take such a leap also emerged from those posts, as well as in several journal articles I read on the subject.

We most often take a leap of faith out of a love for something, a desire for something greater and more fulfilling, not out of fear. In fact, fear-based decision making most often keeps us stuck where we are or causes us to regress.

Leaps of faith are not acting rashly or foolheartedly. They occur when we feel a strong pull toward something, we feel a need for change in our lives, we face some challenge, and we must make decisions about what to do with incomplete information and often with limited options.

We choose to move forward, we make the leap as best we can in the face of great uncertainty.

And, really, when in life are we ever not facing great uncertainty.

And in fact, some folks have expressed that their leaps did not even really feel like much of a choice at all. I remember reading the story of one woman who eventually established a successful consultancy business after feeling unfulfilled and miserable for many years in a corporate job. She wrote of her experience, “It felt less like a leap and more like being pushed off the edge of the cliff.”

And we have to know that sometimes we do fall off the cliff. Sometimes we make a leap of faith, and we fail, or it does not work out, at least not the way we had planned. Sometimes, like the Wiley Coyote in those Road Runner cartoons, we go flying off the edge of the cliff only to hang impossibly in the air for a moment and then fall straight to the ground below with a loud “splat”.

The thing is, almost always, like the Wiley Coyote, we somehow miraculously survive the fall. And unlike the coyote, sometimes good things do eventually come out of it – we learn from it – we are transformed even if recovering from the fall is painful.

Back in the early 2000s, my spouse, Wayne, and I had begun to realize that we wanted to make some changes in our lives. We were living in Houston at the time. For a variety of reasons, we wanted to get out of Houston and felt that Austin would be a better fit for us.

Likewise, though we both had good positions doing work we liked at a non-profit healthcare clinic, for me at least, there was still a feeling of something missing, something not quite completely fulfilling about what I was doing.

So, I began applying for positions in Austin.
In 2004, when I was offered a position as the executive director of a non-profit organization providing immigration legal services and advocacy on behalf of immigrant rights, we made a leap of faith.

Wayne is a physician, we thought. He can get work anywhere, we thought.

We leased an apartment here in Austin, and I moved over to start the new position while Wayne remained in Houston for a while to sell the house and search for primary care positions here in Austin.

We sold the house, and Wayne thought he had found a position.

Then, it fell through, and he was not able to find another one.

“Splat”.

Apparently, at that time, primary care physicians across the country were trying to move to Austin, and the city’s healthcare infrastructure had not kept up with its population growth, so such positions were almost never coming open.

So Wayne had to go back to work for the clinic in Houston. For a year, we lived in separate cities, one of us traveling to be with the other one on weekends when we could.

And it was hard. It did feel as if we had fallen off of a cliff sometimes.

And yet we learned from it and were eventually transformed by it.

We learned that our love for one another, our relationship, was strong enough to survive and overcome the geographic distance that had been placed between us.
We learned that there really is some truth to that old adage that absence can make the heart grow fonder, but what they don’t tell us is that we have to work at it, even from across the distance, to help that love grow even stronger.

We learned that my domestic skills and talents were extremely lacking. I found out you can’t microwave an egg.

I’ve gotten better since then, though Wayne might feel differently as to what degree.

Eventually, Wayne got a great position with a clinic here in Austin, where one of the other doctors happened to be a member of this place called First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin.

He told Wayne all about it, and we decided to visit the church. So began a series of other leaps of faith that have been transformative in our lives and have led to me standing in this pulpit this morning telling you this story.

One of the things that so strongly drew me to Unitarian Universalism was that it inherently involves taking a leap of faith – not a leap to faith so that we can accept holding contradictory beliefs simultaneously like Kierkegaard said was necessary – but rather an acceptance that none of us has all the answers.

That revelation is continuously unfolding.
That there are questions more profound than answers.
That undiscovered vistas still lie before us.

That sometimes we experience transcendence by allowing the great mystery to wash over us.

We make leaps of faith within this religion all the time.

Lifelong UUs and/or UUs who are people of color, who stay with our faith even when it does not always live up to its own aspirations.

People who were previously non-religious who discover in Unitarian Universalism a faith that does not require holding beliefs in the supernatural.

Folks from various different faith backgrounds who often felt wounded by their prior religion, and find in Unitarian Universalism a faith where they can leap back in again.

And every Sunday, we come together as people from these wide ranging backgrounds and more. Every Sunday, we come together as a people with a multiplicity of theologies or world views.

Earlier, I called myself a “post-christian UU”. I made that distinction to acknowledge that we do have many UUs who view their faith through a Christian lens.

And among us every Sunday morning we have atheists, and agnostics, and possibilians, and Buddhists, and folks who draw from earth centered traditions and many, many other faith views. We have a number of us who hold a faith we have constructed for ourselves by drawing from many of the world’s wisdom sources.

Yet, despite these differing views, we come together to experience, no matter what each of us may envision it to be – humanity, the web of all existence, God, the music of the universe unfolding – no matter what we call it, we come together to experience something we recognize as much larger than ourselves, yet of which we are not just a part, but an integral part.

And that leap of faith we make together during worship, at its best, creates in us a sense of accountability to each other and our world – a faith that the way in which we lives our lives matters.

It takes a big leap of faith for us to come together across such a wide range of spiritualities, and yet every Sunday, we do exactly that.

Perhaps we need each other to take our leaps of faith. Perhaps, though we must sometimes go alone into the wilderness for a while, in the end our faith exists only in relationship with others.

In fact, sometimes, we make a group leap of faith. Over the years, I have witnessed the folks in this church make some pretty big and brave leaps of faith together.

Here are just a few of recent examples. Offering immigration sanctuary first to Sulma Franco and now Alirio Galvez. We were taking a leap of faith in both instances because it is not possible to know what the outcome may be when providing sanctuary.

And with Sulma, we were having to kind of build the bicycle while riding it because we had never done this before. And what a leap of faith Sulma took and Alirio is taking with us.

This church also had a capital campaign and is about to begin renovations and expansions. We made a leap of faith that like in that old movie, Field of Dreams, “If we build it, they will come.”

And my friends, they will come. Already, they are coming to our doors. We are only swinging those doors wide open and setting up a larger welcoming table for folks who are not really “they” but “us”.

Author and speaker Martha Beck said on Oprah, so it must be true, that our leaps of faith are always love based decisions, never fear based. These then are just a few of the love based decisions this church has made together.

We make our leaps of faith – we take risks in the face of uncertainty – because we are lured by love and life to do so. We take our leaps of faith because we don’t get to feel fully alive, most creatively alive unless we take these leaps.

We only get love if we leap.

We only experience the fullness of our own creative capacity if we leap. Our souls only take flight if we take a leap of faith first.

So, now you can go out into the world after our service today and tell people that one of the ministers at church told you to go take a flying leap.

Please, just be sure and also tell them that he said that because he wishes you the love and creative life fulfillment he gets to experience every day serving as a minister at this church.

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

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

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
September 3, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

As First UU Church of Austin lives into our values and mission, what is possible? What differences will we make in whose lives? How big can we dream, and what will it take us to get there?

Call to Worship

By Leslie Takahashi

To worship means to consider that which has worth – today we consider, with gratitude, the many gifts of this community –

The opportunity to be affirmed in who we are and to offer that affirmation to others The chance to stand up together to help remake the world in the ideal of justice

And the aspiration to consider all life as precious for if all of it is made of stardust, how can it not be wondrous?

So this morning let’s welcome all of these gifts with gratitude – for they have been paid for with many currencies

The blood of the martyrs who died so that we can be free in our religion

The sweat of those who persisted in justice’s name against hostility and adversity The tears of those who struggled to build better lives for those in this life

The questions of our children as they understand the world anew and offer their understanding to us as a fresh lens

The laughter and joy of those giddy with the embrace of community

The dollars and cents of those who gave what they could – and then stretched a little more.

