 moment of centering silence so we can be fully present with each other this morning. And now let's get musically present with each other by turning to the words for our in-gathering hymn, which you'll find inside your order of service. And good morning, everybody. Welcome to another Sunday here at First Unitarian Society, where independent thinkers gather in a safe, nurturing environment to explore issues of social, spiritual, and ethical significance as we try to make a difference in this world. I'm Steve Goldberg, a proud member of this congregation, and I'd like to extend a special welcome to any newcomers, visitors, and guests. And I know you're out there because I saw some of you in the parking lot. If this is your first time at First Unitarian Society, I know that you'll find it's a special place. And we conduct guided tours after every service, and if you'd like to learn more about our special buildings, please join us over by the windows after the service, and we'll take care of you. And speaking of taking care of you during the service, this would be a great time to silence those pesky electronic devices that might interfere with your ability to enjoy the service. So thank you for taking a moment to perform this simple but important task right now. And if you are accompanied by a youngster to this morning service, and you think that young person might enjoy the service from a more private space, we offer a couple of options for you, including our child haven in the back corner of the auditorium and plenty of comfortable seating out in the lobby, also known as our commons, from which you and your young companion can still enjoy the service. The service is brought to us this morning by a dedicated team of volunteers, wonderful people whom I know personally and will vouch for their character. Mary Manoring is operating the solemn system, Tom Boykauf is our lay minister, Janine Nussbaum was the smiling person who greeted everybody upstairs this morning as we entered, and these people are the brave ushers, Rick DeVita, Melinda Carr, Ann Ostrom and Marty Hollis, and when you get a chance, thank Sandra Plisch and Nancy Kossoff for hosting the coffee and hospitality hour after the service. John Powell will conduct the tour after the service. Just a couple announcements before we get on with the service. First of all, on May 29, we will have a short program during which we will recognize the recent law changes for gay marriage by acknowledging our members who recently got married, and then we'll have a party complete with wedding cake, a DJ, dancing and photo booth, sounds pretty wild, doesn't it? If you want to get here in time, you want to arrive by 6.30 p.m. right here in the Atrium Auditorium, again that is May 29. A bittersweet announcement, Sasha Ostrom, our ministerial intern, will end her time with us at the end of the month, Sunday, May 31. We'd like to send her off with messages of thanks and good wishes, so in your order of service you'll find a card that you can use to create your own message and best wishes for Sasha, and we encourage you to do that when you have a chance. So once again, that's in your order of service. The only other announcement is that following the 11 o'clock service today, we will hold in this room a special budget meeting complete with a food hauler's provided lunch, and we invite you to attend that. So with that, the announcements are over. It's time to sit back or lean forward and enjoy today's service. I know it will touch your heart, stir your spirit, and trigger one or two new thoughts. We're glad you're here. As we gather in this beautiful space this morning, may we take the time to recognize and to affirm the pieces of possibility, the elements of goodness and beauty that we brought here with us. From our individual gifts, we create a multi-hued patchwork, a fabric richly blue with sensitivity and understanding, crimson with creativity, white with the heat of strong conviction, green with the delicacy of new growth, golden with the glow of love. Each of us is beautiful, each of us invaluable, and together in all of our glorious diversity, we are indeed a wonder to behold. It is good to be who we are. It is good to be on this journey together. I invite you to rise now in body or in spirit for the lighting of our chalice. And as Steve Kindles, the flame of our faith, I invite you to join with me in reading the words of affirmation in our program. May we each bring our best selves to this celebration, our ideals, dreams, and noble aspirations. May the flame we Kindle symbolize our desire for committed, compassionate, and constructive lives. May this gathered community inspire us to pursue life's worthiest goals. Now on this fine and rather interesting morning in May, please turn and exchange a warm greeting with your neighbor. Spirit of life, bestow your blessings on these flowers, colorful messengers of fellowship and love. May they remind us, amid our great diversity, of understanding and temperament, to be one in desire, affection, and in devotion to compassionate living. May these flowers also remind us of the need for sharing and cooperation in our common quest for understanding. May we always cherish friendship and community as one of life's most precious gifts. May we not let jealousy or resentment of another person's gifts and talents discourage or estrange us. May we realize that the efforts of all of us, the good will of all of us, are needed to heal