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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
May 16, 2021
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
The stories we tell ourselves both as individuals and as a culture have powerful effects on how we live our lives, make meaning of our world and treat one another. Might some of them be retold in ways that would improve our lives and our world!
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
It’s no coincidence that just at this point in our insight into our mysteriousness as human beings struggling toward compassion, we are also moving into an awakened interest in the language of myth and fairy tale. The language of logical argument, of proofs, is he language of the limited self we know and can manipulate. But the language of parable and poetry, of storytelling, moves from the imprisoned language of the provable into the freed language of what I must, for lack of another word, continue to call faith.
– Madeleine L’Engle, “A Circle of Quiet”
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Learn more about Beloved Community at this link. – The King Center
Meditation Reading
“Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I’m beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it’s actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative – they colonize us. They commission us. They insist on being told. Fiction and nonfiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons that I don’t fully understand, fiction dances out of me, and nonfiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.”
– Arundhati Roy, “The God of Small Things”
Sermon
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