 in a few moments of centering silence. Please remain seated as we sing our in-gathering hymn to 95. The words are in your order of service, and someone pointed out to me between services that the words on here and the words in your book are different. So if you're one of those folks who likes to look at the music while you're singing, that's fine. We all may be singing different verses, but just be aware of that in case it matters, OK? And thank you. Good morning. Welcome to the first Unitarian Society of Madison. This is a community where curious seekers gather to explore spiritual, ethical, and social issues in an accepting and nurturing environment. Unitarian universalism supports the freedom of conscience of each individual. As together, we seek to be a force for good in the world. My name is Karen Rose Gredler, and on behalf of the entire congregation, I would like to extend a special welcome to any visitors who are with us this morning. We are a welcoming congregation, so whomever you are and wherever you happen to be on your life's journey, we celebrate your presence among us. Newcomers and others are encouraged to stay for our fellowship hour after the service and to visit the library, which is directly across from the center doors of this auditorium. Bring your beverages and your questions. Members of our staff and lay ministry will be on hand to welcome you. You might also want to look for persons holding teal-colored stoneware coffee mugs. These are FUS members knowledgeable about our faith community who would welcome visiting with you. Experienced guides are sometimes available to lead tours after the service, but I don't think we have one for this service. If you are particularly interested in a tour, you can see one of us. Can you do it, Harry? Great. Harry is going to lead the tour. Thank you very much. So anyone who's interested, meet Harry after the service up here in what's your left-hand corner of this auditorium, and he'll show you what we've got. Thank you, Harry. OK. We welcome children to stay for the duration of this service. However, some people have difficulty hearing in this acoustical environment. So our child Haven in that corner and the commons behind are excellent places to go if your child wants to sing and dance and run around, and you guys agree that it's better to go to a different place. There was a baby crying during part of the last service, and I just loved it. It was so joyous. It was so life-affirming that I thought, we should hire babies to come and cry in every service because it's very, very spiritual. But if you decide to go because your child wants to run around or whatever, that's fine. We have places. We'd also appreciate if you would turn off any noise-making devices which would primarily be cell phone ringers. That's helpful. And also, unlike darling babies crying, that's kind of annoying during times we're trying to read, trying to hear people doing readings. So turn off the cell phones. Welcome the babies. I'd now like to acknowledge those individuals who help our services run smoothly. And for this service, we have Mark Schultz doing sound. We have Anne Smiley as our lay minister. Our greeters were Becky R, Becky Dick, and Pam Winnie. And let's see. I've got my list screwed up here. Our ushers are Carol Ferguson, Tom Dolmich, Patricia Becker, and Dan Bradley. Then our hospitality folks making coffee are Jeannie Hills and Terry Felton. This morning, we had John Twos to thank for watering our plants and carrying after them. And he did that at the first service. Please note the announcements in the red floors insert in your order of service. This describes upcoming events, things that are going on today. There's a lot happening. It's a very active social environment for us and for the community at this time. So in addition to a list of upcoming services, please look at everything that's going on that's listed in here, as well as the agenda for our parish meeting, which is happening soon after this service. Again, welcome. We hope today's service will stimulate your mind, touch your heart, and stir your spirit. As we come together in this light-filled room, may it be a place for us to find meaning, to choose justice, to remain faithful to our highest values. Here may we reaffirm our conviction that truth brings freedom, that freedom inspires reason, that reason fosters tolerance, and that tolerance reinforces the search for truth. With true collegiality, we welcome all who would travel with us along this road of interdependent thought and worship. We invite your queries. We invite your companionship. With a sense of gratitude, we welcome each in the name of all to this hour of search and celebration. I invite you to rise in body and spirit for the lighting of our chalice. And as Karen Rose kindles the flame of our faith, please join me in the responsive affirmation. Would you please read the bolded italicized sections. We have gathered here in search of answers to life's riddles. We have come in search of hope and healing. Let this be a place not only of inquiry, but of insight. Let this be a place where healing fosters giving, and hope fosters service. And now in the spirit of that circle of love, please turn to your neighbor and exchange with them a warm greeting. Please be seated. Good morning. Leslie Ross, the director of Children's Religious Education here. This weekend we have the pleasure of experiencing our annual banner parade that each of our children's RE classes participate in. We have 29 classes here, spread out over our three service times, and over 450 kids enrolled in our classes. So there has been a lot of serious decorating