 Please join me for a moment of centering silence. Our in-gathering hymn is number 22. Good morning and welcome to First Unitarian Society of Madison. This is a place where curious seekers gather to explore spiritual, ethical, and social issues in a safe and accepting environment. Unitarian Universalism supports the freedom of conscience of each individual as together we seek to be a force for good in the world. I'm Maureen Friend. On behalf of the congregation, I'd like to extend a special welcome to visitors. We're a welcoming congregation, so whoever you are, we celebrate your presence among us. Newcomers are encouraged to stay for our fellowship hour after the service and to visit the library, which is directly across from the center doors in the auditorium. Bring your drinks and your questions. Members of our staff and our lay ministry will be on hand to welcome you. It's a good time to turn off your electronics. Experience guides are generally available to give a building tour after each service and today we do have John Powell with us to do that. So if you'd like to learn more about the sustainably designed addition to our national landmark meeting house, please meet near the large glass windows on the left side of the auditorium. We welcome children to stay during the service. Please remember it often becomes difficult for those in attendance to hear in this lively acoustic environment. And our child haven, which is right back there in the corner, and the commons, are excellent places to go when you or your child needs to talk or to move around. The service can still be seen and heard from those areas. I'd like to acknowledge those individuals who help the services run smoothly. The sound operator is David Briles. Our lay minister is Tom Boykoff. Greeter was Paula Alt. Our ushers are Ann Ostrom and John McEvna. Our hospitality is provided by Nancy Kosoff and Helena McEvna. And please note the announcements and the red floors insert of your order of service. Those describe upcoming events in the society and provide more information about today's activities. We do have a special announcement today. So Saturday, July 16th, next Saturday, FUS will be hosting Funky Town, which is our family-friendly dance party. So from 6.30 to 8.30, we're going to put on our bookie shoes and jam to groovy hits from the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, and beyond. So be sure and take your disco nap before you get here. We'll have refreshments and a photo booth and much, much more. You're invited to wear a costume, but you don't have to just show up as you are. We'd be happy to see you. The suggested donation is $5 for individuals and $20 for family, which will be collected at the door. So stop by the table that's right in front of us, right behind us at the entrance to the library to learn more. And let us know you're coming. So again, welcome. We hope that today's service will stimulate your mind, touch your heart, and stir your spirit. These are the times that try men's souls. Words uttered nearly 250 years ago by Thomas Payne at the outset of the Revolutionary War. These are the times that try our souls. Those words seem equally pertinent today. These are trying times for our society as we struggle with the realities of racial inequality and resentment, wholesale gun violence, widespread mistrust and disillusionment with the criminal justice system. We grieve again over so much senseless loss of life and the fear, the suspicion and the hate that have engendered it. If we feel sick at heart over the events of last week, that's fully understandable. But may we hope against hope that we have perhaps reached a turning point. The communal recognition, as Mahatma Gandhi once put it, that the ethos of an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. These are the words of Rebecca Parker. There is an embrace of kindness that encompasses all life, even yours. And while there is injustice, insensitivity or evil, there moves a wholly disturbance, a benevolent rage, a revolutionary love, protesting, urging, insisting that all that is sacred shall not be defiled. Those who bless the world live their life as a gesture of thanks for this beauty, this kindness and this rage. Please rise and body your spirit for the lighting of the chalice. Please join me in repeating the words of affirmation. It is eternity now. We are in the midst of it. It is about us in the sunshine. We are in it as the butterfly in the light laden air. Nothing has to come. It is now. Now is eternity and now is the immortal life. Now on this fine July morning I invite you to turn to your neighbor in exchange with them a warm and friendly greeting. Please be seated. And if there are some children that would like to join me in the front for our message for all ages. So this is a story from a different religious tradition, not a Unitarian story, but it's from the Buddhist religious tradition. And it's about a person called Avalokiteshvara. I can hardly pronounce it myself. Much less spell it. So this is her story. And for short we're going to call her Avalokita. Avalokita was born out of a ray of light that came from the right eye of her father, Amitabha. And Amitabha is also called boundless radiance, and his light created the entire