A Song for the Millenial Generation!

The Facebook Song! Have fun watching!

Opportunity for Mission: An Update From Marlana!

Marlana Salmon is one of our students at Austin Agape, and she's been studying abroad and traveling this year in South America! She would like to call attention to a special place she visited in Bolivia. It's a Children's Home. Please click here and take a few minutes to learn about a place Marlana loves - a place that is requesting help for others.

Hi Ya'll!

South America is absolutely amazing. I finished my semester in Chile, traveled for 3 months to Ecuador, Brazil, Bolivia, and Peru, and am currently beginning my semester in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

During my time in Bolivia, my friend and I spent a few days at Talita Cumi Children's Home in Santa Fe, Bolivia. It is a Christian orphanage and does wonderful work to help the children. The children are in need of prayers, support, and sponsorship. If you could pass on the information to the congregation and anyone else, Talita Cumi would greatly appreciate it.

Hope all is going well!! I will be back in July and back in Austin in August. So see you soon!

Love in Christ,

Marlana

Ski Trip - Right Around the Corner!

That's right folks! We are less than a month away from our annual SKI TRIP!!!!

Every year we travel to beautiful Salida, Colorado, and we stay at First Presbyterian Church. While we sleep in their basement and play hours of hardcore foursquare, we also assist them in their ministries for youth and children. It's a lot of fun.

And, of course, we go skiing for three days!

We ski at Monarch Mountain. It's beautiful and lots of fun. And if some of us aren't up for skiing, snowshoeing is also available.

This trip is a perfect way experience our strange, wonderful Austin Agape dynamics silly moments from the roatrip, laughs during dinner, and shared excitement on the slopes.

If you'd like to go, please contact Renee by the end of this week. And if you've already signed up, don't forget to give her your $50 deposit by today!

Opportunity for Mission: Micah 6!

So you've heard a lot about the Micah 6 Food Pantry coming to UPC these days. What exactly is Micah 6 anyway?

The Micah 6 Coalition is a network of faith communities that are located around the University of Texas. It includes partner churches who provide services for the community. In their connections, the churches are able to help people holistically with various needs.

Who are the partner churches?

1. All Saints Episcopal Church provides assistance with rent, utilities, food, workboots, and bus passes. The members of the church also help provide birth certificates and IDs.

2. Congregational Church of Austin (UCC) opens its doors as a freeze shelter when the weather is cold. The members of the church also provide food for youth ages 10-23 for the VinCare Services Meal Program.

3. St. Austin Catholic Parish offers financial assistance for rent, utilities, food, and medication through the St. Vincent de Paul Society. The members of the church also assist the Congregational Church of Austin (UCC) with the VinCare Services Meal Program, and they have a Thursday outreach that helps with work boots, ID's, clothing vouchers, eye exams and glasses, medications with a MAP card, and financial assistance for utilities. They also open their doors as a freeze shelter.

4. University Avenue Church of Christ provides financial assistance and offers a Prayer Breakfast on Wednesday mornings.

5. University Baptist Church has a free dinner on Thursday nights and houses the LifeWorks Meal Program for young people.

6. University United Methodist Church has a clothes closet, and they provide breakfast and lunch on Saturdays.

7. And! University Presbyterian Church now has several opportunities for service - and that includes you. On Tuesday mornings, we provide financial assistance for rent and utilities. And. . . our congregation now houses the Micah 6 Food Pantry.

The Food Pantry is held on Thursday nights from 6:00-7:30 and Saturday mornings from 10:30-12:00. We could use your help as volunteers. If you are interested in helping, please contact Renee at upccampus@upcaustin.org.

And there are other churches invovled too!

First English Lutheran Church and University Christian Church are founding partners. Hyde Park Presbyterian Church, Central Christian Church, and Southwest Family Fellowship are contributing partners.

See what amazing things can happen when we work together!

Sweatshops: Accountability for Our Burnt-Orange

Our very own Merrit Martin poses some important questions for us in her opinion article in the Daily Texan this week!

When we so proudly don our burnt-orange at the University of Texas, do we know where it comes from? Who works to produce our burnt-orange products? Is our university working through systems of accountability to make sure that our college-wear is not made in sweatshops overseas?

Check out what Merrit has to say.

What's Your Favorite Class?

What class energizes you the most these days?

