You say you want a revolution

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
March 1, 2026
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

As the song says, “Well, you know, we all want to change the world.” The thing is, we can’t romanticize the revolution. Revolutions can be hard and messy, and last beyond singular lifetimes. The world resists change mightily, at times with the starving of souls and the spilling of blood. How do we sustain ourselves through the long revolution? Perhaps, in the words of author and justice activist Dorothy Roberts, “We have to start with ourselves, and our most intimate relationships…”. Perhaps we start by building what have been called “Islands of Sanity” together.

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

CLEARING
by Martha Postlethwaite

Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world
so worthy of rescue.

Affirming Our Mission

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

Reading

From RESTORING SANITY
by Margaret J. Wheatley
At this time when lives and possibilities are destroyed by casual destructive decisions, l aspire for us to be sane leaders devoted to restoring and awakening the finest qualities of being human – our generosity, creativity, and kindness. We may not change the world, but we can create Islands of Sanity where our human spirits come alive and we contribute in ways that make more possible.

Sermon

THE LAYERS
by Rosemary Wahtola Trommer

Furrowed and runnelled and rough,
the gnarled bark of this old cottonwood.
The dead thickness protects living tissue from cold,
from wind, from flames.

I, too, am older,
but somehow survival shows up for me the opposite.
Any shields I would build up as barriers –
life keeps peeling them away.
What thickens around me now
are layers of dynamic compassion –
vital, vulnerable,ever-growing.

They do not protect against wounds.
Instead, they seem to say,
“Be with what aches, my dear.
Trusting discomfort is the only way.”

So, I’ve been out on sabbatical for two months, leaving me way too much time to think.

Overthink. That cherished Unitarian Universalist pastime and spiritual practice.

And I’ve been reading and watching and grieving and even feeling traumatized by what is happening in our communities, our nation, our world.

A racist President posting racist memes on social media.

A continuing cover up by our Department of Supposed Justice of the sexual abuse and trafficking of children by some of the most powerful people in this country, including, potentially, people within our current administration going all the way up to the President himself.

Not so veiled threats to voting and democracy.

Continuing attempts at the erasure of BIPOC folks, LGBTQI+ folks, and so many more at the Smithsonian, the Stonewall National Monument and on and on.

Illegal military actions, wag-the-dog war, like the one just started.

The invasion and occupation of U.S. cities and states by our own national government, the latest and perhaps most egregious in Minneapolis Minnesota.

I am so proud of and so grateful to our Rev. Carrie for answering the call for faith leaders to go to Minneapolis to bear witness and engage in resistance to the state inflicted terror, violence, and murder being committed by our federal government on the streets of that city.

Well, I could go on and on, as I know could all of you, about the many desecrations of love, justice, compassion, democracy, equity – the very foundations of the way so many of us construct our moral, ethical worldview, not to mention the very foundations of our faith and that of so many world religions – the values to which this country of ours has always claimed to aspire but never lived out.

So, my beloveds, I have been thinking bout a revolution.

And this morning, as our song earlier said, we are gonna be talkin’ bout a revolution.

Don’t give this over-thinker too much sabbatical time, apparently.

I started with that poem earlier because I have been thinking that if we truly want a revolution, truly want to change the world, we are going to have to learn to think about the revolution in news ways.

We are going to have to realize that what the revolution we really want, the one that ultimately creates the Beloved Community, what that revolution is up against is a political ideology that has turn racism, white supremacy, patriarchy, white nationalism, other faith xenophobia and multiple other forms of bigotry and oppression into a religion – a religion it quite often fraudulently claims as Christianity.

And this ideology, this idolatry, is not new.

Indeed, while we are a nation founded in those aspirational values I mentioned earlier, yes, but also founded in slavery, racism, patriarchy, classism and casteism and more.

So this revolution is also not new. This revolution is ongoing. It is a continuation of the revolution BIPOC folks and feminists and womanists and LGBTQI+ folks and so many more have been waging for centuries now.

