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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
July 7, 2026
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Join us for the first in a sermon series exploring the spiritual significance of the ways (called “ends”) through which we as a church have committed to living our mission. This Sunday, we will contemplate the first of our four ends: We are a collaborative, pluralistic church living our values and mission in the greater world, achieving together what we can’t do alone.
Welcome
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 we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.
Call to Worship
“When people think the same idea and move in the same direction, that’s a cult. When people think many different ideas and move in one direction, that’s a movement.”
– Loretta Ross
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Anthem
“Lean On Me” (Bill Withers) – Noah Reinhuber, voice; Valeria Diaz, piano; Angel Roman, bass; Brent Baldwin, drums
Reading
When Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, almost everything lost its footing. Houses were detached from their foundations, trees and shrubbery were uprooted, sign posts and vehicles floated down the rivers that became of the streets. But amidst the whipping winds and surging water, the oak tree held its ground. How? Instead of digging its roots deep and solitary into the earth, the oak tree grows its roots wide and interlocks with other oak trees in the surrounding area. And you can’t bring down a hundred oak trees bound beneath the soil! How do we survive the unnatural disasters of climate change, environmental injustice, over-policing, mass-imprisonment, militarization, economic inequality, corporate globalization, and displacement? We must connect in the underground, my people! In this way, we shall survive.
– Naima Penniman
Centering
Sermon
PERSPECTIVE, POWER, PURPOSE – HOW SOLIDARITY MAY SAVE US
Rev. Chris Jimmerson
In 1968, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. went to Memphis Tennessee to bring the movement he led for civil and voting rights into solidarity with the labor movement and their Memphis Sanitation Worker’s Strike.
Two sanitation workers had been crushed to death in the back of a garbage truck, igniting awareness of the dangerous conditions, injustices, and low wages suffered by such workers in Memphis.
King had come to believe that civil rights and labor rights were intertwined – that racial justice and economic justice required one other – that faith communities, unions, students, local organizations and more could achieve greater justice working together.
On April 4, 1968, Dr. King was assassinated while in Memphis supporting the strike. Only a few days later, the sanitation workers won most of their demands.
The night before, King had delivered his well known “I’ve Been to the Mountain Top” speech. Here is some of what he said.
I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he has allowed me to go up to the mountain and look over and I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land.
He was 39 years old.
Of course, many have since speculated that he had a premonition of the eminent threat to his very life, and yet went to Memphis to build solidarity anyway, because he saw solidarity across disparate groups as the only route to the promised land.
In fact, toward the later years of his life, King had come to view various movements and groups as interrelated and necessary to each other. These included various faith groups, labor, peace movements, student groups, economic justice and poor people’s groups, human rights movements worldwide, various ethnic and racial justice movements and more.
He held the firm conviction that coming together across our differences to work for justice can provide us all with both moral-spiritual clarity and strategic power.
This morning, I am beginning a sermon series on the ends statements the religious community here at the church recently articulated for living out that mission that we say together every Sunday.
You can think of ends as the ways in which we will prioritize going about living that mission and how we will know we are making progress toward it.
The first of those four ends that will be exploring today is stated as follows and on our screens:
“We are a collaborative pluralistic church living our values and mission in the greater world, achieving together what we can’t do alone.”
I was thrilled that the congregation expressed this end.
I begin with the story of Dr. King, his trip to Memphis for the sanitation strike, and his ever broadening view of disparate people and movements coming together in coalitions of solidarity as our best hope for reaching the promised land as a people – I begin with that story because it feels to me like this ends statement that you all created contains certain echoes of what Dr. King was teaching us.
The idea that strength and spiritual clarity are to be found through embracing our differences is the essence of being pluralistic.
Building coalitions of solidarity requires being collaborative and the recognition of our interdependence – the apprehension that none of us can reach the promised land alone.
Now, for this sermon series, I do want to focus on these larger ideas about why our ends matter – their ethical, faith, historical, and spiritual significance.
I won’t be going into as much detail on the exact programs and activities. we may engage in towards the ends. We will begin working on that together over the next several months.
I do want to note, however, that this end involves the ways in which we can build relationships and work with other faith and secular organizations who are also dedicated to to creating love and justice and building the Beloved Community.
And we are already doing so much of this from showing up in solidarity with other groups at rallies, marches, and other social and environmental justice events, to providing financial and other support, to hosting other groups in our church building, to working within larger coalitions, such as the Texas UU Justice Ministry, Austin Sanctuary Network, Texas Freedom Network and several others.
We are already working with over 40 other groups. Our priority for this end in the coming months then will be to deepen, broaden, and expand such relationships of solidarity and mutuality.
So, now, though, why do we even want to do this? Why does it matter? How does it move us toward fulfilling our mission as a religious community?
Well, I’d like to propose that this end, this coalition building, this working together with others in solidarity, this moves us toward fulfilling our mission and living our faith in three vital ways.