The infinite small acts of service that make the parts greater than the whole, done by those who knew themselves in sympathy with our purposes.

So today we consider with gratitude and humility what it means to pay forward what has been paid forward for us.

And now, with all of this, let us enter into worship with gladness in our hearts.

Reading

Gifts

For those who came before, who gave to us this faith that sustained us this, our beloved religious community.

We offer our gratitude and those gifts that are significant and meaningful to us.

For those who will come after us, our literal and spiritual children and grandchildren, who will carry forward our beloved Unitarian Universalism and our beloved church.

We offer our gratitude and those gifts that are significant and meaningful to us.

For the gifts of live and love.

We offer our gratitude and those gifts that are significant and meaningful to us.

For our common purpose, for the opportunity to gather as a community, for the blessings of nourishing souls and transforming lives both inside these church walls and beyond them, for the call to do justice.

We offer our gratitude and those gifts that are significant and meaningful to us.

For ourselves, we who form and carry forward our faith and our beloved community.

We offer our gratitude and those gifts that are significant and meaningful to us.

Sermon

“We gather in community to nourish souls, transform lives and do justice.”

What an inspiring mission. What a grand purpose. What a sacred reason to be.

And it arose out of set of values that this religious community has discerned are at our very core:

“Transcendence. Community. Courage. Compassion. Transformation”.

What glorious aspirations we share.

This is the time of year where we are engaged in our stewardship campaign to ask you for your financial pledges that will make living out those values and that mission possible next year. One of your stewardship ministry co-chairs really wanted me to call this the “Sermon on the Amount”. I declined.

I declined because I want to talk with you about more than just the amount. I want to reflect upon the vision that those shared values call us toward – the dream that we step into every Sunday, when we say together that mission, our sacred reason to be. – But I do also want to acknowledge that we sometime shy away from talking about money, especially here in church and especially as a part of worship.

And yet, a spiritual practice of generosity and a commitment toward responsible stewardship of our church and religious community is a vital part of nourishing our own souls and transforming our own lives. We have inherited this church, our spiritual dream and vision, because of the generosity of our religious ancestors, and we have the opportunity to pass it on even more greatly realized to those who will follow us. And to me, there is something divine in that possibility.

Our church, and all Unitarian Universalist (or UU) churches, are organized in a manner that is referred to as “congregational polity”. Polity just means how we organize and govern ourselves. Our congregational polity goes all the way back to 1648 and a written set of promises, or a covenant, that a group of our predecessor churches made to one another, called the Cambridge Platform.

Briefly, congregational polity, as established by the Cambridge Platform, means that we are a group of associated churches that support and work with one another so that we can all more greatly live out our shared UU faith. Each church pays into a shared administrative body called the Unitarian Universalist Association or UUA. The UUA provides many forms of important administrative and educational support to our churches and our larger UU work in the world.

However, each of our UU churches are independent entities. We own our own property and govern ourselves. There is no centralized denominational hierarchy that can tell us what to believe or what to do – all thanks to the Cambridge Platform.

Maybe that is why my UU History professor in seminary had us sing out Boo-yah after any mention of the Cambridge Platform.

Oops, boo-yah.

Let’s do that together. The Cambridge Platform.

Boo-yah.

The Cambridge Platform. Boo-yah.

The Cambridge Platform.

Boo-yah.

Thank you for indulging my religious nerdiness. Now, another result of congregational polity is that there is no centralized denominational body that provides us with overall financial support. The lion’s share of the funding that allows this religious community to step into the dream together, live out our mission, our sacred purpose together, comes from the very members of this religious community. We have to fund ourselves, also thanks to the Cambridge Platform.

Boo-yah.

And that’s OK, because I know that this congregation is up to it.

We have … you have the spiritual generosity to step into that dream together.

I know this because I have watched you pledge to a capital campaign that will result in creating a welcoming table for more and more folks who will join us in living our sacred purpose together. Strengthened by their presence among us, I have no doubt we will step into the dream even more fully.

And I have experienced the spiritual generosity of this church very directly and very personally.

Several years ago now, not that long after my spouse Wayne and I joined this church and before I went to seminary, Wayne developed a disabling and potentially life-threatening condition called polymyositis.

Polymyositis is likely an inherited condition wherein the immune system attacks the body’s own muscles.

For Wayne, it caused a number of symptoms and problems including weakening his leg muscles to the point where it was difficult for him to walk.

Members of this church brought us food. They offered to take Wayne to his various medical appointments. One member came by and gave Wayne two beautiful walking canes that this church member had hand carved himself.

I can’t begin to tell you how much that all helped.

I was working as the executive director of an immigration legal services non-profit at the time, a job that required well over 40 hours per week. Trying to balance that with caring for Wayne’s needs and just being with him was extremely difficult, and the help that members of this church gave us made a real difference.

Plus, I was scared. I was greatly worried. My heart was hurting over seeing what the disease was doing to Wayne and the fear that it might take him from me.

Just knowing that this church was holding us in prayers and love helped us to make it through that time.

Now, I want you to know that Wayne is doing much better now.

The polymyositis is in remission, and he is even seeing a fitness trainer at a gym, doing exercises people half his age have no business doing.

And in my time with the church since then, and especially now as one of your ministers, I have witnessed this religious community do the same for so many others – helping people through battling cancer and other serious illnesses, holding family members and loved ones through the deaths of ones they loved, loving and supporting one another through any number of life’s challenges and sorrows, and also celebrating life’s joys together.

And that’s only some of the spiritual generosity of this religious community that occurs within these church walls. But you also take that generosity out into our community and our world in so many ways.

We have folks working for justice by engaging in antiracism activities, fighting for LGBTQ rights, the rights and dignity of the disabled, women’s rights, immigration justice and so much more. We have a group of real leaders in the Austin area on the environment and climate change.

This congregation offered sanctuary to Sulma Franco and helped her avoid deportation to her home country of Guatemala, where she would have faced persecution and most likely even death.

That’s the difference that gathering in community to nourish souls, transform live and do justice makes. It changes lives for the better.

Sometimes it even saves a life.

I believe it changes our own lives by helping us to be better people.

People living more fulfilling, ethical lives and who are moved to work for justice in our community and our world.

What an inspiring mission. What a grand purpose. What a sacred reason to be.

And the thing is, I could go on. I have only scratched the surface of all the many ways in which this congregation is demonstrating your spiritual generosity by living out that mission. In all, we have over 80 ministries and programs.

I want to change gears just slightly now though and talk about the resilience and spiritual generosity this religious community has demonstrated over the past several months, while our senior minister, Meg, has had to be out so that she could heal and recover from the serious infection she had developed.

First, I can’t begin to adequately voice for you how much the love and support so many of you expressed to Meg and Kiya has meant to them. You helped lift their spirits at a time when it would have been easy to fall into despair.

And all the while, you have kept that mission alive.

For instance, over these past few months, a dedicated group of church leaders have expanded our efforts toward antiracism, multiculturalism and dismantling the dominance of white norms, both in the church and by working with other groups out in our community. We can and must keep expanding this work; however, we have an everstrengthening base upon which to build.

During this time, so many of you have worked in so many ways as we battled the many harmful bills that came up in the Texas Legislature. We were not always able to stop some of them, but there were important victories. I was happy to see that on Wednesday of last week, a judge at least temporarily blocked one of the most harmful of those that did pass, Senate Bill 4, the so called “show me your papers” anti-immigrant, anti-sanctuary city law.

Over the past few months, you have kept this religious community growing in so many ways. A dedicated group of building committee volunteers did a new set of canvassing visits for our capital campaign to invite relatively new members to participate. Those newer members responded very generously, and many of them have now become canvassers themselves!

And speaking of new members, 46 great folks joined the church between January and July of this year. That is more than joined in all of 2016.

In general, Sunday attendance has also been up, as has attendance in our Faith Development classes for our children and our youth.