happening in our classrooms. Sharing their banners is one small way of sharing with all of you the things that they talk about, think about, play about, and share about in their classrooms. We hope that you'll enjoy their creations as they march through the auditorium. And then during service, I will hang them up in the commons area, so be sure to take a look at how awesome they look out there. The place just fills with creativity and color. It's really beautiful. And lastly, I just ask that you save your applause for the very end of the parade so that we're not here for too long during the parade. So let's bring them on. This is an outstanding religious education program. And in a few months, the program will be, once again, soliciting teachers for the fall semester. And so when the call comes out, we would hope that some of you who perhaps have never done this before would take advantage of the opportunity to work with the youngest members of our community. So we continue our service with two selections from Unitarian Universalist clergy, the first one from Brandy Lovely, who actually was one of my teachers in seminary back in the early 1970s. He also served our Unitarian congregation in Pasadena, California. Brandy writes that simple direct observation leads me to believe that especially in religious matters, most people do not want to think and judge for themselves. Most individuals expect the minister, the priest, the guru, the rabbi to be the religious leader who knows the saving truths and the moral oughts. He or she tells the people what they are to believe, how they are to act, and points out who the heretics and the sinners are. This expectation is held not only by most churchgoers, but also by those who completely ignore organized religion. There are only a very few individuals who take religion seriously and are also willing to take the responsibility of thinking and feeling it through for themselves in concert with other thoughtful caring individuals who are involved in the same process. Now, some religious liberals think that we should do more to attract the multitudes, positioning ourselves as the church for all people. I believe this is misguided. If we attracted multitudes, we would be unable to practice our faith. Our task is to attract curious, independent religious seekers, and there are simply not hordes of them. The purpose of our movement is to serve our uniqueness in ways that are religiously nurturing and spiritually expanding. Most people could care less about this kind of church. And so what we need to do is to accept the reality of that situation, forget the inane myth that we ought to have universal appeal, and conscientiously seek those who, like us, are willing to doubt, to test, to think, to affirm, and to live our religious values day by day. The second selection comes from the Reverend Judith Walker Riggs, who has served congregations both in this country and in England. Some years ago, some friends of mine, including the dean of one of our theological schools, the president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, and a philosophy professor from Canada, this group, along with others, were midway through a trip to our sister Unitarian congregations in Transylvania. This was before the end of the Cold War, when travel in Eastern Europe was still difficult, and at times rather risky. Now, as this party was leaving Hungary, where they had visited many descendants of the Unitarian churches of the 1600s, they were about to enter Romania, and of course, they had to pass through customs. Their belongings were thoroughly searched. Why do you want to come into Romania, they were asked, to attend a religious festival of our faith and meet with local religious leaders, they replied. Well, this answer provoked an even more thorough search of the Westerners' baggage. The guards were looking for Bibles, religious tracts, the importation of which was strictly forbidden by the repressive Cecescu regime. Our colleagues felt completely secure. They were not hard-shell revolutionary Baptists trying to smuggle in seditious religious material. They relaxed, nothing to find here. And indeed, nothing was found, not a single Bible, not a single tract, which led my friends to being detained for another four hours. The customs agent's suspicions had been raised another notch. Are you trying to tell us that you are religious officials and you don't have any Bibles? Who are you anyway? Some days you can't win for losing. You see, it's not easy to explain to a border guard that your religion is a connectedness to the power of life itself, one that constantly challenges us to love and think in an ongoing search for an ever-elusive truth. That doesn't pack very well in a suitcase. And it's hard to communicate in a few simple phrases, but it's no less valuable or tangible for all of that. Thank you, Dan. Linda, thank you, choir, for that perfect compliment to today's message. So many moons ago, with a newly minted PhD in hand, I accepted a call to serve the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Binghamton, New York. And after the holidays in my first year of service, I became aware of a longstanding custom of pulpit exchanges among clergy in the Protestant community during what was called a week of Christian unity. So hoping to build some bridges with my local colleagues, I submitted my name and look forward to participating in this community event. And the coordinators duly paired me with a Presbyterian minister. And so a few Sundays later, I preached what I thought was an engaging and inoffensive sermon to a rather smallish crowd in their large ordinate sanctuary. I came