Perspective.
Power.
And Purpose.
The three “Ps”
PERSPECTIVE – Working together with folks with different perspectives, different priorities, different life experiences than our own, and, in fact, embracing and valuing those differences can provide all of us who dare to forge such relationships a much broader and deeper understanding of reality.
Yesterday was Independence Day, the Fourth of July, and I am reminded of a powerful quote by Frederick Douglas from his “What to the American slave is your 4th of July?” speech in 1892 that illustrates this. He said:
“I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine.”
All these years later, all these years later, we must still listen to and be in relationship with the many folks for whom the rights expressed in the Declaration of Independence are still, STILL regularly denied.
If we are not in such relationships we cannot have an accurate perspective on the reality of these United States today!
Now, I also want to share some examples of how this collaborating across differing life experiences and justice issues can expand our perspective in very practical, strategic ways too.
In 1987, nearly 20 years after MLK went to Memphis in Solidarity with the labor movement, AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power or ACTUP, was formed to combat the unfathomably, immoral lack of response to the AIDS epidemic in the US. Among their ranks were veterans of the black civil rights movement, and ACTUP drew upon and adapted the lessons they had learned in devising its direct actions, tactics and strategies, coalition building, leadership by those most affected, and decentralized, collective leadership.
Then, in 2013, this sharing of perspectives among movements for justice so akin to one another, circled around again, when Black Lives Matters was formed in response to the brutality against and horrific murder of Black people by law-enforcement.
Queer black veterans of the ACTUP movement brought with them what they had learned, and Black Lives Matters adopted and updated some of what ACTUP had done using flyers and faxes to the age of social media.
So, working in solidarity can help us all both broaden our larger perspective, as well as learn effective movement strategies and techniques from one another.
I love how activist and author adrienne marie brown encapsulates this when she writes,
“Meaningful collaboration both relies on and deepens relationship-the stronger the bond between the people or groups in collaboration, the more possibility you can hold… notice who you feel drawn to… And notice who challenges you, who makes the edges of your ideas grow or fortify. I find that my best work has happened during my most challenging collaborations, because there are actual differences that are converging and creating more space, ways forward that serve more than one worldview.”
Perhaps our perspective needs to shift from Independence Day to Interdependence day.
And this brings us to our second P – POWER. Simply put all of us together have far more power than any of us do alone.
Working with others, not only are our sheer numbers greater, but together, we also have more and more varied resources, more skills, more talents, more access to and ways of dismantling the halls of power.
And solidarity is power with not power over, and power with is the greatest power there is because it is the power of fierce love in action!
Relationships of solidarity are grounded in love and sharing our vulnerabilities with one another, because we know – we know that none of us can do this alone. None of us will make it alone.
It is the power that allows any one of us to lay down the mantle for a moment when our spirit is drained, knowing that others will carry it for a while without me.
It is the power that also brings us back though, so that I can pick the mantle up for you when you need the same.
As our song said earlier, “lean on me”. We must all learn the power of allowing ourselves to lean on one another.
Well, finally, a collaborative pluralistic Church becomes part of a much greater PURPOSE – our third P.
As a religious community, our specific purpose at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin is our mission.
And the other faith and secular groups with whom we partner also have their own purpose that moves in the same direction as ours, but is not exactly the same as ours.
And the glorious thing is, that, though we sometimes face challenges keeping these differing purposes going in that same direction, when we successfully combine them, we all become part of a much greater purpose that none of us alone could ever hope to accomplish or even really envision.
The theists among us might call this God’s great purpose, which none of us can know alone, but that by combining our purposes together we come so much closer to realizing.
The non-theists, more naturalistic or humanist among us may instead see this as our great collective, unrealized, evolutionary potential.
Either way, most of us have not yet been to the mountain top, and so we need one another to get there.
Alone, our great purpose is limited.
Together, it is almost limitless.
“We are a collaborative pluralistic church living our values and mission in the greater world, achieving together what we can’t do alone.”
Another way to think of our ends is that they express our aspirations for what we are becoming as a religious community.
I can’t think of anything more faithful, more spiritual, more part and parcel of God than becoming a collaborative pluralistic church living our values and mission in the greater world, achieving together what we can’t do alone.
Perspective. Power. Purpose.
Only through solidarity with our fellow travelers, can these fuel our journey up the mountain and to that promised land.
Praise be. Amen.
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
I offer more words from adrienne marie brown from their book, Emergent Strategy; Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
“At the human scale, in order to create a world that works for more people, for more life, we have to collaborate on the process of dreaming and visioning and implementing that world. We have to recognize that a multitude of realities have, do, and will exist… Move at the speed of trust. Focus on critical connections more than critical mass – Build the resilience by building the relationships.”
May the congregation say, “Amen”, and “Blessed be”
I love you fiercely.
Go in peace.
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