It is a continuing revolution that will not be short. A revolution that will never easy. A revolution that will too often continue to be opposed with the destruction of lives and the spilling of blood, as we’ve just witnessed in Minnesota and elsewhere.

And so, to sustain the kind of systemic, institutional, cultural change that such an ongoing, long-term revolution will require, will require US to shed our gnarled bark, our barriers of privilege, be vulnerable, get comfortable with the inevitable aches and discomforts of real change – these are the only way to wrap ourselves and others in those layers of dynamic compassion about which the poet writes.

To create the world we dream about at the end of the revolution, which will likely be beyond our lifetimes, we have to live our lives with the vulnerability, kindness, sense of justice, and love of each other as equals that we wish to see in our larger world.

We have to create this in our daily lives, our families, our relationships, our communities, right here within these church walls and then carry it beyond them .

And the lovely thing is, doing so is what will provide us with the resilience to sustain that larger revolution.

I’m currently reading the book, The Mixed Marriage Project; A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family, by award winning researcher and author on racism, class, and gender, Dorothy Roberts.

l’ve also listened to interviews with Roberts about it, in which she grapples with her white father’s (and later her black mother’s) research through interviews with interracial couples over several decades.

Had her mother been a part of her father’s research? How had she herself fit into his project? Could she resolve the disagreement she had held with her father over whether interracial intimacy could be a part of dismantling racial hierarchies in our country as opposed to the structural changes on which she had been concentrating in her own research?

I want to let you hear her describe what she came to:

Video

Throughout my career, I have shied away from the issue of interracial intimacy and interracial marriage. I never really tackled that. And I’ve always thought that it wasn’t as important a topic as the ones I was working on. And I think part of it also was this debate I had with my father about whether interracial intimacy could overcome racism.

And because I felt so strongly that it could not, I think I shied away from grappling with that question in my own research. But as I read the interviews stretching from the 1930s to the 1960s, and he actually went on to interview couples into the 1980s, I started to change my view of that because it was so clear to me that the regulation of race and family and interracial intimacy, interracial marriage has been such an important way that the government has reinforced a racial hierarchy.

And so if I was to be concerned about a racial hierarchy and I want to dismantle it. I think that this topic is one that I should wrestle with. I think it’s really important to grapple with the question of how do we love each other in a racist society? How can we cross the huge chasm of race that’s been created and reinforced historically in America to be able to love each other as equal human beings? And I began to see that that actually is the question I’ve been asking throughout my career. And my father’s papers and working on the memoir and really wrestling more with it was a transformative experience for me.

Elsewhere, she also talks of how she came to reconcile her father’s passion for his research, which began before he met her mother, with his deep love and commitment to his family.

I wonder if before we can fully work for abstract notions of equality in our world, we must engage in the lived experience of loving equally in our own lives.

Now of course, that could be friendships and other types of relationships, but I do think we have to be in equitable relationship across our differences if we ever hope to create change together in solidarity.

Maybe part of the revolution then, is learning not just to love across difference, but to love difference itself.

This creating relationships in which we love our multiple, beautiful ways of being human, love each other as equal human beings in our daily lives and in our communities, is a vital part of how we might sustain the long revolution through what researcher, author and poet Margaret J Wheatley calls “Islands of Sanity.”

Here is how she describes this:

“An Island of Sanity is a gift of possibility and refuge created by people’s commitment to form healthy community to do meaningful work. It requires … unshakable faith in people’s innate generosity, creativity, and kindness.

It sets itself apart as an island to protect itself from the life-destroying dynamics, policies, and behaviors that oppress and deny the human spirit.

No matter what is happening around us, we can discover practices that enliven our human spirits and produce meaningful contributions for this time.”

Sounds a lot like what we aspire to in this religious community, doesn’t it?