away feeling pretty good about that morning. And my own congregation, they seemed to appreciate its inclusion in this ecumenical undertaking. It was not an opportunity that my immediate predecessor had ever taken advantage of. And so when the next year rolled around, I again applied, and I was duly exchanged with a Methodist minister, beginning to feel like one of the gang. But then in the third round, something shifted. Shortly after I had applied, I was informed that as a Unitarian Universalist, I was not eligible to participate. This is a week for fostering Christian unity, I was told. And you and your congregation simply do not meet that criterion. And to be quite honest, the coordinators did have a point. My Bigampton congregation was comprised primarily of humanists with a few pagans and cultural Jews thrown in. And although its lineage, which went back to 1885, was indeed Christian, just like this one, only a minority still self-identified as Unitarian Christians. And frankly, my own convictions have always been more closely aligned with Buddhism than with Christianity. Nevertheless, I was stung a little. And so I appealed the decision to no avail. There would be no comity between Unitarian Universalists and the Protestant community. Now, some of the hurt from that rejection was softened a bit because soon after that, the Jewish rabbi and I, we began to have to enjoy some warm relations. And so we began our own annual pulpit exchanges, which made perfectly good sense from a historical standpoint because Unitarians have long been criticized for being more Jewish than Christian, owing to our historic rejection of the Trinitarian creeds. Indeed, our forebears three centuries ago were often described as Judaizers. Now, I found a much different religious climate when I came to Madison in 1988. One of the first calls that I received was from our near neighbor, who served First Baptist Church up here on Franklin. And he welcomed me into the community, and he invited me to join him at the next gathering of the downtown clergy group. Lutheran, Episcopalian, Methodist, Jewish, Presbyterian, Knight of Church of Christ, Baptist, and Unitarian leaders from Madison's Central Corps all participated in this informal body, which was originally formed during the tumultuous 1970s. And the founders included my predecessor, Max Gabler. They had come together initially to act as mediators when violent clashes broke out on campus between Vietnam War protesters and the local law establishment officers. But then after things quieted down, this band of clergy brothers, and they were all brothers back then, they decided that they liked meeting together. So they continued to meet weekly for coffee and conversation. And I became a regular participant, and I grew to appreciate how much we shared in common, despite our theological differences. And since that time, I have spoken in any number of Protestant churches here in Madison at their invitation. And we now, as a congregation, collaborate with many faith-based organizations in a host of different social justice causes. And in 29 years that I've been here, I have never seen anybody reject us for our lack of Christian credentials. But in matters of religion, as in so many things, Madison is remarkably tolerant and accepting. And the first Unitarian society enjoys here a high level of respect, which is not true in all communities in this country. And yet, for all of that, we are the quintessential heresy. At least if words have any meaning at all. Because you see, our English word heresy comes from the Greek heresis, which literally means to take for oneself or to choose on one's own. And this is, of course, what we do. In our non-cretal, non-doctrinal tradition, where the right of individual conscience is held sacred, we each choose what to believe or what to disbelieve. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it so long ago, no facts to me are sacred, none are profane. I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no past at my back. But in confessional religions, one does not choose. One submits, at least with respect to the essentials of the faith. On doctrines like the Trinity, the Virgin Bird, infant baptism, the vicarious atonement, choice is not allowed. To even question these immutable truths is to invite an accusation of heresy. Now, from the standpoint of the world's great religions, this is a rather exceptional stance to take. Heresy is an utterly foreign concept in Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism and Confucianism and even in Judaism. These days, one can profess to be an atheist and still be thought of as a good Jew. The Hindu philosopher Sarvapali Radhakrishnan undoubtedly speaks for many in the non-Christian world when he writes that the principle of unity in variety, unity in variety, that's a profound spiritual truth and it makes utter common sense. Religious exclusivism, he says, has been a frequent source of fanaticism and of strife. So a little less missionary ardor, a little more enlightened skepticism, that would be good for all of us. And even within early Christianity, there was a lot of unity in variety, very little uniformity of belief and really no grounds for labeling somebody else a heretic. Those ancient Christians argued strenuously among themselves about the nature of God, the status of Jesus, the significance of the sacraments. They disagreed about so many things, Richard Rubenstein writes, but there was always this closeness between them. But then eventually that came to an end. Powerful figures within the early church decided that this unity in diversity was not such a good idea, that in fact