If you did not get to be at the service that our high school youth did in May, let me tell you it was profoundly moving. It was great evidence that our folks that work with our children and youth over in our faith development wing are doing amazing and holy work. Rumor even has it that a couple of our youth have begun considering going to UU seminary.

The greatest number of members from this church ever to attend our Unitarian Universalist annual General Assembly did so this past June. Under the leadership of our excellent denominational affairs chair, our participation in our larger faith is growing.

And, so many of you have worked in so many ways to continue and expand our social justice and interfaith efforts this year.

Under the leadership of it founding chair, we have formed and sustained a terrific new Women’s Alliance.

Then recently, this congregation has again offered sanctuary to an immigrant that faces potentially life-threatening consequences without it.

Over the past week, I have been heartened by the generosity shown across our country to offer support and aid to people affected by Hurricane Harvey. I have been especially touched by the responses of our local UU churches, and most especially you, the folks of this church.

Because once again terrific leadership has stepped up from among you. They are providing us ways to donate tangible items and/or to make a financial contribution to folks who have been affected by Harvey. You can also contribute to help our UU churches that were damaged by the storm. Please visit the social action table in the gallery after this service to find out more.

These are just a few of the ways you have kept our mission alive and the spiritual generosity of this religious community flowing over the past few months while Meg has had to be away.

I tell you all of this because that is not what so often happens when a well loved minister is unexpectedly absent for an extend period due to serious illness. What more often happens is that much of what I have just described grinds to a halt. Anxieties rise. Tempers flare. Attendance and new member growth fall.

And very often the poor soul who steps in as the acting senior minister under such circumstances is treated in way that, oh, let’s just say is quite the opposite of the compassion, support and generous spirit with which you all have treated me.

And although of course I would not have had it happen under these circumstances, the compassion and support you all have shown me, has allowed me to learn and grow as a minister. You have helped my soul thrive, and for that I am and always will be extraordinarily grateful.

The resilience, compassion, generosity of spirit and commitment to our mission and ministries this religious community had demonstrated during this time is nothing short of amazing. You are already stepping into the dream together.

So, our stewardship campaign is just the way we provide ourselves with the resources it will take to keep living that dream together next year.

Members of the church have already pledged $300,000 toward 2018, many of them raising their pledges by significant amounts compared to this year.

I know that not everyone has circumstances that will allow them to do that, so here is that sermon on the amount after all. In this church, we ask that our folks pledge an amount that is meaningful and significant to you within your means. We are hoping to increase our pledges by around 5% overall.

Oh, and we also ask that you please be nice to your canvasser.

They are wonderful group of church volunteers who we can never thank enough.

“Transcendence. Community. Courage. Compassion. Transformation”.

What a compelling set of values this religious community shares.

“We gather in community to nourish souls, transform lives and do justice.”

What a sacred reason to be.

May we keep the dream of this, our beloved religious community alive and growing by continuing to support ourselves as we have done going all the way back to the Cambridge Platform.

Boo-yah! And Amen.

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

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
August 27, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

When we encounter life’s challenges and difficulties, the stories we construct about them can help us or hinder us from fully engaging in them and moving toward wholeness and healthiness. Drawing on the work of Glennon Doyle Melton and Brene Brown, we will look at all three acts they outline for our stories.

Call to Worship

No One is Outside the Circle of Love
By Susan Frederick-Gray, Erika A. Hewitt

We know that hurt moves through the world, perpetrated by action, inaction, and indifference. Our values call us to live in the reality of the heartbreak of our world, remembering that:

No one is outside the circle of love.

We who are Unitarian Universalist not only affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person; we also affirm the inherent wholeness of every being-despite apparent brokenness.

No one is outside the circle of love.

We know that things break, or break down: promises, friendship, sobriety, hope, communication. This breaking happens because our human hearts and our very institutions are frail and imperfect. We make mistakes. Life is messy.

No one is outside the circle of love.

With compassion as our guide, we seek the well-being of all people. We seek to dismantle systems of oppression that undermine our collective humanity. We believe that we’re here to guide one another toward Love.

No one is outside the circle of love.

No matter how fractured we are or once were, we can make whole people of ourselves. We are whole at our core, because of the great, unnameable, sometimes inconceivable Love in which we live.

No one is outside the circle of love.

Reading
“Statement of Conscience on Escalating Economic Inequality”
adopted by the UUA General Assembly

Challenging extreme inequality inequity locally and globally is a moral imperative. As a pragmatic faith we are committed to working to change economic and social systems with a goal of equitable outcomes of life, dignity, and wellbeing experienced by all. The escalation of income and wealth inequity undergirds many injustices that our faith movement is committed to addressing including: economic injustice, mass incarceration, migrant injustice, climate change, sexual and gender injustice, and attacks on voting rights….

…The growth of inequity does not happen by accident. It is a direct consequence of the decisions of those people who own and control the nation’s and world’s corporations and resources and their allies in government, who take for themselves the wealth created by the hands of the many and the bounty of our fragile planet….

…Unlimited funding of campaigns by wealthy individuals and corporations, lack of access to conventional financial institutions and predatory lending, and flawed tax policies increase inequity and insecurity….

…Our Unitarian Universalist faith calls us to respond to economic injustice and advocate for those among us being harmed by inequity…

…Words and deeds of prophetic people challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil such as inequality with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love….

…By speaking, acting, and spending in concert with one another and by centering, resourcing, and empowering communities who are most impacted by economic inequities, we can create better and more just economies. Together we can make a difference….

Sermon “A Story in Three Acts”

Act I: David Overton and Rev. Chris Jimmerson

David

In late March of this year, almost exactly three months before our annual Unitarian Universalist (or UU) General Assembly in New Orleans, a controversy broke out within our larger UU denomination.

The Unitarian Universalist Association (or UUA), the administrative body that serves our congregations in a number of important ways, hired a white, male minister to head up the Southern UU regional arm of the UUA. The minister who the UUA hired did not live in the south and did not plan to move to take the position.

A conversation began among UU people of color about how UUA hiring practices had seemed to favor white, male, ministers and how few people of color had been hired to serve in top management positions.

Very quickly, a Latin religious educator from the south revealed that she had been a finalist for the position. She had been told by the UUA director of Congregational Life that, though qualified for the position, they were looking for someone who was “a right fit for the team.” and were thus hiring someone else. People of color have often experienced the term “right fit” as code language that white people use to exclude non-whites from positions for which they are clearly qualified.

A number of charged exchanges broke out on social media and other communications. The UUA President at the time, Rev. Peter Morales, wrote a statement regarding the controversy, hoping to calm the situation. Instead, a number of UU people of color found his wording hurtful. The controversy became more inflamed.

A few days later, Rev. Morales resigned from serving as President of the UUA, citing his hope that doing so would allow healing to occur. By early April, the chief operating officer of the UUA and the director of congregational life also resigned. The minister who had been offered the position announced he would not accept it.

The Executive Director of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association wrote a letter to the UUA board in response. His letter further inflamed matters and by early June, he too had resigned.

In May, our well-loved UUA moderator (the moderator presides at UUA board meetings and at our general assemblies) also resigned due to a recurrence of a previous cancer that had been in remission. On June 2, Jim died.

So, as our denomination approached its annual General Assembly in June, we found ourselves with no president, several other high-level resignations, no moderator, and a raging internal controversy.

Chris

I recently participated in a workshop with Glennon Doyle Melton and BrenŽ Brown. The workshop was about how when we encounter difficulties, hurt and or/failure in life, if we can identify the truth of our story – if we can avoid creating a false story to numb the pain – we often can transform ourselves. We can learn and change in ways that are healthier and more life fulfilling.

As David and I were talking about recent events within our denomination and at our UU General Assembly, it became obvious to us that the framework presented in the workshop provides a great way to understand recent events within Unitarian Universalism and the challenges and opportunities our denomination is facing. In the workshop, Melton and Brown describe how when experiencing great difficulty, to respond to it in ways that are healthy and potentially transformative, we must live out a story in three acts.

