Remembering our Values

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
July 24, 2022
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Our church has expressed a set of five religious values. We don’t talk about them that often though. We’ll review our values and what living them in our world might look like.

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

LIVING OUR 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

Affirming Our Mission

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

Meditation Reading

The reason we roll our eyes when people start to talk about values is that everyone talks a big game but very few practive them. Living into our values means that we do more than profess our values, we practice them. We walk our talk – we are clear about what we believe and hold important, and we take care that our intentions, words, thoughts, and behaviors align with those beliefs.

– Brene Brown, Dare to Lead

Sermon

Here’s a little not so long ago church history for you. In 2010, First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin was coming out of a challenging time. Some of you were here then and will remember all of this.

Feel free to correct me after the service if I get anything wrong. At the end of 2008, the congregation had held a vote to dismiss the then senior minister. The vote was fairly close. There was controversy.

There were folks who felt very hurt. By 2010, the church was engaged in the second year of interim ministry and had also brought in additional outside assistance, which helped bring about much healing and set the church on a course toward restructuring and renewal. One of the folks the church brought in to help was Dr. Peter Steinke, who, sadly, died a couple of years ago.

Your current board of trustees is reading and discussing a book that Dr. Steinke wrote. One of the things Dr. Steinke helped the church to understand was that the congregation had no clear sense of mission at the time.

We had a mission statement, but it was from many years before and was very long and super detailed and pretty much wordsmithed into abstruseness. Additionally, it had, apparently, been added to the top of a legal document and promptly placed into a file drawer never to see the light of day again. Well, the church then brought in our friends from Unity Consulting of Unity Church Unitarian, St. Paul Minnesota, to help the congregation discern our mission.

Unity Consulting still works with our board on good planning and governance practices, even these days. Back then, one of the things they helped us to understand is that a mission with profound meaning for us had to arise our of our most deeply held religious values.

So, the first step in discovering our mission was to look within for those deepest values. The mission the church eventually identified has since been revised slightly to become our current mission.

I’ll get into the story of how that came to be next Sunday. Today though, we will spend some time on those values that we found within ourselves back in 2010, because they remain this church’s expressed religious values today. We read them together in our call to worship earlier.

Unity consulting defines values as those timeless, transcendent, foundational qualities of our religious community we will carry forward with us into our future. Dr. Brene Brown, who we heard from in our reading earlier, writes, “A value is a way of being or believing that we hold most important.”

Either way, I don’t think we talk about our values in the church enough. In fact, the last time we reviewed them during worship was back in late 2015 and early 2016. And we need to talk about them, because as both Unity consulting and Dr. Brown point out, our best decisions happen when we ask, “what do our deepest values tell us about this?”

So, how did those values statements we read together come to be? Well, funny you should ask, ’cause I’m gonna tell ya.

During the church’s process in 2010, Unity Consulting helped us facilitate an exercise they called the “Experience of the Holy”. We held sessions wherein we put folks from the congregation in pairs and asked each of them to tell the other of a time when they had experienced the holy.

Unity Consulting described such experiences like this: “I invite you to reflect on an experience of the Holy in your life – A time when you felt connected to something larger than yourself, a time when you felt your heart and mind expand.”

As a spiritual practice, try asking yourself this sometime, as the exercise of doing so turned out to be very powerful. People were often moved to tears during it. The individual stories of what prompted peoples’ experience of the holy varied widely. Some people spoke of it happening right here in the church. Some spoke of their first time holding a new born child. Other people spoke of quiet times surrounded by the beauty of nature. Some spoke of being moved into the experience through listening to music, viewing a wonderful piece of art. Still others told of experiencing the holy during the simple or the seemingly mundane – just working in their garden in the early morning sunlight.

One war veteran told of holding a dying buddy in their arms, of being the last person who would hold and comfort their friend. Well, folks were then asked to talk about what values arose for them through these stories.

There was then an iterative process by which the pairs were grouped with one another, and the values lists eventually whittled down to about three and then recorded. The board of the time then took the data on values from all of the sessions that were held in the church and found what similar themes came up repeatedly. Eventually, they presented the values statements to the congregation, which heartily affirmed them.

And here we are, still guided by those same religious values 12 years later! Good job congregation 2010! I want to spend just a few moments going over each of them a little more thoroughly.

Transcendence – to connect with wonder and awe of the unity of life.

This was the set of concepts that came up the most times by far. It also a value also shows up in our larger Unitarian Universalist faith, which names six sources from which we draw that faith. The very first of those sources is stated like this, “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.” And science has begun to verify that these experiences can, indeed, renew our spirits and connect us with a sense of compassion and belonging that does uphold life.

Community – to connect with joy, sorrow, and service with those whose lives we touch.

What a beautiful value and one that is the core of why church exists in the first place. I think we have to be careful though to avoid thinking about community in a kind of greeting card slogan way. To maintain the deep connection required to build true community, we must be willing to be vulnerable. We have to realize that we will disagree sometimes. We will make mistakes and let one another down sometimes. That’s why this church has a covenant of right relations, a set of promises we make to one another that can help us keep our community alive, connected and thriving. You can find the covenant at austinuu.org. We’ll be talking about it more in the future. In this church, we have also been fortunate, as we are now, to have a group of non-anxious leaders who can help us maintain the bonds of community as we move through times of transition.