European History, because my professor, Dr. Wilson, is amazing. I love her!

-Kathleen






All of them. Because I'm graduating.

-Caleb

A Mission Opportunity!

Please consider joining Amanda, Catherine, and Merrit this weekend as they assist Manos de Cristo in the Austin Marathon next Sunday! They will be supporting the runners, including our very own Jeff Stump! They'll be passing out water to thirsty participants.

If you'd like to help, just e-mail Renee: upccampus@upcaustin.org.

And if you can't quench thirst on Sunday morning, please consider giving a donation. Manos de Cristo provides incredible services to the Austin Community, including a food pantry, a clothes closet, and a dental clinic. You can talk to Jeff if you would like to contribute.

It's good to think of ways to plug into mission!

Sermon: Bricks We Need

Ephesians 2:11-22

She’s had a long day, and thank goodness, it’s finally time to go home. She ventures back on her normal route. The scenery is familiar – different tables this time on the West Mall – but then again, that’s true every day. This campus has become home to her, and she’s more than ready to go back to her dorm and kick up her feet for a little bit. She opens the door to the building, walks down a hallway – posters and flyers of her campus are all over the place. She pushes the button for the elevator, and waits there. And then another female student approaches her – same age – walking toward her from the other end of the hallway. Maybe she’s had a long day too. Maybe she’s also more than ready to come back. The elevator doors open wide. They both push the numbers for their floors. Finally, time to come home.

But is it home? Can it feel like home? Because our first student sighs inwardly as she watches her white neighbor clutch her purse closely to her chest, a reaction of fear as she rides an elevator alone with a person of dark skin. As she sighs, she thinks to herself, “What? Does this person think I’m going to mug her? Don’t I live here too? Why should I be feared just because I am black?” This story is not from the 1960s. It’s also not hypothetical. It’s the experience of Lauren, an African-American student who currently attends UT.


“I need a haircut,” she thinks. She’s been putting it off, but she remembers a place she’s driven by several times. “I wonder if they’re open.” She gets in her car and discovers that they are. “Great. And there’s hardly anyone inside.” She opens the door and asks the person at the table, “So can I just walk in, or do I need an appointment?” The receptionist looks over her shoulder. There are employees available who could cut her hair right now. “You’re going to have to make an appointment,” the receptionist says.

“Okay. What do you have available?”

The receptionist sprawls open her book – her book, visibly filled with empty pages. “Sorry, we’re not going to have anything available.”

Anger and deep hurt rise to the surface. “Well, I want to let you know that you’ve lost a customer today.” She storms out the door, feeling frustration. “What? You don’t cut hair for people like me? Why should I be discriminated against because I don’t look exactly like you?” This story is not from the distant past. It’s also not hypothetical. It’s the experience of Mari, a Mexican-American student who currently attends UT.


“Hey, nice to meet you!” A hand is extended. “Oh, so you’re a student. That’s great.” They’ve had no time to get to know one another, but that doesn’t mean that assumptions haven’t been made. “I bet you like school. You look like you would.” He’s said nothing about his school experience. “So, what do you hope to do once you’re a doctor?” Again, strange assumptions made. Who said anything about being a doctor? “Actually, I’m majoring in advertising.” “Oh, okay.” The person asking the questions seems to think it’s no big deal, but the student is tired of assumptions like these. “Why do you put me in your own categorical box just because I look a certain way? Why do I always have to be a doctor or a scientist in your mind? Can’t I simply be myself? Or am I some cookie-cutter representation of who you think I should be in your very small world of stereotypes?” This isn’t an old story. It’s also a real one. This is the experience of Lance, an Asian-American student who currently attends UT.


Clearly, the issue of racism is not only a thing of the past. It’s alive and well and moves beyond our history books. It functions in our world. It manifests itself daily in the United States. It lives and breathes as part of the University of Texas. Our society has made great strides, no doubt. But racism remains – not only out there, not only in the words and actions of people we might label bigots -- it resides within. Racism lives within each one of us, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes even unintentionally.

And so, we might ask: What does our Christian faith have to say about this? As you might imagine, our faith has a lot to say. But it’s worth asking ourselves if we believe it does. After all, as people note from time to time, “Sunday morning contains the most segregated hour in the United States.” How can we understand each other and how can we live well with one another if we can’t celebrate and cherish together what is most central to our lives?

