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Rev. Chris Jimmerson & Chalice Camp Youth
June 8 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
We often think of freedom as an individualistic act of escaping that which limits us. And that may be a part of the whole. What if a more complete understanding of freedom involves a communal embrace of our interdependence and the choices we make in order to live love?
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
There is something in the very nature of my freedom that inclines me to love, to do good, to dedicate myself to others. I have an instinct that tells me I am less free when I am living for myself alone. The reason for this is that I cannot be completely independent. Since I am not self-sufficient, I depend on someone else for my fulfillment. My freedom is not fully free when left to itself. It becomes so when it is brought into the right relation with freedom of another.
– Thomas Merton
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Reading
I am learning that getting well in community is liberation. We are interdependent. When one of us attains freedom, it elicits/rekindles that longing in each of us. When we learn to feel, when we learn to stand with each other in feeling, when we learn to tune into the wisdom of our bodies, to love ourselves, to love each other, we are doing the unthinkable, we are creating new worlds of possibility… We must love each other and protect each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.
– adrienne marie brown
Sermon
NOTE: This is an edited ai generated transcript.
Please forgive any omissions or errors.
Rosie:
In Chalice Camp this week, we learned our camp creed and learned about a different line of it each day. It goes,
“It’s a Blessing we were born.
It matters what we do.
It matters what we do together.
What we know about God as a piece of the truth.
We don’t have to do it alone.”
I think maybe adults should be learning this creed too. A lot of people forget these things or never learn them in the first place. We all deserve the freedom to search for our truth, to know we are born worthy and to connect with the people around us. I hope maybe we can remind you.
Sol Cornell:
Thank you Rosie.
Hello. My names are Sol and Shanti. I am a small white human with short blue hair and I’m also the manager of religious education here at First UU Austin.
Over The past week, I got to plan, direct, and run our chalice camp, a week-long summer day camp for kids in kindergarten through sixth with counselors from seventh through twelfth. It focuses on introducing the beginnings of spiritual development, practicing presence and grounding, and asking some really big questions in between crafts, games, and various levels of joyful chaos.
Let me tell you, this has possibly been the most intensive, demanding and exhausting project I have ever taken on, and I am so, so glad that I did. I’ve wanted to work with kids for a long time, but I hadn’t considered working with them in this particular capacity, helping them explore spirit and meaning and self until pretty recently. And I’m finding it to be a calling that fills my soul beyond any work that I’ve done before.
There’s something sacred about the way that kids move through the world. They’re honest. They’ll tell you exactly what they think and feel. Sometimes while sitting quietly in communal reverence and sometimes while running in circles, demolishing a bag of cheez-its.
Kids ask fantastic questions, Some big and some small. I heard a broad array over the past week from, “How old is that Eye of the tiger song?” All the way up to “How is God real, but also not real?” I learned some of the most interesting facts from Googling a curiosity that someone had, and I sat with some of the deepest questions that Google simply can’t answer.
At one point, a camper asked me, “Why do you like working with kids? They’re really loud.” She’s not wrong, but I answered honestly and I said, “I think it’s the coolest thing in the world to watch you all become who you are.” Working with kids gifts me a sense of joy, curiosity, and peace.
Children are unburdened by the spiritual baggage that many of us carry and they invite us to put some of it down just for a little bit. It’s an honor to teach our newest humans about something so big and personal as spirituality. And in doing so, they teach me too.
In the midst of all the chaos, the paint and the pipe cleaners and the occasional bout of tears, I found something quietly blooming in my soul, a deep sense of freedom, the freedom that comes from having a passion instead of just a job, the freedom that comes from doing something that feels right, that fits, that brings me home to myself. I get to wake up every day and do something that truly fills my heart and soul. I never knew I could have this life.
And I want to be clear. That kind of freedom, that kind of joy, isn’t just for me. We all deserve it. You deserve it. And sure, maybe it won’t come in the form of directing a children’s camp but there’s something out there that will make your heart sing. I promise you. Seek it, find it, grab it with both hands, and pull it from the ether if you have to. Because when we do that, when we find and bring the whole of ourselves into community, we create something powerful. Not just a group or a congregation, but a living, breathing, deeply human kind of togetherness.
So thank you for being part of that. Thank you for letting me be a part of it too and for trusting me with something so important. Let’s keep chasing the things that fill us up. Let’s keep asking the big questions. And let’s remember that we’re all still growing as long as we live and that that’s a beautiful thing. As the Camp Creed tells us, “We don’t have to do it alone.”
Blessed be and amen.
Chris Jimmerson:
I think I’ll grant myself the freedom this morning to not sermonize a lot about the taco tyrant in the White House and his enablers, nor the Texas tyrants in control of our state government.
French philosopher and author Albert Camus said that,
“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
I think Camus is expressing there what I call “soul freedom,” a sense of deep internal freedom that can’t be taken from us and that we need to sustain ourselves to persevere when we must rebel against tyrants who would rob us of our societal freedom.