universe, everything that we see. And at her birth, Avalokita immediately uttered this sacred phrase om mani padma hum, which means hail the great wisdom jewel in the heart of the lotus. Got that? Now much later, and having learned a whole lot of things about the nature of reality, the way that the world works, Avalokita looked at all of those creatures that were in pain and were unhappy and were suffering. And she said to herself, I have grown in so much wisdom and I have so many special powers that I've reached the point in my growth and my development where I could leave this universe and just go by myself to a place of tremendous peace and happiness. But I know I can't do this because as I have grown I've also become more kind and more compassionate and I see all the suffering in the world and I want to save all those people who are suffering, all these poor beings because when they suffer it feels like I'm suffering too. And so Avalokita made a vow. She made a promise to her father, Amitabha, I am going to ease the suffering of all the creatures in the universe, she said, and I will not stop until I have succeeded. And if I do not make this happen, if I don't succeed, may my head split open like a coconut. And so Avalokita began her work. And so first she went to a world called the hell realm and she wanted to relieve the suffering of all the beings that were trapped in the hell realm because of all the evil things that they had done during their life. They had to go to the hell realm because that was punishment for the evil things that they had done. But she used all kinds of miraculous lights and sounds that she had learned and in just three days, six hours and 23 minutes she had emptied out all of the hell realms. Everybody that was suffering down there was freed. And so then she moved on to another world called the world of the Preta or the hungry ghosts. But before Avalokita could make any progress in freeing the people who were in the hungry ghost realm, she saw, look back in the hell realm, was filling up with people again. People were going into hell faster than she could liberate them because they were doing so many wrong things on planet Earth. This is just too much for me, she cried. I don't know if I can do this. So she sat down and she quit trying. And at that point her father, Amitabha, remembered Avalokita's vow and he tapped her on the top of the head and her head split open just like a coconut. And it caused her great pain, as you can imagine. Well, if you like, her father said, I will relieve your headache and then you can just go away into the realm of peace and happiness and not have to worry about all this suffering again. No, Avalokita said, by knocking on my head like this and splitting it open, you've knocked some sense into me. When I look back and I see all the people that are still suffering, my heartache is so much greater than my headache and so I need to keep working. And so Amitabha was so impressed with Avalokita's determination that he had her on the head a few more times. And each time he did so, you know what happened? A new head appeared and some of those heads had three faces on them and each face radiated with all this kindness and compassion strong enough to liberate many, many more people from their suffering. And then another amazing thing happened. Avalokita began to sprout additional arms and hands. First she grew four and then six and then eight until finally she had a thousand arms and hands. Each one like this brilliant ray of light and in the center of each hand there was an eye that could see the suffering and respond to it with love and with kindness. And in addition, Avalokita now had the power to send her compassionate energy out into the world and so it entered into human beings like me and like you so that we could help to save other people from their suffering. And so from that time forward, there was still suffering in the universe but now there was also lots of kindness and love and compassion and the possibility that all of us might experience inner peace and happiness. So that's the story of Avalokita and she's one of the most famous, what they call, bodhisattvas in the Buddhist tradition, kind of a god-like being. I hope you enjoyed the story. We're going to sing you out with our next hymn. Please be seated. And at this time I would like to invite Bruce Meredith to share his thoughts in Defense of Boogalberry and say that he composed a while back and shared with me that inspired the subject matter for today's reflections. Bruce. Good morning. I guess we're off to a Sunday morning field trip to Boogalberry. I didn't intend to watch. I was just trying to get to the weather channel. Unfortunately, I couldn't get back past the spectacle. A bevy of journalists aiming their cameras and commentary at a closed door. Mike Huckabee was standing guard. According to the commentators, he wanted to make sure Ted Cruz didn't steal his show. The TV scroll said Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who went to jail rather than permit her staff to issue marriage licenses to gay couples would soon emerge from jail. Less than 10 commercials later, the doors opened and a large crowd hoisted their black and white signs. Remarried after three