In our current UU story, what David just described is Act I. Our denomination began what Melton and Brown call a “Brutiful Adventure”. “Brutiful” refers to how life can be both brutal and beautiful and that we have to accept and experience both. We do not get one without the other. If we reject the brutal, we also reject the beautiful.

The brutiful adventure begins with an inciting incident that often reveals realities and truths we have been suppressing or denying. In the case of our denomination then, the inciting incident was the most recent UUA hiring decision and revelation that a qualified person of color had been among the final candidates that David told you about.

This incident let loose a strong undercurrent of feeling among UU people of color about UUA hiring practices specifically and a continued dominance of white cultural values within UUism more generally that has been with us dating all the way back to a controversy that broke out in the early 1960 over efforts toward black empowerment within UUism.

The brutal includes the great hurt that so many have felt since the incident, the string of resignations and the unexpected and untimely loss of Jim Key during the middle of it all.

The beautiful is the way in which so many UUs have vowed to one another and to our denomination to work through these difficulties and truly live out our commitment to becoming a truly anti-racist, multicultural denomination.

Act II: Carolyn Gremminger and Rev. Chris Jimmerson

Carolyn

Since the events that David described, there has been a recognition within Unitarian Universalism, leading up to and following General Assembly (or GA for short), that we still have much work to do to be in right relationship with each other and to truly become a religion that lives our commitment to dismantling racism, both within our faith and beyond it.

We have come to realize that we are not all in agreement yet, and that we will have to live in that tension, even while remaining in covenant with one another for a while.

For example, we have begun a conversation about a culture of white supremacy within Unitarian Universalism wherein we do things in ways that adhere to white, western European cultural norms, often to the exclusion of other cultural practices.

Yet, some UUs object to the use of the term “supremacy” given how it is so often used in the media these days in relation to white nationalists and neo-Nazi hate groups. Other UUs though, feel very strongly that the use of the “culture of white supremacy” terminology is necessary in order understand the great challenge that lies before us as a denomination. For these UUs, the term captures that the dominance of white cultural norms is the water in which we currently swim and thus can be very difficult to see.

Other UUs fear that the great, almost singular concentration upon our internal UU struggles with race leading up to and at GA may distract us from other vital matters, such as climate change, class inequality, LGBTQ rights, women’s rights and the like.

Yet other folks also worry that this internal focus could prevent us from being present and vocal in public life at a time when our religious values are needed like never before.

Similarly, the UUA board had approved raising 5.3 million dollars over time to fund Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism. Many saw this is a very positive step. Others worried that it might drain resources from other important needs. During the early and most emotional times of the inciting controversy, relationships between folks became strained or broken and will need time and much mutual work for healing to be possible.

So, our denomination is acknowledging that we must commit to doing the work of coming together across our differences, healing, and learning from all that has happened. We have committed to living out our multiculturalism both within UUism and out in our world. We know that this will take time and that we must stay engaged even while it will still be difficult sometimes.

Chris

What Carolyn just described is what Melton and Brown would call “Act II” of our story. Act II is where we have to stay on the mat – we have to struggle with our difficulties, feel the bad feelings, live in tension for a while, because if we try to avoid them by moving on too soon, we will be doomed to relive Act I yet again someday.

Melton and Brown also say that we have to identify what the rules of our current world are that may be holding us back. We have to identify such unhelpful rules in order to move past Act I and begin to work through Act II. For UUism, some of those rules include the dominance of white cultural norms within our denomination, such as perfectionism, either/or thinking and avoidance of open conflict.

Unitarian Universalism is currently in Act II with the story we are sharing with you today, at least for the most part. We are identifying that which has been holding us back and trying our best to stay on the mat. At times, we have not been entirely successful at staying on the mat, and that is not surprising or out of the ordinary. It is difficult. Sometimes we have to recommit.

We have lost leaders because they did not stay in relationship with us. We are hopeful they will come back into relationship, perhaps in a different way than they were before.

Yet, we also have a great number of us who have committed to staying on the mat – to doing the challenging yet potentially transformative work that lies ahead. At GA, the leaders that moderated our sessions clearly worked hard to set a tone that was respectful and healing but that also recognized the difficulties with which we must grapple. They modeled acknowledging our mistakes and working with one another across our areas of disagreement.

A multitude of opportunities to learn about dismantling racism and creating multicultural ways of being were also offered at G.A.

So at GA and since then, our denomination has been doing its best to stay in the struggle against racism internally and externally.

The way forward will be uncomfortable and difficult sometimes. This is where we are for now – staying in the struggle, even though it is hard at times, because it is the struggle that makes transformation possible.

Act III: Valerie Sterne and Rev. Chris Jimmerson

Valerie

While as a denomination, we are still mainly in what Carolyn and Chris have described as Act II, we thought it would also be important to mention some really positive developments that have occurred leading up to GA, at GA and since then.

After Peter Morales resigned, the UUA appointed three co-presidents to serve until the election for our new president could be held at GA. All three co-presidents were people of color, and one was the first female ever to serve as UUA president. These co-presidents implemented interim hiring practices with specific multicultural goals for UUA positions, including management positions Then, at GA, the delegates selected our first elected UUA president, Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray! Rev. Frederick-Gray has pledged to work with a board-appointed commission to put into place permanent multicultural hiring practices and has already appointed people of color to top positions within her new administration.

In late April and early May, almost seventy percent of our congregations participated in anti-racism/culture of white supremacy “teach-ins” using materials created by UU people of color. These congregations dedicated a worship service to the teach-in and many have offered educational classes following it. In the two days before GA, hundreds of UUs participated in intensive undoing racism workshops, and, as Chris mentioned, there were a number of great workshops on the subject also provided during GA.

We also held a beautiful memorial service for Jim Key at GA, which allowed our folks some closure around his loss. Kiya performed Meg’s song, “All Will Be Well” at the memorial service.

Since GA, our denomination has also begun to embrace a both/and outlook rather than an either/or point of view regarding our being able to do the internal work of examining the dominance of white cultural norms within our own institutions and showing up to work for justice in our larger world. We can do both, and, in fact, must do both. An essential part of doing racial justice in the world is also doing it in ourselves. We can’t make change out there, if we don’t also do so in our own hearts. Additionally, we can work for racial justice while also still working for justice against other forms of oppression and harm to our environment.

For instance, large numbers of our UUs were among the interdenominational faith leaders who showed up in Charlottesville to stage a peaceful, interfaith counter protest to the neo-nazi, white nationalist supremacists group who were there. Here at our church, we decided until Meg could be back with us to do something similar to the teach-ins I mentioned earlier. In the meantime though, our church already has a lot going with antiracism and multiculturalism efforts.

We have done education on white supremacy culture with our Austin Area UU White Allies for Racial Equity group and our Board of Trustees. We have an active People of Color Group and allies group. We have begun offering a racism-unlearning circle and have offered several film screenings and other learning opportunities regarding antiracism.

Finally, a group of folks is working to identify a broader educational curricula that we can offer in 2018 that would accommodate a large number of our church members being able to attend it over time.

So, much is happening and moving forward!

Chris

All the positive developments that Valerie just described are what examples of what Melton and Brown say can happen in act III of our story. If we have done the work of identifying the rules that are holding us back and staying in the struggle, we get to write our own ending for the story.

While we still have much work to do and must stay on the mat for a while, as Melton and Brown would put it, these positive developments are a sign that even though these have been difficult times for us as a denomination, they also offer us the opportunity for real growth and transformation.

We have the opportunity to write our own ending – to create a faith that is truly multicultural and inclusive of a multitude of cultural norms and practices. Such a faith in turn, holds the great potential of being transformative for each of us as individuals, by widening our worldview.

We invite you to join in. Feel free to talk with David about opportunities for getting involved with our larger denominations. Join our people of color or allies group according to how you identify.

Together, with each other and with the many wonderful folks in our larger UU faith, we will write our own ending to the story we have shared with you today.

