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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
February 5, 2023
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Love is fundamental for fulfillment in our lives and central to our theology as Unitarian Universalists. Love brings us great joy, comfort and so many other wonderful feelings. And to love will mean to experience loss. Love is not just an emotion but also involves behavior in which we must engage to keep it alive. Love calls us toward our best selves and beckons us to build the Beloved Community.
Chalice Lighting
This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.
Call to Worship
Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.
– Martin Luther King Jr.
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Meditation Reading
Loving only ourselves is escapism; loving only our opponents is self-loathing; loving only others is ineffective. All three practices together make love revolutionary, and revolutionary love can only be practiced in community.
Love is more than a rush of feeling. Love is a form of sweet labor: fierce, bloody, imperfect, and life-giving – a choice we make over and over again.
– Valarie Kaur, See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love
Sermon
“Love can change a person the way a parent can change a baby-awkwardly, and often with a great deal of mess.” That’s a quote from Lemony Snicket, pseudonym for author and musician Daniel Handler.
During February, we will be exploring “The Path of Love” as our spiritual subject. I loved that quote because, to me, it captures in a humorous way how love is so much more complicated than the sentimentality often portrayed in greeting cards and made for TV movies.
Certainly, love can involve extremely feel good emotions. It can be sentimental, romantic, even joyous.
Valarie Kaur, whom we heard from in our reading earlier, describes it like this, “…that rush of oxytocin…that rush of feeling, being swept away, and it’s delicious, and it’s delirious, and it’s what we live for. It’s glorious.”
However, she goes on to say: “And it’s fleeting.” “And it’s something that happens to you, right? “
The point she goes on to make is that love is more than a feeling. To keep love alive, to express love to its utmost dimensions, to channel and amplify that great river of love that flows through our universe, we must choose love, as she says, “over, and over, and over again”. Love makes demands of us. It calls us to engage in loving actions.
It lures us toward joyfully making love the primary occupation of our lives.
My spouse Wayne and I have been together for almost 32 years now. I truly believe that part of the reason that we are still together and still in love is that we have engaged in keeping love alive. We have done the work of love.
Through all those years, even in difficult times, even when it was tough, we have both always been willing to come to the other and say, “Can we find a time to talk?”
Now. I’ll admit that sometimes when Wayne has come to me with that, what I was really feeling inside was: “Oh, OK.”
“How about three years from next Thursday?” But I always said, “yes”. And I know Wayne has also felt that way at times when I have come to him, and he has always said “yes.” And those difficult conversations have kept our love filled with vitality. Another thing we have always done is something quite simple. One of us will just go get the other one and, for example, say, “Come see this with me. The night sky is unbelievably beautiful from our front porch tonight.” That brings me to what research psychologists John and Julie Gottman have called, “Bids for emotional connection.”
Here is a short explanation of this.
SERMON VIDEO
I still need to work on that “putting away your screens” part. Similarly, researcher Dr. Sara Algoe has found that the simple act of expressing gratitude, especially if we are specific about what we appreciate, is a key aspect of living out our love for each other.
And it is important to note that these ways of doing the work of love:
- Being willing to engage in crucial conversations;
- Turning toward bids for connection;
- Expressing gratitude;
All of these can also benefit our relationships with other family members, friends, co-workers, here at the church and out in the world of forming solidarity for social justice.
Now, Valerie Kaur also says though, “Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love. Anger protects that which is loved. And when we think we have reached our limit, wonder is the act that returns us to love.”
To make love the primary occupation of our lives, we must also accept that to know the joy of love we will also suffer loss.
At memorial services, I sometimes quote Kahlil Gibran:
“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?..
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.”
And, as a spiritual task, we must also know that there are times when love will drive rage within us, especially when we witness injustice. We must allow that at times, anger is a necessary part of loving. As Audre Lorde, who described herself as “”black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” wrote, “My fear of anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also.”
But, as Kaur also says, we must know that returning to the wonder of love is how we sustain the struggle for justice. If we dwell only in love’s anger, we will cease to know the joy of love.
And all of this is KEY to our faith as Unitarian Universalists. It is at the core of our shared theology.
Though we may have many different individual beliefs, what holds us together as a religion is that we are covenantal. We make promises to one another that we will walk together in the ways of love.