And I think folks in the communities throughout Minneapolis and surrounding areas have created their own beautiful version of this,

forming networks of support,
providing one another mutual aide,
setting up rapid response communications systems to warn each other of danger when the federal invasion was drawing close to their communities and to expose the violence being perpetrated upon their communities.

They set up loving communities of mutuality, love, and support – regular folks defending and taking taking care of each other that model the world of which we dream – the Beloved Community for which we strive.

And from there, the revolution spreads.

Not far away from us, in San Antonio, a young woman named Ashley Fairbanks was horrified as she watched the news pour out of her home town of Minneapolis.

She used her social media and website design skills to launch a site called “Stand with Minnesota” to provide direct assistance to families under siege. The site has received over 2.5 million hits and resulted over 20 million dollars in aide being sent to Minnesotans put at risk by the actions of ICE and other federal agents.

This is not a charitable organization – it simply helps neighbors connect with neighbors, people connect with people from across the country to provide aide for folks who have been unable to pay rent, afford transportation costs, shop, obtain food, or tend to the many basic necessities of life for fear of being endangered by federal agents – or because parents have been separated from children – or when folks have been removed from their homes and taken to detention centers halfway across the country.

What started as just one person’s project has created Islands of Sanity in a sea of ideologically driven, intentionally created chaos.

AND, I think, creating these Islands of Sanity will also involve doing what Rev. Carrie and so many other religious professionals did in answering the call to go to Minnesota. They not only joined folks in those communities in solidarity, witness, and support, they leveraged whatever status and privilege may come from being a faith leader and any other social locations they might hold to amplify that witness and support, AND, AND, they were willing to put that privilege, indeed their own bodies and physical wellbeing at risk to be in solidarity.

Sustaining the long revolution will require that more and more of us be willing to do the same in order to create those relationships of love as equals, the Islands of Sanity we will need to survive the seas of chaos that will continue to be thrown our way.

Now, I want to hasten to add that movement organizing, vigils, marches, voting, political activism – the types of social/political justice work in which our social action council and our Texas UU Justice Ministry engage, aimed at creating change at the structural level – these are vital and necessary too.

These activities and the the Islands of Sanity we have been talking about go hand-in-hand.

Living life and creating communities with the vulnerability, kindness, sense of justice, and love of each other as equals that we wish to see in our world, will help give us the resilience we need to sustain our structural/political activism.

And, the Islands of Sanity can provide the beginning of a model, an infrastructure that could be built upon on our way toward that revolutionary end – the Beloved Community.

MY Beloveds, this revolution will not end quickly. It will at times be difficult and heartbreaking. We may not know how it ends within our lifetimes.

Centered in a fierce love though, may we soften our hearts, learn to be with what aches, my dears, trust the discomfort, so that what thickens around us are layers of dynamic compassion – vital, vulnerable, ever-growing.

This is the powerful spiritual strength that will carry us through the long revolution.

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

from IMPOSSIBLE GENEROSITY
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

I want to give you what I could not give you,
a world where there is no hurt or grief.
a world where you don’t know
ravaged and sleepless nights,
don’t know mornings too quiet
or the color of dirt in the cemetery.

Because I cannot give you this,
I want to give you the certainty
that you can live fully in a world
where there is hurt and grief,
that you can meet what is most painful
and at the same time
turn toward what is beautiful.

I want to give you a love so safe
that you grow into yourself
certain that there is nothing
you can do or not do
that could keep me from loving you.
I have been loved like this, too,
and did not know the enormity of the gift
until I longed to give it to you.

I want you to take it for granted
that love is so vast, so unshakeable,
so true. I want to give you the belief
in your resilience, want you to know yourself
as a flower that grows more vigorously
after it’s been cut back.

I would keep the hands from cutting you,
but since I can’t do that,
I want to be the soil, the rain, the sun.

I want to give you what cannot be given,
want to give you what you have given me –
the astonishment of living with you
in a time of hurt and grief
and the miracle of watching you grow.

May the congregation say “amen”, and “blessed be”. I love you fiercely.

Go in peace.

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