First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin

Rev. Meg Barnhouse's sermon delivered on April 4, 2021. Join us this Easter Sunday for a sermon about a man who reinvented himself after giving up on people. His name, appropriately enough, was Harold Hatcher. He was a member of the UU congregation Rev. Meg served in South Carolina and he may have touched more lives after he gave up on people than he did before.

Assistant Minister Rev. Chris Jimmerson's sermon delivered on March 21, 2021. Our commitments are central to our lives, our relationship with ourselves, with others and our world. Yet, we can over-commit, fail to live up to our commitments, find ourselves needing to renegotiate them or even withdraw from them. We'll explore the nuances of our commitments and how they have helped us make it through...

Rev. Meg Barnhouse's sermon delivered on March 14, 2021. March 15 marks one year since First UU Austin began social distanced worship. Since we've gone inside we have continued to explore, experiment, and expand our understanding of how we exist as a community. We are looking back at this year of rapid learning and seeing how far we have come while honoring the knowledge that we are still in the m...

Rev. Meg Barnhouse's sermon delivered on March 7, 2021. Almost all faith traditions lift up the power of words: to encourage, to comfort, to mislead, to hurt, to cast a spell, to incite a riot. What kind of attention should we pay to the words we say and to the promises we make?

Rev. Meg Barnhouse's sermon delivered on February 28, 2021. We have all been through something very difficult. Whether we lost power and water or just had to watch our family and friends lose those things and not be able to help because we couldn't get out, it has been a very traumatizing time. What does that do to a person's brain? What does that do to a person's energy? What is trauma brain? Do...

Assistant Minister Rev. Chris Jimmerson's sermon delivered on February 21, 2021. Jim and Jane Henson created their lovable puppet characters over six decades ago, and the Muppets really began to gain prominence in the early 1970s. Through their decades of television and movies, what have the Muppets had to tell us about life, love and creating community?

Rev. Meg Barnhouse's sermon delivered on February 14, 2021. One of the most famous poems about love is in the Christian New Testament. Who wrote it? To whom was it written, and why? What wisdom might it hold for us?

Rev. Meg Barnhouse's sermon delivered on February 7, 2021. We come to another of our beloved traditions held each year around Imbolc and St. Brigid's Day. The Blessing of the Animals invites folks to (in a non-pandemic year) to bring their animal companions to church so that we may all benefit from their love as we bless them in their companionship to their humans.

Guest Speaker Bear Qolezcua's sermon delivered on January 31, 2021. If you knew that your next meal was your last, what would you choose to eat? Imagine, instead, that we would sit around the long table of humanity and feast on the finest, most filling meal our souls could crave.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse's sermon delivered on January 24, 2021. Some people use the metaphor of darkness to mean wrongness or evil, but darkness is as sacred as light. It is in the darkness that roots grow, and it is in a time of uncertainty that people can reflect and transform the way they are going to go forward. As we say goodbye to the darkness of winter, let us pause to appreciate it a bit.

Assistant Minister Rev. Chris Jimmerson's sermon delivered on January 17, 2021. Our imagination can lead to both wonderful spiritual paths and can take us down paths that can wound our spirits. On the one hand, our imagination helps us dream of a better life for ourselves and a better, more just world for all. Yet, we can also imagine things that are not true and get drawn into harmful cultural my...

Rev. Meg Barnhouse's sermon delivered on January 10, 2021. How can we be there for each other in this painful time of crisis? How can we linger in our witness of the pain and lack of clarity without trying to fix things for everyone? How can we practice true presence with our country and with one another?

Rev. Meg Barnhouse's sermon delivered on January 3, 2021. We are entering a new year and a new decade, many firsts. Bring your resentments, angers, sorrows, and hurts to the burning bowl, bathe them in the fire, and let us all experience the renewal that comes from letting go.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse's sermon delivered on December 27, 2020. How can we use guidance methods such as I Ching, Runes, Dream Interpretation, Tarot and others in order to answer our questions and to seek a path through our lives?

Rev. Meg Barnhouse's sermon delivered on December 20, 2020. We raise our voices in story and song to greet Christmas with our annual Christmas Pageant.

Assistant Minister Rev. Chris Jimmerson's sermon delivered on December 13, 2020. Sometimes stillness is not so much a lack of motion but rather a moment to find our center so that we can discern where to move next.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse's sermon delivered on December 6, 2020. The election is over and our president elect is calling for unity. How do we do that on a family scale? On a community scale? How do you build relationships with people who you see more clearly now? How do you rebuild relationships with people for whom you may have lost some respect? Can you just move forward without addressing the harm th...

Rev. Meg Barnhouse's sermon delivered on November 29, 2020. Join Rev. Meg as she explores the idea of meditation through poetry. We will explore lines, writers, and work together to better understand how to find our center through the art of words.

Assistant Minister Rev. Chris Jimmerson's sermon delivered on November 22, 2020. Often, we can have a tendency to equate healing with being cured - like when we take a prescribed regimen of a medication and then get better. For trauma and other emotional wounds though, healing is more of an ongoing process, sometimes lifelong, whether individually or socially. We will explore embodied ways of appr...

Rev. Meg Barnhouse's sermon delivered on November 15, 2020. Both Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie, two wisdom teachers of the current age, say that we need to see reality clearly and be present with it in the moment. "We suffer when our thoughts argue with reality," Byron Katie writes. Can this view be compatible with longing for a better world?

Rev. Meg Barnhouse's sermon delivered on November 8, 2020. A lot of us have experiences with things that are mysterious to us. Can they all be explained by science? Maybe not yet. Do we sometimes behave as if we believe in things which, in our head, we don't really believe in?

Rev. Meg Barnhouse's sermon delivered on November 1, 2020. Honoring the Ancestors. Who are our ancestors? How do we honor them? How might we think of ourselves as ancestors?

Rev. Meg Barnhouse's sermon delivered on October 25, 2020. How can American evangelicals love our current president with such fervor and passion? We can go back to the early days of the European and British immigrants from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. How could you tell if you were one of God's chosen? You are wealthy and healthy and blessed.

Assistant Minister Rev. Chris Jimmerson's sermon delivered on October 18, 2020. Listening deeply is a gift that we can give to others. Even more, it is a gift we can give to ourselves.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse's sermon delivered on October 11, 2020. Experiment, make mistakes, have a vision, know when to work hard and when to step back.