Our Unitarian ancestors believed in the oneness of God, rather than God as the the trinity of the father, the son and the holy spirit. In time, for many Unitarians this became about the oneness of all of us and of all things.
Our Universalist forebearers proclaimed that God’s love is universal. That he would not condemn any of his children to eternal hell.
Because that would be child abuse and quite severely patriarchal. Over time, we have often come to broaden this as a calling to universal love for others and for all that is.
Currently, a study commission of the central organizing and support structure for our faith, the Unitarian Universalist Association (or UUA) has recommend that we, the constituent congregations and faith groups of the UUA, consider a change to the bylaws for our association.
Paula Cole Jones, co-author of the 8th principle serves on that commission. The commission is proposing a new covenant for our religious movement composed of a set of religious values that embody the essence and intent of our current principles, as well as incorporates key language from each of them. I will be offering a session to learn about and discuss this recommendation on February 19 after the worship service.
Briefly for now though, here is their graphic representation of the proposed values.
SLIDE
What is striking to me is that love once again shows up as the core of our faith – our theological anchor. Once again, love is calling us to make it the primary occupation of our lives. And that means love is also calling us to love beyond our family and our immediate circle, beyond even this religious community.
Love calls us to get outside of our daily lives and beyond these church walls. It is so easy, especially for those of who experience one or more forms of privilege, to remain in this sort of bubble of our closest loved ones and associates, who are often very much like us. We may vote in ways that support greater justice. We may say the right words and know the language of justice. Still though, when the going gets tough, many of us have the option of escaping to our bubbles. We can look the other way.
Holocaust surviver and author, Elie Wiesel, said that “the opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference.”
So, we must guard against indifference settling in just beyond our immediate awareness. It can lure us into a comfort that denies where love is calling us – to justice. As Cornell West famously said, “Justice is love showing up in public.”
So love is calling us to show up. It is calling us to speak out. Love calls us, for instance, to cry out for dismantling and re-envisioning a criminal justice system that privileges some of us with protection while damning others to terror, mass incarceration, abuse and slaughter at the hands of law enforcement.
Love calls us to rage against police beating to death Tyre Nichols as he pleaded, “I’m just trying to go home,” as he cried out for his mom. This bloodbath in the streets of modern America must end.
Love demands that we continue to demand responsible gun regulations and put a stop once and for all to the massacre of innocent people that continues to plague this country.
Love calls us to denounce the continued efforts in this state to violate the very humanity of our trans siblings.
Love beckons us as love warriors against the decimation of reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy we are witnessing through draconian anti-abortion, anti- LGBTQ laws and so much more.
Love weeps for us to act now in outrage over the practices and policies that are threatening devastation within that sacred web of all existence of which we are a part and have propelled us into a climate crisis. The very future of our children is at stake.
And my beloveds, these are only just a few examples of the ways in which love is calling us to show up in our world for justice.
Our Texas Unitarian Universalist Justice Ministry is holding a legislative action day at the state capital on March 13. May love lead as many of us as possible to be present.
So, love moves our outrage toward a sustained and ever growing struggle for justice as we reach for the dream of the Beloved Community fully realized.
Now, I want to close though by returning to some of the words from Valarie Kaur. “Anger protects that which is loved…wonder is the act that returns us to love…revolutionary love can only be practiced in community.”
Again, we need the anger that love drives in us to protect that which is loved, but we cannot exist in the anger. Always, always we must return to the wonder of love.
And we must direct that love even toward those with whom we disagree. We must find love even for those who act in ways that we may view as reprehensible, harmful and immoral. This is how we avoid becoming the same way. This is necessary to making love our primary occupation.
And we need community to hold on to the wonder that makes this possible. Spiritual community like that found here at first Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin. A spiritual community where we care for each other so that we can keep manifesting love in our world.
A couple in our church recently said something to me that I thought was very wise. Like we must love ourselves before we can fully love others, we must care for each other within this religious community so that we are able to help build Beloved Community beyond it. Rev. Jonalu and the Co-Chairs of First UU Cares will be holding a conversation on March 12 on how we may best do that.
I believe that love is calling this religious community to be a righteous voice for it in this, the heart of Texas.
May the universal river of love flow through us. May the unity of all bring us great wonder and give us unwavering strength. May we answer the call of love throughout our days together, bringing into being the Beloved Community, within which divine light radiates.
Amen.
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