divorces, Ms. Davis didn't seem the ideal spokesperson for defending the sanctity of marriage. But several years earlier, she had renounced the devil and accepted Jesus Christ as her savior. Having professed her face, Huckabee let us know that Jesus had forgiven her sins and that God didn't hold grudges. Just asked the myriad of politicians who stood before other TV cameras accompanied by their somber wives and proclaimed their faith in God's grace and mercy. Since God had forgiven them, so should we. Maybe they were right. I hadn't studied the Bible as much as they claimed. I went to Catholic schools where the Bible was read by prescription only. Instead, we studied Catholic dogma. Even as a first grader, I was instructed to recite obtuse matters of arcane theology and then was cross-examined by stern-looking dunes, mostly wearing outfits now seen mainly in Star Wars. We did our best, but we just repeated words. Words we didn't understand. But I learned early on that forgiveness was tricky, usually requiring confession, penance, and most often a trip to Boogellberry. When I told my parents about Boogellberry, they laughed and wanted to know why I thought I would end up there. So I explained that after death, people went to heaven, hell, or Boogellberry. My parents were shrewd enough, however, to know that no matter what one did, good or bad, no one spent an eternity in an obscure jam. They quickly determined that I was referring to purgatory. According to the nuns who taught 50 antsy kids trapped in small rows of desks, purgatory was a place where good but sometimes naughty children were seared in flames before entering heaven. With some nuns, the pain was intense, with others more like a really bad sunburn. As my religion education progressed, I learned more about purgatory, even though hell and the sins that got you there got top billing. Purgatory was a place for purification for those who had committed mortal sins, religious felonies, that had been confessed and forgiven, or venial sins, misdemeanors that hadn't. Once purified, you headed to heaven. Except for the flames, purgatory seemed like a reasonable idea, like taking a shower before going to a good restaurant. But then things got really technical. You could get out sooner if individuals prayed or had masses said to you before or after your death. But the surest way was to cash in your accumulated indulgences. A plenary indulgence was a prize to get out of jail free card, allowing the holder to bypass purgatory entirely under certain circumstances. I didn't fully understand the accounting, but I tried the bank easy to get indulgence. Simple phrases like, Jesus, Mary, Joseph will get you 300 days of early release, more than enough to compensate for the venial sins of saying the same words in anger. When I got to Jesuit high school, however, purgatory and indulgences, like my old baseball cards, were mainly confined to the closet. Purgatory was still there, but if you had a good lawyer, especially a Jesuit trained one, you could avoid doing much hard time. Good works, not indulgences were of the size. It wasn't until I got to Georgetown, a Jesuit college, that I learned that some Christians didn't think purgatory existed. In fact, many thought it was a medieval Ponzi scheme. According to those Christians, God only gave pass-fail tests with no makeups. Grace, not good works, was the key to getting into heaven. By the time I left Georgetown, my theology professors, grand inquisitor types, had convinced me that much of what the nuns taught me was either wrong or a muddle. It wasn't until about four years ago that I again gave Googleberry renewed consideration. I had developed a close friendship with a card-carrying Calvinist who loved to talk about religion. For the first time, I discovered the true hatred some Protestants had for purgatory. It was despised more than hell. Who knew? Since I was no longer practicing law, I had lots of time to devote to arcane religious discussions. My friend's main critique of purgatory was biblical. No mention of it by name anywhere in either the Old or New Testament. Worse, the church was belittling the concept of grace. It didn't earn grace, and it certainly wasn't sold. God gave it freely, whether you deserved it or not. Just look at those poor laborers in the vineyard in the New Testament. Those who came to work early got paid exactly the same as those who sauntered in just before closing time. According to him, God could save any well she damn well pleased. As a lawyer, I recognized his arguments. He was a strict constructionist, and his case was solid. My friend had convinced me until I re-read the Catholic Reef in support of purgatory. To my surprise, I discovered the Catholic case wasn't hopeless. Maybe the nuns were right after all. There was language in both the Old and New Testament that could be read as referring to purgatory. As long as you knew where to look and weren't a stickler for detail, the church was merely construing an ambiguous document to find God's true intent. Catholics just needed to find a liberal judge. More important to me, the original purgatory was well intended. The early church theologians wanted to provide a type of order logic and predictability that they saw in God's creation. They