it posed an existential threat to Christians as individuals and to the movement as a whole. And so these powerful figures argued successfully that salvation and belief were indissolubly connected. This was no mere academic matter, Rubenstein writes. If the correct doctrine wasn't imposed, millions of souls would be lost and Christ himself would be dealt a terrible defeat. And so it was in 325 AD, the reign of orthodoxy began. The Nicene Creed made belief in the trinity obligatory for all adherents of the Roman Catholic faith. On this question, the possibility of personal choice was eliminated and to ensure that the faithful would toe the line, a list of anathemas was subsequently attached to the Creed itself. But those who say there was a time when Christ was not and he was not before he was made and he was made out of nothing or he is of another substance or essence or the Son of God is created or changeable or alterable, they are all condemned by the holy Catholic and apostolic church. By the sixth century, deviation from doctrines like the trinity or infant baptism or eternal damnation, all of these heresies were made punishable by death and needless to say, that proved to be a pretty effective deterrent. And so for many centuries, people didn't even bear think about these things or privately imagine that there could be any alternative as the historian Stephen Greenblatt points out, the church had also rigorously condemned curiosity as a mortal sin. It would be almost a thousand years before anyone successfully challenged the major tenets of the Catholic faith and those who dared like the 13th century Cathars or the 15th century Hussites, a few willful theologians, they were all violently put down suppressed. The Protestant Reformation of the 16th century broke the Catholic church's monopoly on sacred truth and saw the rise of numerous religious innovators, but certain age old doctrines remained inviolable. And so those who questioned the trinity were still condemned as heretics by Protestants and Catholics alike. One of the few things that they actually agreed upon. And thus Michael Servetus, one of our own Unitarian forebears was burned at the stake in Geneva, not by the Catholics, but by the Protestants. And his insightful book on the errors of the trinity was banned and all but a handful of copies were destroyed. A few decades later, the non-cretal Unitarian leading minor reform church of Poland, that church was decimated by a coalition of Catholics and Lutherans. A remnant from that church that fled to the mountains of Transylvania where they joined together with the one Unitarian movement that was able to resist this war on heresy. Throughout history then, Unitarians and Universalists for that matter have been regarded by mainstream Christians not just as your garden variety heretics, but as arch heretics. With the 18th century enlightenment, that began to change. Pedalties for disavowing the trinity were relaxed. Unitarian congregations began to spring up in England and Wales and here in the colonies. And although our forebears here in America were still decried as heretics by defenders of the faith, a state of uneasy coexistence began to emerge. And with respect to the 18th and 19th century, Universalists, not Unitarians, Universalists, well, for them the story was a little different. Their existence was a little more problematic. John Murray was one of our early Universalist evangelists and he was often pelted with eggs and sometimes even with stones when he came to a new town to preach the good news of universal salvation. You see, because they were not thought to be sufficiently God-fearing, Universalists were persecuted. They were prevented from testifying in courts of law. They could not hold public office in many of the new states of the Union as Max Coots riley observed. By reading themselves of hell, the Universalists scared the hell out of everybody else. And even the Unitarians, so similar to the Universalists in a number of ways, they had qualms about the latter's blithe dismissal of universal damnation. And many Unitarians agreed with their orthodox rivals that only a just and harshly punitive God could deter human beings from acting sinfully. Even the Unitarians had doubts about the Universalist Gospel. But for both of these two prongs of our movement, Unitarian and Universalist, freedom of conscience has always been important. It's always been a hallmark of our faith. But unfortunately, we ourselves haven't always been utterly consistent on this regard. Our own movements sometimes have been, had thought it was necessary to curtail people's right to choose, at least in certain particulars. And so in the early 1800s, when this transcendentalist, this American romantic movement was beginning to emerge, Ralph Waldo Emerson was invited to Harvard Divinity School to address the graduating students. And after he had apprised the graduating students of the premises of transcendentalism, another professor at that school, Andrews Norton, served up this scathing rebuke of Mr. Emerson. He said the words God, religion, Christianity have a definite meaning, well understood. But how shamefully they have been abused in modern times by infidels, by pantheists, should preachers like Mr. Emerson abound and grow confident in their folly, we can hardly overstate the disastrous effect they would have upon religion and the moral taste of our community. So Emerson found himself on the outside now looking in. In time, tempers cooled. Emersonianism prevailed. Transcendentalists gained acceptance followed in short order by humanists, pagans, and any number of other chosen faiths. And by 1894, the