And that truly is holy work.

Amen.

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

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
August 20, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Our mission begins with “we gather in community.” As we prepare to celebrate and participate in LGBTQ Pride week and activities, we’ll examine how our common purpose begins with a concept of community that values all of us as our truest, full selves. This will be the first in a series of sermons on the elements of our mission.

Call to Worship

WE ANSWER THE CALL OF LOVE
By Julia Corbett-Hemeyer

In the face of hate,
We answer the call of love.

In the face of exclusion,
We answer the call of inclusion.

In the face of homophobia,
We answer the call of LGBTQ rights.

In the face of racism,
We answer of justice for all races.

In the face of xenophobia,
We answer the call of pluralism.

In the face of misogyny,
We answer the call of women’s rights.

In the face of demagoguery,
We answer the call of reason.

In the face of religious intolerance,
We answer the call of diversity.

In the face of narrow nationalism,
We answer the call of global community.

In the face of bigotry,
We answer the call of open-mindedness.

In the face of despair,
We answer the call of hope.

As Unitarian Universalists, we answer the call of love –
now more than ever.

Reading

LET US MAKE THIS EARTH A HEAVEN
By Tess Baumberger

Let us make this earth a heaven, right here, right now.
Let us create a heaven here on earth
where love and truth and justice reign.

Let us welcome all at our Pearly Gates, our Freedom Table,
amid singing and great rejoicing,
black, white, yellow, red, and all our lovely colors,
straight, gay, transgendered, bisexual, and all the ways
of loving each other’s bodies.
Blind, deaf, mute, healthy, sick, variously-abled,
Young, old, fat, thin, gentle, cranky, joyous, sorrowing.
Let no one feel excluded, let no one feel alone.

May hate and warfare cease to clash in causes
too old and tired to name; religion, nationalism,
the false false god of gold, deep-rooted ethnic hatreds.
May these all disperse and wane, may we see each others’ true selves.
May we all dwell together in peace and joy and understanding.

Let us make this earth a heaven.

Sermon

This coming week, the Austin-area lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer community (or the LGBTQ Community) will gather for a number of LGBTQ Pride events, culminating in the annual Pride parade Saturday evening. Lots of straight friends and loved ones will also join in the Pride activities.

For many years now, our church has been participating in these Pride events, and for two of those years recently, we have held a “Big Gay Sunday” service to celebrate and give context to that participation.

So, earlier this summer, already knowing I would be in the pulpit on this date and that it would be Big Gay Sunday, I was at our Unitarian Universalist annual General Assembly earlier, and seeing it on display at a booth in the exhibit hall, I had no other choice than to purchase this big gay rainbow stole to wear for this momentous occasion.

And this is a time for celebration. Yet, I cannot help but feel an eerie sense of this strange juxtaposition between what happens when many souls come together at LGBTQ pride and what we witnessed last week in Charlottesville, Virginia and to lesser degree yesterday in Boston.

Next weekend, people will come together for the Pride parade, where they will proclaim universal love and acceptance – the valuing of each and every person claiming the fullness of our own, individual identity.

People will celebrate inclusiveness and the forming of community. They will uphold the beauty of how our differences blended together allow each of us to shine more brightly, so that together we form that famous pride rainbow that will be on display on flags everywhere. There will be beautiful colors and sometimes-flamboyant outfits. There will be dancing and music and laughter and joy.

We will recognize that progress has been made – oppression can be overcome. Though we are not nearly all the way there yet, and progress has come at a heavy price sometimes, our demands for justice have been and continue to be worth it. Contrast that with what we saw with the white supremacist nationalist groups last week in Charlottesville.

This so-called “Unite the Right” event could not have been more different than LGBTQ pride.

Well, except for the guys carrying Tiki torches straight out of the “on sale now” rack at Pier One Imports. As Betty Bowers, who claims to be America’s best Christian posted on Facebook, “when fascism comes to America it will be carrying Polynesian party accessories”.

They also carried Nazi flags on the streets of an American city, waving them next to their confederate flags, bringing together two symbols of two of the worst, most murderous episodes in recent human history.

Some dressed in paramilitary gear, and many carried semi-automatic weapons, pepper spray and other armaments.

The white nationalist protesters chanted misogynistic, racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic slogans.

“Blood and Soil”, they chanted – a phrase borrowed from Nazi Germany that idealizes a master race rising up out of white, rural, farm life.

“Jews will not replace us,” they chanted.

“White lives matter more.”

“F-You, Faggots.” Only they used the actual f-word that I will not say in this sanctuary.

Violence broke out, and, despite the claims of Mr. Trump that there was blame on all sides; the white nationalists instigated that violence.

A 20-year old man drove his car into a crowd of peaceful counter protestors, injuring 17 people, killing Heather Heyer, who was only 32 years old.

My heart breaks. I struggle with understanding. I struggle with holding these two events occurring so closely in time with one another, each seeming to take a sense of pride in such opposite directions.

• LGBTQ Pride seeking inclusive community, while a white nationalist movement glorifies exclusion, along with religious, racial, gender and sexual identity tribalism.
• A celebration of something worthwhile gained through a hard fought movement for justice versus outrage over the perception privilege lost because of the human rights gains of others.
• Solidarity and equality juxtaposed with authoritarianism and hierarchy.
• And the list could go on.

I think it is important to note that this rise in authoritarianism and race-based nationalism is happening not just here but throughout the world. So, I it is an existential threat to humanity and our world.

Certainly, it is a threat to those of us who are among its targets. So, I am feeling a need for the sense of love, acceptance and belonging inherit in our upcoming LGBTQ Pride week. I am feeling grateful for my Unitarian Universalist faith and this church that I so proudly serve.

Our faith was likely the first to perform a same sex union in the late 1950s! We were among the first denominations to ordain gay ministers. Though we were much slower to ordain transgender ministers, we were still one of the first faiths to do so historically. Unitarian Universalists have long been amongst the most vocal supporters of LGBTQ rights and marriage equality.

This church has been an LGBTQ welcoming congregation for several decades now, as are 95% of our congregations with at least 150 members. The Welcoming Congregations Program is a Unitarian Universalist curricula that helps our churches learn how to be welcoming and inclusive places for people who identify as LGBTQ.

If you have never experienced what it feels like to be excluded from your family or a community simply because of who you are, it is hard to describe what it feels like to find a community where you are welcomed and included. After feeling rejected by and never really a part of the religion of my childhood, when Wayne and I first found First UU Church of Austin, the only way I can describe what it felt like to me is that it felt like coming home, only to a religious home that I had never had before.

In fact, Wayne and I used to joke that being gay at this church almost seemed to be an advantage. People would be like, “Oh, you’re gay. That’s great! Wanna be on the board of trustees?”

I think that one of the ways that we do the work of ridding ourselves of the prejudices and sense of supremacy we have all been taught in one way or another, is to do the spiritual work of expanding who it is we are able love and love with equality, like the Welcoming Congregations program has helped so many Unitarian Universalists to do.

And that brings me back to the folks in the white supremacist nationalist movement.

I do not think that responding in kind to the violence, hate and intolerance will help us understand or much less have any chance of persuading anyone. Nor do I think it will help us resist this harmful ideology.

In fact, I think we likely need the opposite. We need that sense of love and compassion I was just discussing. As Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. put it, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

Earlier this week, the founder and editor of a conservative political journal who had been an avid Trump supporter, wrote an editorial in the New York Times in which he stated that given the events of the past several months, he now greatly regrets that support.

I was disappointed to read the comments by progressives on the editorial, in which many of them lambasted him and attacked him personally. What makes us attack even those who seem to be transforming their worldview in a way that we might be better off supporting?

At a recent public forum here at the church, Bruce Naylor, one of our congregation members put forward a concept he called the “Warrior Brain” that has helped me make sense of what we have been witnessing, as well as our own temptations to respond in kind sometimes.