mused about limbo to make sure that innocent unbaptized children didn't go to hell, and they mapped out purgatory and ordered to bride both hope and justice to the imperfect. It wasn't their fault that centuries later, a syndicate of slick clerical venture capitalists decided to use purgatory as a centerpiece of an indulgence marketing scheme. Of course, we now know that the universe isn't so orderly after all. Maybe grace and forgiveness were meant to be as unpredictable and chaotic as clusters of swirling atoms. But my friend's concept of grace, almost free and automatic, created its own set of problems. Without the need for penance or purification, grace can become a type of ritualistic, no fuss, no bother, cleanery indulgence. Just as in the free Luther church, individuals could book a free passage to heaven, regardless of their behavior. To me, purgatory can best be defined as a shrewd early attempt at restorative justice, a primitive way to make humans understand more fully that bad behavior had consequences and that forgiveness sometime must be earned. But even those fond of purification must recognize that purgatory has a dubious past as a type of spiritual debtor's prison. If purgatory is going to work as a place of restorative justice, it needs to be reimagined. Perhaps it should be renamed Boogalberry. For starters, no one could take a place named Boogalberry too seriously. So maybe Catholics and Protestants would be less fervent in their competing dogma and find more common ground. The new improved Boogalberry would recognize God's grace, but also acknowledge that human failures have consequences and that God is no one's fool. Purgatory would be a place to return in a community setting and relearn the golden rule and the importance of humility. Perhaps if Boogalberry became accepted dogma, individuals would focus more on their actions and less on their professions of faith. Think more critically about justice and how their actions affect others. Become more compassionate. Who knows? Boogalberry might give Kim Davis and me a chance to meet, to discuss the Bible, divine justice, and the foolishness of preachers or politicians who claim to know exactly how God thinks. Thank you, Linda. Thank you, Bruce. Hosea Baloo was a high-profile universalist minister in the early decades of the 19th century. He was a preacher known for his homespun but instructive stories and he was a penetrating theologian and the author of A Treatise on Atonement published in 1805, a treatise that enjoyed a very wide readership and drew many people into the universalist fold. Baloo's persuasive powers notwithstanding in orthodox circles, the universalists were the subject of continual withering criticism, the most dangerous heresy in America, its detractors maintained, because by denying the reality of hellfire and eternal punishment and holding out the prospect of universal salvation, the universalists and Baloo effectively removed the chief incentive for men and women to avoid sinful behavior and to lead good and upright lives. Spare the rod and spoil the child, so to speak. Now the universalists, for their part, politely disagreed, pointing out that the threat of future punishment had been in the past a rather ineffective deterrent to sin. They argued further that when people were convinced of God's love and knew that they were the recipients of God's forgiveness and God's compassion, they themselves would be moved to be more loving and compassionate and forgiving. Moreover, Hosea Baloo asserted, sin is inherently unpleasant, so people simply need to be convinced that righteousness brings ample rewards to us in the present life. It's much more pleasant than sin. Hosea Baloo used the following story to emphasize his points. It seems that he was riding through the countryside one Saturday afternoon. He was on his way to a small town where he was scheduled to preach the next day. And after a while, riding along, he's joined by another rider, a hard-shelled Baptist minister, and they're headed in the same direction. So they get to chatting, and in the course of their conversation, Baloo shared his convictions about the afterlife to which the Baptist responded, Brother Baloo, this is the problem I see with your position. You see, if I were a universalist, I could hit you over the head right now and steal your horse and still find myself a place in heaven, to which Baloo is alleged to have responded. My good Baptist brother, if you were a universalist, that thought would never enter your mind. Now all universalists of that time period accepted this doctrine of universal salvation. That's where the word universalist comes from. It's also an idea that the Apostle Paul and the author of John's Gospel found attractive according to biblical scholars. But Hosea Baloo was something of an outlier in his own denomination. You see, Baloo did not believe in post-mortem punishment of any sort. He was known as an ultra-universalist, or a death and glory universalist. You die, you go right to glory. Hell Baloo maintained is a condition that we create and impose on ourselves in this world, not in the next. It is as much the nature of sin, he wrote, to torment the mind as it is the nature of fire to burn the flesh. Sin deprives us of