and transform our wounded world. Please join me now in the spirit of meditation. And so now, occupying this quiet space and inspired by the lovely flowers before us, I invite you individually to picture in your mind's eye a blossom of some sort, a tulip, bleeding heart, a rose, a lotus, an iris, and choosing that particular flower. Allow it to fill the interior of your imagination, with inward gaze, absorb each wondrous fluted petal shimmering with moisture, sensuously colored, lightly scented. Slide down that flower's humid surface until you drop into its velvety core, and then sink into the cool, limpid heart pool. Let go of all thoughts, immerse your senses in this safe and comfortable chamber. Within the subtle fragrance and marvel that this creation, while so utterly fragile, boldly buds forth, turning resolutely toward the sun. We too, as human beings, shimmer with expectation, exuding our own illumination, color, pulse, and scent. We too are fragile, vulnerable, yet fortified by courage and hope, we too lean toward the light reaching and straining for the good, the true, and the beautiful. So yes, in some simple ways, our lives are not unlike this flower, delicate, persistent, original, gorgeous. And so on this day of Flower Communion, may we re-appreciate our own beauty, even as we celebrate the beauty of these flowers. May it be so. Amen. And now I would like to invite our young people to come forward for the message for all ages. So all of you know what special day this is? Other than Sunday? Yeah, graduation was this weekend, wasn't it? Your mom's birthday was yesterday. Happy birthday to mom, wherever you are. Oh, she's not here. Oh. Ah, well, your cousin's birthday's today. Well, today is also a special day because this is the last day that you're going to be in your church school classes until September. So I hope you've enjoyed your year in the religious education program. And September's your birthday. Will you come back on your birthday? Very good. We've got lots of birthdays here. Well, I want to tell you a story. Yeah, one more comment. The fourth day of September, first. First day of September? Okay, great. Oh, we've got lots of birthdays here. So I'm going to tell you a story about a birthday as well, and this is a story about the birth of springtime. And this is a story that comes from the Ojibwa Indians. And in the northern part of Wisconsin, there are lots of Ojibwa Indians that live there. So maybe this story actually came from Wisconsin. So once there was an old man and he was sitting inside his lodge, the lodge stood beside a frozen stream, and it was the end of winter. And the air was not as cold as it had been in January, which was a good thing, because the fire in the lodge was almost out. And this man was old, and he was alone, and his hair was white with age, and he was stiff in every joint, and his arms and his legs trembled. It means he couldn't walk very well. Everything was kind of stiff. And day after day had passed as he sat in his lodge, and he heard nothing outside but the storms sweeping all of the deep snow before it. But then on this particular day, a handsome young man approached and entered into his lodge. And this young man's cheeks were bright red, and his eyes sparkled, and he walked with a quick light step, and he carried in his hand a bunch of fragrant flowers, just like the flowers that you see up there. Ah, my son, said the old man, I am so happy to see you. Come in, come in. I want you to tell me about all of your adventures, what strange lands you have seen, and I will tell you about my wonderful deeds and the powers that I have. And then you shall do the same, and in this way we will entertain each other. And as a gesture of hospitality and welcome, the old man then drew out of his buckskin bag a long, unusually shaped pipe, and he filled that pipe with mild tobacco, lit it, and handed it to his guest. As was the custom among the Ojibwa and other native peoples, each one of them smoked from the pipe in turn, and then they began to tell their stories. I am the spirit of winter, the old man said. I blow my breath, and the streams stand still. The water becomes stiff and hard as clear stone. I am the spirit of spring, the young man said. I breathe, and the flowers spring up in the meadows in the woods. I shake my white locks at the old man, and the snow covers the land. The leaves fall from the trees, and my breath blows them all away. The birds all fly away to distant lands, and the animals hide themselves from the cold. I am the spirit of winter. I shake my dark hair, said the young man. And warm showers fall on the soft earth. The flowers lift their heads from beneath the ground, and the grass begins to grow thick and green. My voice recalls the birds from those distant lands, and they come flying joyfully from the south. The warmth of my breath opens up those ice-covered hard streams, and they sing the songs of summer. Music fills the groves wherever I walk, and all of nature rejoices. And even as these two were talking, wonderful changes were beginning to happen outside. The sun rose higher in the heavens. A gentle warmth stole over the lodge. The spirit of winter became silent, and his head began to droop lower and lower, and the snow outside the lodge yet all quickly melted away. And at this the spirit of spring grew even more radiant. He rose joyfully to his feet. The robin and the bluebird began to sing from the roof of the lodge. The stream