Bruce theorizes that warfare had, at least at one time, as we moved from hunter gatherer, nomadic, tribal groups into agricultural city states, an evolutionary advantage, because at least for some groups, it eliminated the competition. Warfare then shaped our brains and was passed on through successive generations.

Bruce says that our warrior brains drive us toward an “us versus them” ideology. It focuses us on winners versus losers and loyalty versus traitors. Our warrior brain offers us no empathy for the enemy. In fact it dehumanizes our perceived enemies. It uses deception as a tactic. It fills us with anger. It pushes us toward tribalism. It makes us most comfortable when there is an authoritarian leader and a hierarchal organization of society.

Sounding familiar?

Recently, though, I had lunch with Bruce and another of our terrific church members, Peter Roll, and we theorized that we likely would also have inherited what we are calling our “Aquarius brain”.

Remember that old song, “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius”. Sure wish that would happen just any time now.

As the development of agriculture allowed humans to evolve into larger and larger city-states and then nations, we would have seen a survival advantage from cooperation and greater inclusion, as well as greater and greater specialization.

The Aquarius brain that would have been shaped by this would move us toward empathy, reason, compassion and inclusion. It would lead us to value difference rather than fear it. It would move us toward favoring more democratic organization of social groups and influence us toward loving with equality. This is sounding much like that juxtaposition I was struggling with earlier, isn’t it?

Now, these are very broad descriptions of the Warrior and Aquarius Brains concepts. If you want to learn more, look for the Science and Religion First Sunday Seminars that will begin this October.

I think these concepts can be very helpful as a framework for understanding, at least in part, what we’re witnessing in our country and our world. We all inherited both a warrior brain and an Aquarius brain. Some of us likely have a biological predisposition toward one or the other, and our cultural environment likely drives us toward more often engaging one or the other. But it’s not just the white nationalists that can fall into warrior brain mode. We do too.

Here is why I think we have to know this.

The stakes are high very right now. I don’t assume to know what candid Trump really meant by “make America great again”, but I do know what his white supremacist nationalist followers mean, because they have told us.

It means going back to a time when women were to be barefoot and pregnant. It means going back to a time when anyone without Lilly white skin was to remain subservient or risk there very lives – a time we unfortunately have never really entirely left behind.

It means going backwards so that Jews and Muslims become fair game to be scorned, degraded and attacked.

It means going back to a time when those of us with non-conforming sexual and/or gender identities were to remain hidden deep within our metaphorical closets at risk for our very lives.

Those are the stakes, and I think that if we engage our warrior brains now and respond with hate toward the hate, violence toward the violence, then the opposing ideology will have already won, because we will have already given in to it.

We must instead proclaim our ideology of love, inclusion and equality at every opportunity we can show up to do so.

So when we go to Pride events this coming week, we are not only celebrating. We are also uplifting and singing out a clear message.

We will not go back.

We will not go back.

We. Will. Not. Go. Back.

My friends, I will not go back. In my lifetime, I have tasted something greater than when it started, and I will not give up the greater equality and the opportunity to be legally wed with the person who is the love of my life.

And the only way I know to resist going back is to demonstrate more love in my world. To contrast and juxtapose that love with the opposite of it that is being expressed so frighteningly these days.

I must find ways to shut down my warrior brain and, as Dr. King said, drive out hate with love.

I must find a way to love even that young man that drove his car into a crowd of peaceful protestors, though still loudly condemning what he did and opposing the ideology that compelled him to do it with every fiber of my being.

I know this will not be easy. Empathy comes hard in situations like this. I try to imagine what misery lies behind such actions. I know it is not possible to live a life that is happy and full with a heart filled with such malice, and perhaps that is a seed from which some amount of empathy might grow.

I’m fear that if we give up on even one human being, we give up on all of humanity.

So, we must find a way to go on loving even when it is difficult, because it may be our best way to resist the existential threat of rising global authoritarianism and racial-ethnic supremacy.

We must find a way to go on loving for ourselves and those who are dearest to us, because the alternative is an entire society and perhaps an entire world constantly locked in warrior brain.

The Buddha said, “In this world, hate has never yet dispelled hate. Only love dispels hate. This is the law, ancient and inexhaustible.

So, during LGBTQ Pride this coming week, may we love with a great fierceness. May we put that love into action, building and expanding communities of love, acceptance and belonging in all of the days that follow.

Amen.

Benediction

Now, as you go out into our world, carry with you the love and sense of community we share in this sacred place.

Carry with you a mind open to continuous revelation, a heart strong enough to break wide open and a peace that passes all understanding.

May the congregation say, “Amen”, and “blessed be”.

Go with love.

Podcasts of sermons are available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
July 9, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

We all at some point will be unable to care for ourselves, or will need the help of other people in some way. Why do we struggle so much to ask for help when we need it?

Singer, songwriter and performance artist Amanda Palmer, writes “So, a plea. To the artists, creators, scientists, nonprofit-runners, librarians, strange-thinkers, start-uppers, and inventors, to all people everywhere who are afraid to accept help, in whatever form it’ s appearing: Please, take the donuts. To the guy in my opening band who was too ashamed to go out into the crowd and accept money for his band: Take the donuts. To the girl who spent her twenties as a street performer and stripper living on less than $ 700 a month, who went on to marry a best-selling author whom she loves, unquestioningly, but even that massive love can’ t break her unwillingness to accept his financial help, please… Everybody. Please. Just take the…” expletive deleted… “donuts!” That’ s from Palmer’ s book, “The Art of Asking or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help.“

Palmer derives “take the donuts” as a metaphor for being willing to ask for and accept help from a tale she tells about someone we Unitarian Universalists claim as one of our own, Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau was among our transcendentalist ancestors, whose ideas still influence our Unitarian Universalist religious worldview today and, more generally, still influence the whole of American culture.

Thoreau is perhaps most remembered for his book, Walden, which chronicled his thoughts and experiences living mainly alone for almost three years in a 10 by 15 foot cabin in the woods next to Walden Pond.

What is less often discussed, as Amanda Palmer points out, is that Thoreau’ s cabin sat on land owned by his friend and fellow transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose home in Concord was less than a two mile walk from the cabin. What’ s more, Emerson had Thoreau over for dinner quiet often during his time roughing it by the pond.

Also, Thoreau’ s mother and sister brought him a basket of baked goods every Sunday, which apparently included fresh donuts.

We often attribute our hyper-individualism and extreme self-reliance to the transcendentalists, but it seems that these may not have encompassed the entirety of their thinking and way of living. Thoreau wasn’ t foolish – he took the donuts when they were offered.

Part of Palmer’ s point is that this misconstrual has led to a culture in which we can easily over value individual independence, strength and control. We can find it very, very difficult to ask for help, even when we very much need it. We will not let ourselves take the donuts, even when they are freely offered, because we view accepting help as a sign of weakness.

And this can be reflected both in us as individuals and in our larger communities and our larger society. Even our Unitarian Universalist churches have struggled sometimes with a go it alone perspective, not always fully actualizing how we could help and learn from one another. I am pleased to report that there is much work being done at the local, regional and national levels on how we can become better connected amongst our churches and other institutions. As a country, the U.S. has often taken a go it alone or even domineering posture. The U.S. spends more on military and defense than the next eight countries in our world combined, even though we live in a time when military strength alone will not solve problems like terrorism and global climate change. We need the help of others to solve many of our current problems.

At the same time, we do not provide adequate support and care for the poor, our children, people with disabilities and chronic disease and the elderly. If we view asking for help as a sign of weakness, it is far too easy for a society to begin to view needing help as a sign of some character flaw and thus being unworthy of our support.

A society’ s values and ethics, I think, can be evaluated based upon how well it takes care of its young, its sick and disabled and its elderly. By that measure, I’ m afraid ours is in danger of a great moral failure if we do not change course soon.