So maybe it would be helpful tonight to revisit an old story. Maybe it would be beneficial to revisit some of the ancestors of our faith. Perhaps they have something to say to us.

The earliest Christian disciples were Jewish people who followed Jesus. They followed him as their own Jewish rabbi. They also believed him to be the Messiah, more than a Rabbi. And they spread their deepest beliefs to others, including people they could have easily chosen to exclude – people of every nationality and ethnic background, people who were non-Jews, people otherwise known as Gentiles. And they had some precedent in doing this. The Hebrew Scriptures contain laws of inclusion. As we read tonight in Leviticus, the Jews of ancient Israel were commanded to treat others with respect – to love and include those who lived as outsiders in their land, because they had experienced hardship themselves as foreign slaves in the land of Egypt.

The Jewish ancestors of our faith invited Gentiles into their own Messianic expectations. But as you can imagine, some questions and difficulties emerged as well. This is often happens when cultures collide. Some asked, “Shouldn’t Gentiles have to undergo the rite of circumcision – a mark of Judaism - to follow Christ?” People disagreed on this. In Christians communities, Jewish believers and Gentile believers fought one another and clashed over the ways their faith would manifest itself. Animosities swirled around them, coming from both directions.

And the passage tonight from Ephesians addresses these difficulties. Would Jewish believers and Gentiles believers include one another? Or would they create walls of hostility – barricading themselves as segregated communities that had nothing to do with one another? The author of this letter believes there is no place for walls of hostility. In Jesus Christ, these walls are to come tumbling down.

“Christ is our peace,” the letter proclaims. In him, two groups have become one humanity. There is only one humanity. No room for a dividing wall. In the faith, no one is a stranger or an alien. Believers of every ethnicity and culture are saints and members of the household of God. They are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.

Again, “Christ is our peace,” the letter proclaims. Christ brings peace to people who have always known inclusion and he showers peace upon those who have wrongfully been labeled as outsiders. But there is no dividing wall from which Christ divvies up this group’s peace and that group’s peace. There’s one peace – one peace for one humanity. After all, what is peace if it’s not at work right within the intersection of what has been conflict!

What is peace if it’s not at work right within the intersection of what has been conflict?

And so the question comes back to us: Where will we be at work right within the intersection of conflict? To answer that question, we have to see the conflict for what it is, and then, with God’s help, we need boldness to go there – boldness to walk right in there and seek peace.

The conflict is not only out there somewhere. The conflict is within ourselves – within you and within me. Racism is taboo in our culture. And on a small level that’s good news, because it means our society has finally come to a place, by and large, where we can declare racism to be wrong and unjust. But because we know it is, we don’t want to believe that we ourselves have succumbed to its influence. Racism is horrible. We know it, and we don’t want to believe that sometimes we let it rear its ugly head in our lives, even in subtle ways. So instead, we brush it under the rug and assume that it exists out there somewhere. Even worse, we assume it’s someone else’s problem to deal with.

And another thing needs to be said: What may seem subtle and unintentional from our perspective, may be incredibly harmful from the perspective of another. We have no idea what went through the mind and heart of that young, white student, holding her purse tightly to her chest in that elevator. We don’t know and we can’t know, and we shouldn’t excuse that behavior. But just for a moment, let’s imagine that she had no intention to send the message she did. Maybe she’s the product of this society – a society where black criminals are disproportionately shown on t.v., infinitely more than their white counterparts. Maybe that induced fear in her. But here’s the problem: if people like her never question whether racism underlies her own behavior, who will confront the larger problems of society that create that behavior? We must address the conflict within our own selves.

So often when we think of making peace, we imagine ourselves talking. We imagine ourselves acting, making decisions, leading. But maybe we make more peace with listening. Years ago, I attended a church service, and I remember something the preacher said. He said this: “You know, maybe there’s a reason we have two ears but only one mouth.” I think he’s right. Maybe we need to listen more and talk less. I imagine that’s true for all of us – true for you and for me.

Our passage from Ephesians tells us that each and every believer is being built together. We’re being built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God. Can God be divided? If the answer is no, then neither can we. We can’t afford it. As we think about the issues of racism around us, it becomes obvious that we need to listen to the bricks that surround us. We desperately need the stories of those who have experienced racism first hand. We need those bricks to become our teachers. There’s no dividing wall. We’re all God’s children, and we’re incomplete without one another.