Compassion – to treat ourselves and others with love.

Author Tim O’Brien tells of his patrol being attacked one night during the Vietnam war. In a flash of sudden bright light, he saw that one of his buddies, a friend he had known since their school days, had been hit. He ran to him, but there was nothing that could be done. He didn’t want to leave his friend’s body there, so, he picked his friend up and began carrying him toward their camp. And then he saw the North Vietnamese soldier staring straight at him, rifle raised and pointed toward him. They locked eyes.

He realized that holding his friend’s body as he was, he was vulnerable and might not be able to grab his own weapon in time. He wondered if he was about to die too. And then, the North Vietnamese soldier looked down and saw that O’Brien was holding his friend’s blood soaked body in his arms. The North Vietnamese soldier looked him in the eyes again, but there was something different in the stare. They began backing slowly away from each other, the North Vietnamese soldier’s rifle still pointed directly at O’Brien, until they disappeared to one another in the darkness of the night.

In that moment, two enemy combatants recognized their shared fragility. For one brief moment, a battle was halted through embracing shared vulnerability – shared humanity – shared interconnectedness.

These are the roots of empathy, and empathy acted upon becomes compassion.

Courage – to live lives of honesty, vulnerability, and beauty.

I love the way we define courage in this statement. I love it because living in such a way really does require courage. It requires us not to put up the barriers. Not to numb ourselves out with substances (or shopping)! Or any of the many other ways we find to NOT feel. It requires us to open ourselves and live wholeheartedly, speak our truths, pursue what is beautiful to us, even at the risk of criticism or scorn from others.

And as a church, it requires us to live out these values and our mission even when it is hard and risky – such as when we offered sanctuary to immigrants who came to live on our campus. Like when our own Peggy Morton got herself arrested for refusing to be ignored or silenced about the rights of our friends who were in immigration sanctuary at the time. That’s courage. Courage we will need again now, when we must and will speak out and take action for reproductive justice. I count myself fortunate indeed to serve as minister for a courageous congregation.

Transformation – to pursue the growth that changes our lives and heals our world.

All of the other values kind of lead to this one, don’t they? And this one is explicitly stated in our mission, when we say that together, we transform lives. And, I truly believe this church and our faith can be transformative.

It was certainly transformative for me. When I walked through those glass doors into the foyer just outside of our sanctuary here 16 years ago now – at my spouse Wayne’s insistence, because I didn’t know what Unitarian Universalism was and didn’t want to go to church – I walked through those doors having pretty much left all organized religion behind. Little did I know I would end entering the UU ministry within a few years. I found my purpose. I found my people. I found a deep rooted spirituality and a number of causes that matter deeply to me. My personal friends, all round the country, are now either Unitarian Universalists are folks who should be. And though, of course, not everyone becomes a minister, this story of transformation through our faith has happened over and over again. I hope it is happening for you.

Having a community of faith can be so helpful, because we rarely achieve transformation entirely by ourselves. Though we may go by ourselves into the wilderness for a while, the paradox is, as Dr. Brown points out, that time in the wilderness is intended to reconnect us with others and our world even more profoundly than before. So we need community to transform ourselves, and we most certainly need it to transform our world.

I’ll close by sharing Brene Brown’s steps for living into our values.

Step One, she says, is We Can’t Live into Values That We Can’t Name. That makes sense.

To live them out we have to be able to articulate them. That’s part of why we are reviewing them today. And, we will be listing our values, mission and ends in your order of service from today on. (We’ll talk more about what our ends are next week.)

Dr. Brown says that step two is taking values from BS to behavior. In other words, we have to walk our talk. It can help to think about what behaviors would be consistent with our values. So, for instance, for “courage”, that might be something like, “I will speak out when I witness racism or anti-trans behavior, even when it’s hard – even when I might get criticized or even ostracized.” For “compassion” that might look like, “I will be compassionate to myself by scheduling several times each day for rest and relaxation, a spiritual practice or just doing something I enjoy.

We’ve given you these sheets to take with you. Under each of our values on the sheet, I encourage you to take some time later to list several behaviors that would be consistent with that value.

Finally, Dr’ Brown’s step three for our living values is that we need empathy and compassion. To hold to our values in challenging times, we need empathetic folks in our lives who understand and hopefully even share those values. Folks who will both support us in living our values and hold us accountable to them. Hmmmm. Sounds like we might find that right here, in this religious community.

In addition to such empathy from others, Dr. Brown also says we need self- compassion. She urges us to treat ourselves to time for relaxation, and sleep; to eat well; exercise; find connection and belonging; make room for fun, joy and spirituality. That sounds pretty great to me! So, let us live our values, my beloveds. It is how that spark of the divine within us glows and grows. It is how our inner light shines most brightly.

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