The thing is, we will all face many of these challenges in our lives. We may face economic challenges at some point. We will all get sick from time to time. All of us will age. Even if we may not currently face physical or mental challenges, still, we are only temporarily abled. In fact, the only way we can avoid an eventual deterioration of our physical abilities is if we manage to somehow get ourselves dead first. We will all need the help of other people at various points in our lives.

On top of that, there are many other life situations wherein, even if we are capable of making decisions and acting on our own, we can still benefit from asking for help. By doing so, we can improve our lives and the lives of others. Complete self-reliance is an impossibility. Human beings need and always have needed one another to survive as a species and to live as fully and as best we can as individuals.

In her book, “Mayday: Asking for Help in Times of Need”, M. Nora Klaver, a renowned business and organizational coach, argues that asking for help can actually lead to making better decisions, generating more creative possibility, improving our emotional well being and forming deeper relationships. Klaver says that not only do we often fail to ask for help when we need it, we also are usually terribly bad at it when we do ask for help. We fidget and fumble our words and cast our eyes downward.

She offers several reasons why we dislike and are so bad at asking for help, but the greatest among them is simply fear. She describes three forms of fear that are rooted in lies that we tell ourselves.

1.) Fear of surrendering control. We’ re afraid that, if we ask for and accept help, we will give up our independence and our control over our own lives. In reality, though, we have far less control than we think we do in the first place. Sometimes surrendering into the present moment, the current situation, the flow of our lives leads to some of our greatest spiritual experiences. Likewise, allowing someone else to help us when we are in need can be a gift of graciousness to them.

2.) Fear of separation. We fear that if we ask for help, those from whom we seek that help or others who witness our asking for it may reject us. This is based in a primal human fear – the lie that we are always, ultimately alone in this world, when in fact, we are greatly interconnected.

3.) Fear of experiencing shame. We fear that if we ask for help, we will reveal our inabilities, flaws and shortcomings and be judged unworthy. We tell ourselves a lie about how we must be perfect in order to deserve human worth and dignity.

Klaver tells a story about a woman she calls, “Gina” to illustrate all of this. Gina was a young mother. Her husband had lost his job and was out of work for an extended period. Gina found herself supporting her family not just financially, but emotionally as well. She had been promoted to a position of high responsibility in her work life, so she had people relying on her both at home and at work. However, to meet their needs, she had been neglecting herself. She gained weight, started smoking and ignored the growing depression she was experiencing.

When Klaver first met Gina, she was on the verge of breaking down, but terrified to ask for help.

She was scared of failing at her job – that if she took any time off to deal with her own needs she would be letting down those who reported to her (fear of surrendering control). She felt as if she had to be perfect – a boss, wife and mother without flaws (fear of shame). In fact, she worried constantly that she might actually lose her job (fear of separation).

Wiping tears from her eyes she had sobbed, “No one can help me! I just have to deal with this situation on my own.”

It took a lot of convincing, but Gina finally agreed to direct some of the concern and compassion she had been showering on others toward herself. She sought help. She called the Employee Assistance Program at her work and got their help finding counseling for her depression. She asked her boss for time off to attend to her own needs. She got her mother to help watch her young son for a few days so that she could spend some time in a rural cottage to get some rest. She asked her husband to understand that she needed this time to herself and that she needed him to take care of things while she was gone.

And every single one of them gave her the help she needed.

Three months later, Gina’ s life was going significantly better. She and her husband had grown much closer. She no longer worked overtime every week, and in fact had become very protective of her family and alone time. Her energy returned. She lost weight. She quit smoking.

To bring about this change and allow herself to reach out, Klaver says that Gina had to embrace three virtues –

• compassion, particularly for herself,
• faith that if she asked for help at least some of the change for which she hoped would happen
• and finally, gratitude for all she already had and for the help received from others so that those relationships could grow even stronger.
• Asking for help had transformed her life in ways that going it alone never could have.

Compassion. Faith. Gratitude. Transformation.

Those sound like spiritual terms to me.

And it makes me believe that developing our willingness and capacity to ask for help when we need it is a spiritual endeavor.

Like many of our spiritual quests though, it takes intentional practice. We do not automatically get better at it.

Especially with asking for help, we need the practice, because most of us have never been taught how to go about asking for help. We have few if any models, stories or mythologies to follow.

For example, how many of you are familiar with the New Testament story about the Good Samaritan? (No, really, raise a hand if you are.)

Now, how many of you know the biblical story of Jairus?

How about the Canaanite woman?

Less of us are familiar with the latter two.

The Good Samaritan story is about offering help. The other two are about people who asked for help.

It is telling that the religious tale about offering help is in our psyches much more strongly than the stories about asking for help. Perhaps we need to tell and uphold those other stories more often.

In this religious community, we could do that, and we also could create new stories and practices affirming that developing our individuality and accepting communal support are not opposite ends of a duality – that we can help each other become our most whole selves and to be as self reliant as is healthy and possible given whatever our circumstances might be.

Church it seems to me is a great place within which we could create a loving environment, a beloved community that encourages and supports asking for help – a place where we can all help each other learn how to take the … expletive deleted … donuts.

Here is the process M. Nora Klaver suggest we practice regarding asking for help.

Before making a request for help, get clear on what the real need is. Make sure what would actually be helpful. Then, if the timing is not urgent, take a break first and engage in something that helps you find a greater sense of calmness. Then, set up a time to ask in person if at all possible. During the request, take a leap of faith that new paths will open up no matter what the response to the request, and then word the ask as simply as possible.

After the request, be grateful, listen intently and then express your gratitude no matter what the response. You will have something for which to be grateful. No matter what, you will learn more about your relationships, as well as the situations your friends and loved ones might be in themselves. Sometimes people want to help but cannot because they do not have the capability or are facing some big challenge themselves at the time. At the very worst, you might discover that a relationship is not what you thought it was or is in need of repair.

Most of the time though, people will want to help.

No matter what happens, new opportunities will appear to you, and you will have grown in compassion, gratitude and faith.

Asking each other for help requires that we have the courage to be vulnerable – to risk real human connection.

May the members of this church practice this together.

May this be a community of love and support that nurtures both asking for and offering help to one another.

May we walk in the ways of love together, giving and receiving of one another’ s unique gifts and abilities.

The song says, “I get by with a little help from my friends.”

May we go even further.

May we proclaim together, “We’ re going to thrive with a little help from our friends, our families and this, our beloved religious community”.

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
July 2, 2017
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Many, if not most of the world’s religions have a sect that is mystical. We will examine why religious experience is so often to be found through mystery, awe and wonder.

What if I told you that there might be a relatively simple way you can become a more compassionate, ethical person, increase your life satisfaction, slow down you perception of time and improve your health?

Now, what if I told you that to gain these benefits all you need to do is have more experiences of mystery, awe and wonder, brought on at least in part by a sense of your own relative insignificance given the enormity of our universe and the vastness of time.

The good news is, paradoxically, the experience often also involves a mysterious, ineffable sense of expansion – of connection to, even oneness with all that is, ever has been and ever will be. Within these experiences, there is also a sense of non-duality – that the ultimate reality is non-linear and much more complex than can be expressed through either/or thinking.

Broadly defined, these are sometimes called mystical experiences, and mysticism, a belief that this type of experience is necessary for faith, can be found within all of the major world religions. Mystic sects have developed within each of them that have created various practices, some monastic and some communal, intended to bring about these types of experiences.

Within the monotheistic religions, mystics believe that one can only know the ultimate reality of God through this mysterious, awe-inducing direct experience of the divine. And this is because God is so large and so great – so beyond our usual comprehension. God is beyond what words or concepts can capture, and so this ineffable and fleeting experience of oneness with God is necessary.

For instance, many Hindus have concepts called the Atman, the individual soul of the self and the Brahman, the cosmic soul. The merging of the Atman into the Brahman, is necessary for human beings to end a continuous cycle of suffering and rebirth. Paradoxically though, the Atman has always been the Brahman.