Two years ago, I had this strange dream that had a big effect on me. In this dream, I was learning how to become multi-lingual in terms of people. And others were doing it too. We were all attempting to learn the different languages of the people in our lives. And by “languages” I don’t literally mean foreign concepts or vocabularies. In my dream, people were intentionally learning to converse in languages based on people’s dreams, anxieties, hopes, and experiences. I wonder if our Christian life of discipleship requires this kind of learning.

If you think about it, it’s like traveling to a completely new place. When we do that, commonalities between ourselves and others become cherished because we draw upon our common experiences to communicate. But if we’re willing to stay for a while, we also learn to value the differences, and we begin to learn the language that’s spoken there. Now we know the best way to do this is to get our noses out of the dictionaries and the phrase books because we need to have an immersion experience. In this way, our language-learning becomes dependent on the people who actually speak the language. We can know the phrases from the phrase books all day long, but if we stay stuck our books, we’ll end up putting a wall between ourselves and others, and we’ll never move beyond mere trivialities no matter how grammatically correct our phrases may be. What we need is to learn the slang – the unique ways that people understand their experiences. We can read books about racism all day long, but if we don’t talk to the people who’ve experienced it, we’ll never be able to converse in the broader language which is Justice. There are bricks we desperately need.

And if we continue in the discipleship of listening – of language-learning – we’ll discover that our experience can never be exactly like someone else’s. But as we continue to live among others and learn their languages, we’ll learn how to converse in their world. And we’ll discover that their experience – their world – becomes a part of ours too. We can’t claim that their experience is our experience, but through immersion, we can adopt their experience toward ourselves. And we’ll discover that our world will never be the same. We’ve been enriched through the dreams, anxieties, hopes, and experiences of others.

And so, how will we engage in language-learning here at Austin Agape? Who will we dare to meet? How will we challenge ourselves to listen, and what will we change within ourselves? How will we be become conversant in Justice, and what will we proclaim once we learn to speak it?

How will you do it, and where will we be at work right within the intersection of conflict? May God help us answer these questions with our very lives. May God send us to the people we so desperately need.

Amen.

- Renée Roederer, Campus Minister

What's Your Favorite Class?

What class energizes you the most this semester, and why?

"Existentialism, because I can't really consider myself an Honors quad kid until I know Being and Nothingness by heart. "

- Merrit

"Reactor is cool...we apply matrices and differential equations to design chemical reactors. I like it because it makes a lot of theory we've been studying useful."

- Walter

What's Your Favorite Class?

What class excites you most this semester, and why?


"Childrens literature, because I love kids and reading chapter books will be a nice break from normal reading."

-Alyssa







"Psychology: Research Methods and Statistics -- because I ♥ Psychology and research and math... =D. Plus after this class, I can take cool classes like Behavioral Neuroscience."

- Catherine




"Intro to archaeological studies. Reading about archaeology is like reading a story. Plus I get to learn all about excavation methods and what-not."

- Andrew




"The class that excites me most this semester is actually my informal class, Portuguese. I'm so excited! Aprenderei português!"

- Amanda

Spring Bible Study: Questions of Christian Identity

What questions swirl around in your mind these days?

I imagine our heads are full of all sorts of questions - some significant, some not. But what are your deepest questions? And which questions involve the deepest part of yourselves?

Who am I? Where have I been? How did I get here? Where am I going? What gives me meaning? Who am I in relationship to God? Who am I in relationship to others?

Who are we? What does it mean to live in Christian Community? Who is Austin Agape at the University of Texas?

What are our stories? How do our stories interact with other stories? What does it mean to be a Christian and to live as a Christian among others?

And. . .where will these questions take us? That's a great question! Come find out - these are the questions we'll be asking in our Bible Study this semester.

This semester, we will turn inward to understand ourselves, and we will do it for the purpose of turning outward toward others. Please join us every Monday night at 7:00 pm upstairs in the Youth Room for this exciting study!

Super Bowl Party!

Last night, we gathered around the tube (Thanks Amanda and Ben!) to watch the 2009 Super Bowl. Tacos were eaten, foursquare was played, and touchdowns were scored. Congratulations to all the Steelers Fans!