began to murmur at the door, and the fragrance of opening flowers wafted into the lodge. But then the lodge just faded away. It was gone. And the spirit of winter, with a grateful sigh, sank down and dissolved into tiny streams of water that vanished beneath the brown leaves of the forest. And thus, that is the way that winter departed. And where the spirit of winter had melted clean away, the Indian children came the next day, and they gathered the first flowers, fragrant, delicately pink, of a modest flower that's called the spring beauty. And we may even have some spring beauties out there in our vases, in here in our vases. I'm not sure. But I hope you enjoyed the story about the coming of spring, and it is definitely spring now. And we hope you will enjoy the last class of the season. So stay where you are, because we have a little choral anthem before you leave. Let's give our kids choir a hand for their last performance of the year. You're very welcome. Thank you for being here. Dripping hazard, isn't it? So we continue our service with a brief selection from the Gospel of Mark, eighth chapter. Now Jesus sent his disciples set out for the villages of Caesarea Philippi. And while they were on the road, he started to question the disciples, asking them, what is it that you hear people are saying about me? And in response, the disciples said to him, well, some people say that you are John the Baptist. Others say Elijah. Still others say Jesus is one of the prophets. But he continued to press them saying, well, what about you? Who do you say that I am? And Peter responded to him, well, you are the anointed. And he warned them not to tell anyone about him. Slash will deliver our second reading. This reading is by Stephen Mitchell. It's titled, Jesus, What He Really Said and Did. Jesus was born and raised a Jew. He thought of himself as a Jewish teacher. All his direct disciples were Jews. He felt that his job was to teach Jews about God and about the right way to live, though his teachings are truly for all people, Jews and Gentiles alike. He remained a Jew throughout his short life. He didn't intend to start a new tradition, a new religion. He wouldn't have even known what the word Christian meant. Nor would he have recognized the name Jesus Christ. His name was Yeshua or Yeshua, which is Joshua in English and Jesus in Greek. Christ isn't even a name, it's a title. It's the Greek equivalent of a Hebrew word that means the anointed one. The Messiah is a figure in Jewish legend, a descendant of King David who will someday appear bringing peace and justice everywhere on earth. Jesus once or twice referred to himself as a prophet, but he never thought of himself as the Messiah or as the Son of God. True, he called God Father, but that was and is common in Jewish prayer. He didn't mean that he was literally a Son of God. What he meant by Son of God was someone who takes after God, just as a son takes after his father. If you truly love God and trust your fellow human beings with respect and compassion, then you are a Son of God. In other words, the more you are like God, the more you are a Son of God or a daughter of God. In fact, he wanted everyone to become a Son of God. However poor or stupid or ugly or confused we think we are, all of us are capable of becoming sons and daughters of God. Anyone who acts with unselfish love is God's beloved child. It is equally true that everyone is God's beloved child and that God's love is always present for us, no matter how selfishly we act. And now I would invite you to turn to your hymnals to hymn number 187 and please rise in body and spirit. Go tell Dan to raise the screen. So to the question that is posed in the title of today's reflections were the first Christians Unitarians, the most honest answer is yes and no. Now in tackling that issue we must first ask, what does it mean to be a Unitarian? And I'm purposely leaving the universalist side of the tradition out of the discussion if only to avoid muddying the waters. The question of our identity as a religious movement is somewhat complex because over the centuries Unitarianism and Universalism have steadily evolved, shedding certain beliefs and practices and along the way acquiring new ones. For instance, today it is the rare Unitarian Universalist congregation in the United States that serves the Lord's Supper, whereas that was pretty much standard practice until the 20th century. On the other hand, flower communion was introduced to our movement in the mid-20th century and it only achieved widespread acceptance by the 1970s. What does your religion stand for? We are often asked. To which one of our forebears replied, Unitarian Universalists don't stand, they move. Nevertheless, from an historical and theological standpoint it makes a certain amount of sense to begin with this label itself, Unitarian, and its connotations. Now originally, as I suspect most of you know, the word signified a person who had rejected the doctrine of the Trinity in favor of a unitary conception of God. Strictly speaking, traditional Unitarians declared that the Father alone is God, that Jesus was a figure of significant stature but he was still a human being and that the Holy Spirit is a power of God acting on and transforming human hearts. As the notable 19th century Unitarian thinker William L. R. E. Channing put it, we do, with all earnestness, protest against the irrational and unscriptural doctrine of the Trinity. To