Indeed, this soul freedom is what allows us to flourish, to live our lives most fully and fearlessly. It is what has empowered people throughout the ages to thrive, even when forced to endure the harshest of repressive conditions, concentration camps, slavery, colonization, racism, ongoing systemic oppression.
Our children at Camp UU this past week, as you’ve heard, have been learning about our Unitarian Universalist Theological Heritage and Identity, an identity that is deeply rooted in this soul freedom from the early Unitarians that claim the freedom to reject religious dogma and to form their own personal relationship with the God of their understanding to our universalist forebearers that freed us from fearing a judgmental and punishing God centered us instead in liberatory universal and communal love now.
One of the things that we you use have discovered along the way is that there is a potential paradox in developing soul freedom a tension between individualism and communalism. Communities can sometimes stifle our personal freedom, the expression of our true selves, can’t they?
And yet, as both of our readings highlighted this morning, we are interdependent. We need one another. We need love and support to fully become who we are meant to be, to find the sense of fierce love and belonging that sets our hearts and souls free.
So we have to form communities that accept and support each of our individual whole and fully creative selves, while at the same time each of us as individuals must choose to accept constraints, obligations that actually free us to contribute toward the love relationships and communal belonging we so desire.
Here’s another seeming paradox. Soul freedom requires surrendering. Surrendering to the fact that we are only the co-authors of our life stories, that much of the plot involves events that are well beyond our control. Our freedom lies in creating the narrative about how we interpret and respond to these events, Surrendering all that isn’t really important to us so that we are left with only the needs and boundaries that really matter to us, and this again frees us to then fiercely and fearlessly immerse ourselves in love and belonging.
So what we surrender is really only that which we have been telling ourselves mattered to us that really didn’t. And so often these things are things we absorbed and internalized from misguided, repressive societal norms that subjected our true selves in the first place.
Author Virginia Woof once put it:
“The eyes of others are prisons, their thoughts, our cages.”
Here’s a part of my own personal narrative that I think might illustrate much of all of this.
When I was seven, my dad developed severe depression that required repeated hospitalizations. By the time I was 12, he had divorced my mom. And because of all this, I became a sort of child parent to my younger siblings, a sort of child co-head of household with my struggling single mom. I had to learn to give love, to help, support, nurture, parent, protect. And some of that has become a valuable part of who I am. It’s a big part of what led me to become an activist for justice, to work in social support organizations, eventually to become a minister.
What it didn’t allow me to see as a part of my story nearly as much, though, is that I also need to be nurtured, helped, supported, protected to let myself want, accept, and ask for these things to enjoy and recognize being loved. Add to that a small-town culture in which I grew up that derided males for admitting a need for things like help and protection, and the eyes of others became a prison of sorts.
Flash forward to last year when my spouse of 33 years died. I grieved the loss of me loving him. I even felt gratitude for having loved him all those years.
But somehow I was still stuck. I was having trouble moving forward. I was just going through the motions of life without the joy that it used to bring me, unable to even entertain the idea of romantic love again.
It was only after several months of reexamining that self-story I had learned as that seven-year-old with lots of counseling and lots of support from loved ones, that I realized I was stuck because I hadn’t been able to let myself grieve the love, support, nurturing, and protection he had given me.
It was only then after I began to surrender that nearly lifelong self-narrative to allow for a more full, whole self-image that accepts being loved and nurtured, that I found the freedom To open myself to new love and to life again.
My beloveds, we will all sometimes fall into the traps that life can put in front of us.
Our soul freedom comes from allowing ourselves love and belonging accepting our interdependence because that, that is what helps us to rewrite our narrative and steer our story in a new direction more of our own choosing.
And sometimes we have to allow ourselves some time, some freedom to learn, And to unlearn some of those cages, the thoughts of others and/or our own, have trapped us within. The learned habits that can be so very hard to surrender.
I leave you with a poem by singer, songwriter, actress and author, Portia Nelson that I think illustrates this last idea in a kind of fun way. It’s called:
AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN FIVE SHORT CHAPTERS.Chapter 1
I walk down the street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in. I am lost. I am hopeless. It isn’t my fault. It takes forever to find a way out.Chapter 2
I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don’t see it. I fall in again. I can’t believe I’m in the same place, but it isn’t my fault. It still takes a long time to get out.Chapter 3
I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it there. I still fall in. It’s a habit, but my eyes are open. I know where I am. It is my responsibility. I get out immediately.Chapter 4
I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it.Chapter 5
I walk down a different street.
The end.
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
Go now into daily life free, not only of that which holds you back, but also free to choose that which ignites your mind, body, and soul.
Choose to revel in our interdependence.
Choose community. Choose to love fiercely, fearlessly.
This is our revolution. This is our journey toward freedom.
May the congregation say amen and blessed be.
Go in peace.
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