Unitarian Association had revised its constitution, emphasizing that no doctrinal test would ever be required and that membership in our association was open to all. And so we recognized, well over a century ago, that we could no longer be an exclusively Christian denomination and thereby strengthen our commitment to a free and open-ended search for truth and meaning, wherever that might lead. And that's where we still are today. Now the Universalist Church was something else again. They were much more fearful of losing their Christian identity. And so at one point, as transcendentalism was beginning to gain in popularity among Universalists, the leaders of the Universalist Church of America placed some limitation on members' freedom of conscience. And in fact, they even imposed, for a short period of time, a creed that was during this stressful time that the church actually conducted its first and last heresy trial. The Reverend Herman Bisbee of St. Paul, Minnesota was called onto the carpet for promoting transcendentalism and a post-Christian universal vision of religion. Natural religion is an all-embracing religion, he wrote in 1870. It recognizes the religion of the atheist, as well as the Hindu and the Muslim. It opens the door to infinite expansion. In natural religion, all information is welcome. There are no pet theories to maintain. Truth is the great requirement and all that helps the truth helps religion, he wrote. Now, Bisbee's perspective on these things would, just a few decades after that, become normative for Universalists. But in 1872, it just could not pass muster. Bisbee was tried, convicted of heresy, and expelled from the Universalist Church of America. And he forthwith joined the Unitarians. Bisbee's words are now a century and a half old. And they have, to us, a decidedly modern ring. And for more than a few Americans, they probably don't sound nearly as outrageous as they did to those who sat in judgment of Herman Bisbee in 1872. And yet I would wager that most Americans, when they pause to think about religion, this is not where their thoughts naturally lead. Like those Romanian border guards that I alluded to earlier, they'd probably say, what? You call yourself religious? Where are your Bibles? Repeat to us your creed of confession. But many of us who have discovered Unitarian Universalism have found it refreshing, a welcome change from that kind of doctrinal obedience that orthodox communities still insist upon. Heresy is not for everybody, however. And that is why we remain a small denomination. As Brandy Lovelace sagesly observed, there are only a very few individuals who take religion seriously and are also willing to take the responsibility for thinking and feeling it through for themselves. That's Heresy. Now, Brandy Lovelace wrote those words that I just quoted 35 years ago. And I've seen that much has changed since then. Yes, ours is still a relatively small denomination. But today, many mainline Protestant congregations actively encourage just this kind of spiritual investigation, and they are not particularly invested in creedal conformity. There's kind of a parallel here. You see, by the late 19th century, our universalist forebears, well, they began contracting. The church began to contract. And why was that? Well, there were a number of different reasons. But one of the primary reasons is because their Methodist and Lutheran rivals had pretty much by the end of the 19th century stopped preaching fire and brimstone. The universalist has succeeded in converting the opposition. Now, a hundred years later, we see much the same thing happening with respect to this whole concept of heresy, the right of conscience, the freedom to choose. It's a principle that growing numbers of Protestants and even Catholics are actively practicing. So yes, we have long been the quintessential heretics. But I would hope that if I returned to Binghamton in 2017 and asked to participate in that week of Christian unity, things might play out a little differently. The stigma of heresy is on the way out. And for that, we can take some credit for having paved the way. Blessed be Adam and man. And now I do invite you to participate in the giving and the receiving of our offertory and you will note that we are sharing it this week with the AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin. Please be generous. This would normally be a time when we would share some joys and sorrows and concerns that were recorded in our Cares of the Conrogation book, which all sits right outside the main doors there. There was not an entry for the 11 o'clock hour, but I would like to add a little shout out to Patty Whitty, who was the person that purchased the theme, the subject for today's sermon at last spring service auction. And Patty's over here and she has had the stamina to sit through all three of my sermons yesterday and today. So thank you for inspiring me, Patty. I appreciate it. So we will now turn directly to our closing hymn, number 131, Love Will Guide Us. Please be seated for the benediction and the postlude and the choral closing. Defined as a set of right beliefs and ritual observances, religion can become divisive, absurd. Religion as walking with others, listening to others, sharing with others. That's not a creed, it's a way of life. To be religious is to be grateful for what we have been given and to give in return as much as we possibly can. Religion is a way of life with sympathy, responsiveness, reverence for sacred potential, respect for one another and the miraculous earth and all of its creatures. Religion is a way of life that love makes beautiful. Amen. Blessed be all.