us, as to the apostle and the primitive Christians, there is one God, even the Father. With Jesus, we worship the Father as the only living and true God and we are astonished that any man can read the New Testament and avoid the conviction that the Father alone is God. Now Channing's declaration was issued at a time, 1819, when American Unitarianism was still in its infancy and when its apologists were eager to defend its Christian bona fides. In many respects their views back then were quite conventional. Channing agreed that Christ performed miracles, that he was raised from the dead, that his words and his deeds projected divine authority and that those words and deeds possessed redemptive power. But that was almost 200 years ago and the majority of those who now identify with our movement do not share the Christian sensibilities of those early Unitarians. Today, as one wag put it, the Unitarians believe in one God at most. Ours is in fact a post-Christian denomination. A substantial number of Christian Unitarians remain in our midst but we have drawn into our orbit religious seekers of many different persuasions. Nor do we restrict ourselves any longer to the traditional Christian scriptures. The canon of writings from which we receive moral and spiritual inspiration is radically inclusive. Scientists as well as mystics, pagans and Christians, social reformers and Eastern sages are all referenced in the six sources that are listed in your order of service and that inform our living tradition. But for the moment let's return to that word, Unitarian, as it was understood by its original Christian believers. Just how venerable is that particular idea and does it accurately reflect the views that were held by the earliest followers of Jesus? And once we've answered that question we can then ask whether the eclectic Unitarian universalism of the 21st century shares anything in common with those ancient Christian communities. Now as we heard a moment ago, William L. R. Channing defended his Unitarianism on a scriptural basis. We challenge our opponents to adduce one passage in the New Testament where the word God means three persons, he said. And in this Channing was substantially correct. Yes, if you turn to the final chapter of Matthew's Gospel you will find a baptismal formula in which Father, Son and Holy Spirit are all invoked in the same sentence. But the relationship of those three entities is not spelled out in Matthew. They do not constitute a trinity. Moreover, scholars agree that this particular passage represents the views of someone who was writing decades after Jesus' death and thus those words cannot be attributed to Jesus himself. So were Jesus and the first generation of his followers were they Unitarians? Almost certainly they were. Because they were faithful, if somewhat idiosyncratic, Jews. As Stephen Mitchell pointed out. The Unitarian historian Charles Howe concurs saying, for the first Palestinian Christians to have attributed divinity to Jesus, that would have been unthinkable. It would have been completely contrary to the Jewish concept of the oneness of God. That the outlook of Jews and Unitarians on this important question was quite similar is underscored by an accusation that Orthodox Christians often lodged against our own forebears. We were, they said, Judahizers. We were not legitimate Christians. We were more Jew than Christian. Now how did his earliest adherents regard Jesus? Opinions differed. But those who wished to reconcile his ignominious death to their high expectations of him, they probably regarded him as a martyred prophet whom God had posthumously glorified. Others probably revered him as an original and inspired interpreter of God's laws as they were set down in the Torah. And for the latter, the master's teachings were as if not more important than the actual person. Now as evidence for that latter claim that his teachings were of cardinal importance, Elaine Pagels points to a first-century document that is known as the Dedeke. And the Dedeke was probably composed at about the same time as the Gospel of Mark, maybe 65, 70 A.D. But the Dedeke, curiously enough, was left out of the New Testament. And so few apart from scholars are even aware of its contents, but it contains some of Christianity's earliest teachings. And so you will find in the Dedeke passages from the Sermon on the Mount which later found their way into the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. The Dedeke, Pagels writes, describes the way of life as set forth in the Hebrew Scriptures and as interpreted by Jesus. His followers, the Dedeke says, should strive for perfection in observing the pretexts, strive for perfection. But then the text continues, if you cannot be perfect, at least do the best you can. The Dedeke does not propound a doctrine. It does not present a creed. It does not speak of the need for correct belief. It focuses instead on the spiritual qualities that Jesus himself emphasized and embodied, qualities of love, loyalty, forgiveness, and selfless service. The Dedeke's Eucharistic theology is also distinctive. Whereas later generations of Christians drew this magical, mystical connection between bread and wine on the one hand and Christ's body and blood on the other, the Dedeke speaks instead of in-gathering and of the unity of God's people. It says, as this broken bread was scattered upon the mountains but was brought together to form one loaf, you will let your people be gathered together in this ceremony from the ends of the earth and into your kingdom. Much of what is presented in this ancient document, the Dedeke, is consistent with historical Unitarianism. Jesus was an inspired teacher. He was a moral exemplar. The importance of upright and godly behavior was emphasized. Jesus' interest was an exercise in communal sharing. And some of those same ideas that we find in the Dedeke are also found in the Epistle of James, which did find its way into the New Testament. Who is wise and understanding among you, James asks? