Hopeful Heretics

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
December 7. 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Transcendence and Transformation are two of our religious values at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin. We’ll explore how our experiences of transcendence can lead to personal growth and transformation, and paradoxically, how working to transform ourselves and our world can lead us into transcendence.

Chalice Lighting

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

Call to Worship

From PERSPECTIVES AND POSSIBILITIES
by Psychologist and Author Rick Bellingham

Transcendence can be described as elevating perspective, while transformation is a process of integrating new awareness back into everyday life. Practices like meditation, yoga, or spiritual experiences can lead to a feeling of connectedness to something greater which can facilitate transformation.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

THAT WHICH HOLDS ALL
by Nancy Shaffer

Because she wanted everyone to feel included in her prayer,
she said right at the beginning
several names for the Holy:
Spirit, she said, Holy One, Mystery, God

but then thinking these weren’t enough ways of addressing
that which cannot be fully addressed,
she added particularities, saying,
Spirit of Life, Spirit of Love,
Ancient Holy One,
Mystery We Will Not Ever Fully Know,
Gracious God
and also Spirit of This Earth,
God of Sarah, Gaia, Thou

and then, tongue loosened, she fell to naming superlatives as well:
Most Creative One, Greatest Source, Closest Hope-
even though superlatives for the Sacred seemed to her probably redundant, but then she couldn’t stop:
One Who Made the Stars, she said,
although she knew technically a number of those present
didn’t believe the stars had been made by anyone or thing
but just luckily happened.

One Who Is an Entire Ocean of Compassion, she said,
and no one laughed.

That Which Has Been Present Since Before the Beginning, she said,
and the room was silent.

Then, although she hadn’t imagined it this way, others began to offer names:

Peace, said one.
One My Mother Knew, said another.
Ancestor, said a third.
Wind.
Rain.
Breath, said one near the back.
Refuge.
That Which Holds All.
A child said, Water.
Someone said, Kuan Yin.
Then: Womb.
Witness.
Great Kindness.
Great Eagle.
Eternal Stillness.

And then, there wasn’t any need to say the things
she’d thought would be important to say,
and everyone sat hushed, until someone said

Amen.

Meditation

We shift now into a meditation on the experience of transcendence.

I invite you now, whether you are here in person at the church, joining us online or over public access television, to settle into as comfortable a position as you can.

Feel the ground underneath you, holding you up, supporting you.

And as you find that place of as much comfort as possible, join me in taking a few deep breaths, pausing briefly at the end of each inhale and exhale.

Now, I invite you to reflect on a time when you have experienced a connection with something larger than yourself.

An experience that moved you beyond yourself. When you felt your heart and consciousness expand.

Perhaps you experienced awe and wonder that brought you outside of your ordinary mind and beyond ordinary, everyday experience.

Maybe you had a sense of timelessness and interconnection with all of creation. Maybe even a boundless love.

An experience that moved your heart and spirit in profound ways that might be difficult to express in words – a stillness and a soaring at the same time.

Let’s take a few more breaths together as we hold in our minds and hearts such experiences.

If you haven’t been able to recall such an experience, that’s OK, please feel free to continue with deep, meditative breathing. In fact, meditating on, contemplating transcendence has been shown to actually make us more likely to experience it!

If you have brought a transcendent experience to mind, dwell for a moment in how it felt.

What does remembering it feel like in your body? Where were you? When was it?

Who else, if anyone, was there?

What happened?

What made the experience beyond the ordinary for you?

Where there ways in which you felt you were different afterward?

Now, let’s share a couple of more deep breaths.

Sermon

FIRST UU VALUES

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

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

COMPASSION – To treat ourselves and others with love

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

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

This morning, we are exploring two of our religious values here at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin, the first of which is transcendence.

We describe transcendence as “To connect with wonder and awe of the unity of life”.

Studies show that most of us have had some version of these transcendent experiences, and that they can effect us in ways that can lead to transformation, the second of our religious values we will reflect on today.

Now, over the past weeks, we have explored what I call our “C Values” that you can see on the slide here – Community, Courage, and Compassion.

So today, we’ll switch to our “T Values” – Transcendence and Transformation.

Wow. Transcendence. Transformation. We sound just like a church, don’t we?

Our experiences of transcendence are understood in a variety of ways. Some call them experiences of the holy; some use the term flow experiences, humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow called them peak experiences.

They can be brought on by spiritual practices such as prayer and meditation, communal religious practices like worship or rituals – also though, music, art, nature…psychedelic drugs and more.

Maslow described these experiences like this,

“feelings of limitless horizons opening up to the vision, the feeling of being simultaneously more powerful and also more helpless than one ever was before, the feeling of great ecstasy and wonder and awe, the loss of placing in time and space with, finally, the conviction that something extremely important and valuable had happened, so that the subject is to some extent transformed and strengthened…”

It turns out that Maslow’s description was largely correct.

Science is finding that while the exact nature and intensity of individual personal experiences of them vary, these transcendent or Peak experiences do share common characteristics:

- A sense of belonging and connectedness with others and with all of creation

- Closely related to this, a sense of both dissolution of self and a flowing or expansion outward toward a sense of unity with all that is

- Being an an infinitesimal yet intrinsic part of something much greater than one’s self

- An altering of one’s normal sense of space and time

Acceptance of paradox; a sense of finding a stillness even as one’s spirit is set in flight.