every rational enjoyment so far as it captivates the mind. It is never able to furnish one drop of cordial for the soul. Her tender mercies are cruelty and her breasts of consolation are gall and wormwood. As William Shakespeare put it, hell is empty, all the devils are right here. Hell is merely a useful metaphor for the pangs of a bad conscience, for the suffering that is caused by unslaked desire. Sin produces no peace, no trustworthy pleasure, and no lasting satisfaction. But among universalists, this was not the prevailing outlook. Jacob Wood was one of ultra-universalism's most vociferous detractors. In a brief essay on the doctrine of future retribution, Wood invaded against both eternal punishment in hell and those who eliminated all future punishment like Hosea Baloo. The latter, he argued, do give encouragement to sin. I will not call those who believe in this system stupid animals, but I do think their opinions to be very erroneous. The immediate gross absurdities to which the doctrine of immediate universal salvation is liable and the vicious effects which it is calculated to produce render it a doctrine justly deserving of disapprobation and contempt. So Reverend Wood and his allies came to be known as restorationists because they believed that human beings would only be restored to a place of glory after they had endured a period of purification or punishment. Still, with their belief in the unlimited goodness and mercy of God, the restorationists rejected the orthodox notion that the Almighty Himself punished people for their sins. Their position was, in fact, closer to that of the Hindus and the Buddhists for whom karma, the cosmic law of moral cause and effect, controlled every human being's outcome. And thus Charles Hudson, a primary opponent of Baloo's, announced that any pain or any torment experienced by the immortal soul after death would be the immediate fruit of that guilt of which the mind is conscious in consequence of past transgressions. It is reasonable to suppose, he wrote, that those who die impenitent will enter into after death a state of misery consisting of anxiety, guilt, remorse, which will continue until repentance or reformation is affected. Now, for their part, the Unitarians of the 19th century and prior to the Union of our two denominations, the Unitarians exhibited kind of a mixture of opinions on the afterlife. According to the Reverend James Walker of Charlestown, Massachusetts, most Unitarians eschewed that harsh, Calvinist, Puritan doctrine of everlasting punishment. Some held that souls who had committed serious, mortal sins would simply be annihilated. And others entertained the belief that was more or less consistent with that of the Universalist Restorationists. Many early Unitarians expected post-mortem suffering to be consequential and indefinite as to its duration, but it would not be eternal. In point of fact, all of our forebears embraced a concept very similar to purgatory, although they didn't call it that. But the Universalists and the Roman Catholics were hardly the first to speculate about or to describe, sometimes in vivid detail, this place of limited but significant suffering. Through history, people have bought into this idea because they simply could not conceive of an indifferent amoral universe, a world where brute strength and lethal cunning counted for everything. People needed to believe that the universe possessed a moral as well as a physical texture. And so these doctrines of compensation developed. Theories which assured us that no matter how long it took, the requirements of justice would be fulfilled. Now we should not expect that a fair apportionment of punishment and rewards will be made in this single, brief lifetime of ours. If humans possess immortal souls, then eventually all those souls will be held accountable. All souls will receive their just desserts. And so our species, it could be said, possesses this instinct for justice, which demands that a cosmic reckoning will take place at one time or another. As that legend of Avalokita indicates, Purgatory figured very prominently in some schools of Buddhism. If you accumulate enough bad karma, the Lotus Sutra promises, then expect to be reborn in the Avicii hell, this Dante-esque chamber of torture and deprivation, one of the common misconceptions that Westerners often carry about Hindu Buddhist teachings on reincarnation is that it precludes any experience of either heaven or hell. But in fact, many Hindu and Buddhist sects hold that this earthly plane of ours is but one dimension of a multi-layered reality which includes worlds that are both more pleasant and much more unpleasant than this one. But wherever one happens to end up, there is always in Buddhism and Hinduism the prospect of redemption and additional opportunities to improve one's karmic destiny. In India, Heinrich Zimmer writes, heaven and hell are purgatorial stations representing degrees of realization experienced on the way to the ultimate transcendence of all qualitative experience whatsoever. That being said, some Buddhists have substituted a strictly psychological reality for those older metaphysical theories. Aggression, violence, selfishness, untamed desire, impurity, these are all behaviors that