The Abrahamic religions – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – all also contain mystic sects. For example, the Muslim Sufis engage in practices and a way of life intended to bring about experiences of the divine -experiences of awe and wonder over a sense of both insignificance in the face of the divine and at the same time oneness with the divine. Again, we find a sense of paradox and non-duality.

Notably, mysticism does not require a belief in a deity at all. In Taoism there is a mystical sense that one must flow into the Tao, which is literally translated “the way” and is more a process, pattern and underlying substance of all that exists that cannot be grasped as an intellectual concept. It must be lived and experienced.

The Buddhists have a concept of “no-self” or release of self that must be experienced in order know Dharma, the ultimate reality that involves constant change and paradox. Even the very concept of “no-self” is non-dualistic. It is like the flame in our chalice, which visibly exists to our eyes. Yet, it is actually being burnt away and begun anew in each instant and therefor, also does not exist.

And, one can certainly find mysticism within Unitarian Universalism. The transcendentalists of the 19th century developed at least in part in reaction against what they viewed as the overly staid, overly intellectual Unitarians of the time. They argued that an experience of the over soul, a kind of oneness between God, man and nature was necessary for spiritual development, and they often found and experience of wonder and awe through nature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, perhaps the most well known of them all, wrote of an experience he had in a forest, “Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes, I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”

Likewise, Universalism also has long had elements of mysticism within it. Later, after the merger of the Unitarians and the Universalists, many folks with a spiritual grounding in the earth-centered faiths came into Unitarian Universalism, and also brought experiential practices into our religion.

Today, even many Unitarian Universalists (or UUs for short) who ascribe to non-theistic (or at least firmly undecided) humanism and/or naturalism, nevertheless also consider themselves mystics. We even have a national UU Mystics in Community group with a website, newsletter and Facebook page.

Rather than experiences of a diety, these UUs describe having had experiences of an ultimate reality or a oneness with all of humanity and with all of existence. Often these are brought about through encountering the wonders of nature, contemplating the mysteries of our universe, or engaging in ritual practices such as meditation.

Even loss, sorrow and facing the mysteries of death can sometimes lead to mystical experiences. Here is a story from someone who found themself in just that situation.

“It was a few weeks after my mom died. I was lying in my bed the evening after her memorial service. I was experiencing this strange mixture of grief and gratitude all at once – gratitude that she was no longer suffering – gratitude that I had been able to be with her until the last. I had been able to look into her eyes and tell her how much I loved her and how grateful I was for all she has done for me. I held her hand and sat with her even after she had fallen silent and her eyes had gone dim. I was there at the sacred moment when she exhaled her last breath.

At the same time, I was feeling overwhelming sadness and grief over losing her. I had this sense of unreality. How could it be that I would never see her again, never get to hug her again or tell her that I love her? And there was this feeling of being unmoored. With my mom now gone, I felt unanchored in my world, adrift and floating without direction.

And as I drifted between fitful sleeping and then waking up, being washed over by great waves of sadness and sorrow and contemplating the mysteries of life and death and my own mortality, I suddenly had this experience of spreading out, dissolving into all that was around me.

It’s hard to describe, but it was as if I was in the leaves of the trees in my yard and in the roots of the plants in my garden. I flew in the birds, swam within the creatures of the sea, moved within my fellow human beings and the myriad creatures of our earth. So too, was I in the rocks and stones, in the wind and rain, ever expanding, ever dissolving, ever no more and yet ever everywhere.

I would swear it was not a dream. It didn’t feel like a dream. It seemed more real than a dream, somehow more real even than day-to-day reality.

And then it stopped.

I was in my room again. Me again.

And yet, I felt a greater sense of peace, a greater acceptance. The grief and sorrow were not gone, but somehow the unreality was no longer so present. The feelings I was having seemed more right, more necessary.

And then, I have no idea why, but into my head popped the one about how the Dali Lama orders pizza.

He just calls up and says, “Make me one with everything.”

And that terrible joke sent me into a burst of giggles. I realized that I could not remember the last time I had laughed or felt joy.

And suddenly I knew that I would eventually find my bearings, get anchored in my world again. I would miss her profoundly the rest of my days and yet the love I knew for her would go on, carried within an all-encompassing love that is enduring and may well even be eternal.

So somehow, delving into mystery, allowing ourselves to be drawn into that sense of awe and wonder, letting mystical experience happen if it comes seems to be helpful to us. As I mentioned earlier, scientific research is beginning to discover it can be beneficial to us, whether we associate such experiences with a divinity or not.

I don’t know why this might be true. It’s a mystery.

I think maybe it is a result of, a response to the situation in which we find ourselves. Perhaps, it is a shift in perspective that brings us both humbleness and a sense of expansiveness and possibility.

David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Stanford, illustrates this perspective shift through describing what happened some years ago when NASA conducted the Ultra Deep Field Experiment. In the experiment, NASA repeatedly pointed the Hubble telescope at a tiny point of our sky that appeared to be completely dark – so tiny that it would be equivalent to our perspective of looking at the tip of a pencil held at arms length. Using technology I do not completely understand, they hoped to capture any light photons that might have emanated from that tiny patch of space that would not be visible to our naked eye but that could be detected through the Hubble lens and this technology. They thought they might discover a few stars previously unknown to them.

Instead, they discovered thousands of galaxies – trillions of stars like our own in just that tiny patch of dark sky. And because the light from those galaxies had traveled such a great distance to reach the lens of the Hubble telescope, it had taken a long, long time for it to cross that distance, even at the speed of light. Those thousands of galaxies, those trillions of stars in that tiny patch of our sky had existed billions upon billions of years ago.

Now, place ourselves and our lifespan within the immensity, the enormity of the size of our universe and the vastness of that kind of time period. It’s humbling and yet awe inducing. For Eagleman, the enormity of the mysteries that surround us, the vastness of what we don’t know, far from being frustrating, is full of wonder, creative potential and almost infinite possibilities for new discoveries. In fact, he calls himself a possibilian and rejects both fundamentalist, literal interpretations of the world’s religions but also rejects the absolute certainty expressed by some of the neo-atheists. He quotes Voltaire who said, “Doubt is an uncomfortable position. Certainty is an absurd one.”

Over the past 400 years, science and mathematics have brought us wondrous discoveries about how our world and universe work. It has created amazing advances in technology. It has even expanded the average human lifespan. And yet, all that we still do not know in this incomprehensibly vast universe means that ours is still a very, very small island of knowledge floating in an almost infinite sea of mystery.

If we think of our current knowledge as that island surrounded by an immense sea of what we do not know, that means that even as we learn more, as our island of knowledge grows, the circumference, the perimeter of where our knowledge bumps up against that sea of the unknown also expands. We generate even more questions and more potential discoveries to explore.

That sea of the unknown includes that which we cannot yet explore scientifically because our scientific toolkit does not yet have the ability to observe and measure it. It is the yet to be discovered territory, the possibilities wherein our island of knowledge will continue to grow, continue to take us into new understandings and new possibilities.

And the unknown also includes the meaning making and experiences of beauty we create for ourselves over and over again, generation after generation, as we learn more and create new metaphorical understandings – the art and poetry and theatre and dance and literature and storytelling and music we have yet to imagine.

The unknown includes how we are interconnected with the web of all existence in ways that we do not yet fully understand.

Given this perspective, how can we not be mystics? How can we not look out over that vast sea of mystery and be filled with awe and wonder?

Perhaps our human capacity for mystical experience is there to give us glimpses into that almost infinite sea of mysteriousness that surrounds us – to help us gain that shift in perspective – to fill us with a sense of humility, expansiveness and interconnectedness all at once.

My friends, we call ourselves a people of faith. The very word faith implies an acceptance that there is much we do not know, that revelation is not sealed but rather is continuously unfolding.

Given that, shall we embrace the unknown, praise uncertainty, celebrate nearly endless possibility?

What if we did that?

What if we dive into the sea of mysteriousness and swim in its vast waters, at least from time to time?

Might it be where the divine is yet to be discovered?

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.