Perhaps even more importantly, our transcendent experiences have been found to often lead to an altered perspective that can give us a greater sense of purpose, self-contentment and a drive toward more prosocial, compassionate, loving behavior.

The sense of interconnectedness, unity, and being a part of something larger can become how an omnipresent, universal, fierce love finds us within these experiences,

or maybe it is the other way around – maybe our experience of transcendence is how we find our way to fierce love and then bring it back into our world.

Abrahan Maslow thought Peak experiences as he call them could lead us toward becoming our fullest, most creative self as an individual (what he called self-actualization).

He also believed though that they could move us even beyond that, toward living our lives for something greater, which he called self-transcendence.

Here is a brief summary of these terms.

(Video)

So, you may have heard of Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs. Maslow views self-actualization as the capacity to really come into your full potential, express who you were meant to be. But he also saw that as a Right of Passage that allows us to go beyond the single self into what he referred to as self-transcendence. So self-actualization is about fulfilling our potential. Self-transcendence is about furthering a cause beyond the self and maybe we sense it as this profound desire to protect the welfare of all people or to give back to our community.

So, our experiences of transcendence can transform us.

Neuroscientists have even discovered that during transcendent experiences changes occur in our brainwave patterns and our neurochemistry and that this can begin to permanently change our cognitive processing and thus our perspectives and behavior.

Transcendence creates transformation, not merely metaphorically, but physiologically – psychologically – spiritually.

Now, that raises the question though of what we mean by “transformation”.

I think in the context of religion and church, and as it relates to this sense of transcendence, we are talking about spiritual transformation.

Abraham Maslow thought Peak experiences as he called them could lead The kind of change that Maslow talked about that moves us to self-actualization, but then that leads us toward self-transcendence – toward manifesting a fierce love that does justice in our world and strives to build a better and better world.

At First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin, we define this type of transformation like this: “To pursue the growth that changes our lives and heals our world.”

Self-actualization and self-transcendence.

Spiritual transformation.

Now here’s an interesting thing, almost a paradox about spiritual transformation – while experiences of transcendence can move us toward spiritual transformation, it is also true that living out this kind of metamorphosis in our lives and our world can lift us in to a state of transcendence.

It becomes a self-reinforcing cycle – transcendent experience creates transformation begets further transcendence and so on and so on.

When I was in seminary, I did my internship in a church where I witnessed transformation catalyze transcendence like this, which then lead to the potential for further transformation.

Early in my time with them, the church discovered that their much-loved prior lead minister who had only recently left, had committed sexual misconduct within the church.

It was heartbreaking to witness how harmful and extraordinarily painful this was for a religious community.

I can’t really adequately express the pain that had been caused.

By the way, I am not breaking any confidentiality by sharing this story. Both our Unitarian Universalist Association and the church made these circumstances public.

Transparency about such misconduct is a vital part of how a church heals and helps to make such misconduct less likely to happen again.

As the church dealt with the painful aftermath of the misconduct, they brought in an outside minister who has extensively studied and written about it and helped many churches work to heal from such circumstances.

One Sunday afternoon after the worship service, we gathered in the fellowship hall with this minister they had brought in. Almost the entire church membership was there.

She had brought slides and prepared an agenda that would help educate the church about ministerial misconduct, what to expect in its wake, and next steps the church might take.

As she began the discussion though, individual church members began sharing their perceptions and feelings about what had happened.

The differences in their perspectives where sometimes stark.

Yet, the hurt and the vulnerability each of them shared was powerful.

And this minister, this “expert”, laid her plans aside, put away her agenda and let healing begin to emerge.

She transformed what had begun as an educational workshop into a healing circle.

And from that change, this sense of transcendence settled over the room, as one by one folks began sharing their truths, their pain, their love for their church and religious community that now seemed threatened.

I have rarely been so moved.

I don’t have any other way to adequately express what happened that Sunday afternoon than to say that it felt like God had entered that room.

And from that transformative change she made, a communal, transcendent experience emerged on that Sunday afternoon in the fellowship hall of the church, through which transformational healing became possible.

This is the power of living our values.

Just as that guest minister they had invited lived out our Unitarian Universalist faith values of community and covenantal relationship by setting aside her own agenda, living our values here at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin has the power to actualize our highest potential selves and to channel our self-aspirations toward building the Beloved Community.

Our values are the ground from which our purpose arises, as a church community the source of our shared mission.

Our religious values are why First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin exists – they are the reason we do church.

Transcendence. Community. Compassion. Courage. Transformation.

Transcendence is where we encounter the holy.

And out of that sacred stillness, our spirits take flight, compassion and courage arise in us, calling us to build the Beloved Community, thereby creating more holiness in our world.

Transformation is what doing so makes possible.

May this church be the center of our quest for transcendence together.

May transformation then be our work in the world.

Amen. Blessed be.

Extinguishing the Chalice

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

Benediction

FOR A NEW BEGINNING
John O’Donohue

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge…

Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;

Soon you will home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

I send you much love, Go in peace.

SERMON INDEX

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

PODCASTS

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