lead ultimately to self-hatred that cut us off in this life from our fellow human beings. And so the root of all hell, Buddhist commentator Martin Lowenthal writes, consists in resisting the flow of the universe and feeling utterly separate from it. And so we come full circle for such a solution in Buddhism aligns almost perfectly with Hosea Baloo's ultra-universalism. Hell and purgatory, those are conditions that we experience in this life and no other. Still, important distinctions between these ideas and those held by traditional Roman Catholics remain. Indulgences, those get-out-of-jail-free maneuvers, those played no role in classic universalism. And God's infinite graciousness received considerable emphasis among both universalists and unitarians. But as Bruce noted in his remarks, the Catholic Church mapped out purgatory in order to provide hope and justice to the imperfect, which is pretty much the same argument as restorationism in 19th century universalism advanced. Today, the vast majority of unitary universalists give very little credence to traditional notions of hell and heaven and purgatory. But if somehow we are possessed of immortal souls, and if there has to be a place where we will eventually pay our dues, may it utilize that place, that humane process of restorative justice that is mentioned, and may it be popularly known as Boogalberry. So now, I would invite you to participate in the giving and the receiving of our offering, and our offering will be used today for the support of the programs of this institution. We gather each week as a community of memory and of hope, and to this time and this place we bring our whole and sometimes our broken selves. We carry with us the joys and sorrows and the recent past, seeking here a place where they might be received and celebrated and shared. And of course, all of us are thinking today and feeling a great deal of sorrow about the loss of life outside of St. Paul and in Baton Rouge and most recently in Dallas and the ongoing protests and the disturbances that are taking place in those and many of our other communities across the country. People have said that they wonder what they can do in situations like that, how they can respond constructively. And in this congregation, of course, we have a Moses ministry team and we have an equity ministry team. And both of these ministry teams are working actively on issues that affect people, particularly in the minority community and our African American community and trying to address the inequities that our society still manifests. And so for any of you who are interested in participating more actively in finding solutions to some of the problems we face, I would suggest to you that you'd be in touch. You'd be with the Moses Equity Ministry teams. Gail Bliss writes that she was at Christ the Solid Rock Church yesterday, Saturday. There was a vigil that was held to bring members of the community and members of law enforcement together to share and to pray together. Gail says that she's going to be going back for their services today at 11 o'clock and anyone who wishes to be in solidarity with our African American community at Christ the Solid Rock is certainly welcome to go over to attend their services that run from 11 to 1, but oftentimes they really don't get things going until about 1130, so you would still have an opportunity today if you would like to do that. Robin Lowney Langton says, please keep my father, Neil Lowney, in your thoughts. He had heart surgery on Thursday and he is now recovering in Minneapolis. And so we keep Robin and her family in our thoughts as well. We were sad to learn that long-time FUS member Mara McDonald passed away last weekend. We're not exactly sure what happened, whether she had a stroke or a heart attack or some other condition, but she died unexpectedly in her home. Mara had two animals that lived with her, a cat, which was very quickly adopted, but then also a dog named Macy, 12 to 13-year-old Rottweiler German Shepherd Mix, who is very sweet and good with adults. This dog has health issues, is in pain and is medicated for it. Also has a tumor that is probably cancerous and Macy is only expected to live for eight months to a year. But right now Macy is in the Humane Society and looking for a home without animals, without small children, where she could live out other remainder of her days. And so if any of you know Mara and have the ability to adopt this dog for a short period of time, give her a good home for a few months, then please please see me after the service. In addition to those just mentioned, we acknowledge any unarticulated joys or sorrows that remain among us and those we hold with equal concern in our hearts. Let us sit silently for just a moment or two in the spirit of empathy and of hope. By virtue of our brief time together today, may our burdens be lightened and our joys expanded. I invite you to rise once more and body or in spirit as we join our voices in our closing hymn. We receive fragments of holiness, glimpses of eternity, brief moments of insight. May we gather these up for the precious gifts that they are and renewed by their grace, move with curiosity and confidence into the unknown. Blessed be, please be seated for the post loop.