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom. Now, as the center of gravity for this new religious movement, as it moved out of Palestine and for the most part into the Greek world, new perspectives gradually emerged. We can see something of that progression in the New Testament Gospels themselves. So in Mark, the first Gospel to appear, nothing whatsoever is said of Jesus' birth and infancy. For this writer, Mark, Jesus was conceived normally, just like any of us. He came into the world as an ordinary human being only at his baptism as an adult was this blameless man adopted by God and exalted above all other men. That is Mark's perspective on Jesus. Writing a decade or two later, Matthew and Luke add those infancy narratives, which for the first time suggest that Jesus was conceived and delivered as the Messiah. He did not have to earn his commission. It was pre-assigned. And then, just a few decades later, John's Gospel makes this stupendous claim that as the immortal logos, Jesus was already present, yes, at the creation. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. At this point, first part of the second century, we have left behind the world of Judaism and entered into the rarefied world of Greek idealistic philosophy. Throughout this process, the Jesuit scholar Thomas Sheehan writes, a functional theology gradually gave way to an ontological theology. I'll explain that. In other words, the older Jewish and Unitarian view of Jesus as a person who acted with divine power and authority, that view is superseded by a vision of Jesus as a divine being, as a divine authority. The doctrine of the Trinity still lay two centuries in the future, but the crucial steps in that direction have with the Gospel of John now been taken. It would be quite some time before unanimity on this subject was finally achieved and only then that unanimity was only achieved at the insistence of Rome's first Christian emperor, Constantine. Until the first creedal confessions were adopted in 325, many viewpoints circulated throughout the Mediterranean world, largely without hindrance. And so there were civilians who held that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit were not distinct entities, but merely modes or aspects of one unitary principle. And there were Gnostics for whom Jesus was holy divine, whose humanity was merely an illusion. And there were several schools of subordinationists who taught that Jesus was more than human, but clearly inferior to God the Father. And among the latter, the subordinationists, the most influential group, were the Arians who took their name from an Alexandrian monk and teacher named Arius. And during the third and fourth centuries, this faction, the Arians, enjoyed considerable popularity. And in keeping with Mark's Gospel, the Arians believed that Jesus had found favor with God and on account of his spiritual and moral accomplishments was ultimately adopted as God's Son. And after his crucifixion, Jesus was raised and he was granted semi-divine status. And like the author of the Deedicay, the Arians held that Jesus' value lay in his teachings and in his righteous behavior, as Richard Rubenstein observes, because his merit earned him the prize of immortality, the same reward was made available to other human beings provided that they modeled themselves after him. His triumph over egoism shows how we may become sons and daughters of God. Now, as relations between various Christian factions became more and more contentious, Constantine grew worried. And he concluded that because of these controversies between and among Christian groups, that the empire was suffering. And so in an effort to quell those disturbances, to create religious unanimity, together that great council at Nicaea and out of its lengthy deliberations came the Nicaean creed. And now, for the very first time, a single definition of the relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a single definition was declared normative and all others were condemned. Two centuries later, the Code of Justinian criminalized Arianism, making denial of the Trinity a capital offense. And so it's no surprise that the movement would then lay dormant for a thousand years until it was reawakened in the Protestant Reformation. Now, before closing these reflections, let me mention just a couple of other noteworthy parallels between contemporary Unitarian Universalism and those early Christian communities. The evidence does suggest that those early communities were constituted in a manner that we would find somewhat familiar. So these congregations were, generally speaking, inclusive, egalitarian, and non-hierarchical. Wayne Meeks writes that these congregations attracted individuals from across the socioeconomic spectrum. Religious and civic organizations of many types thrived in the permissive climate of ancient Rome, but few of those organizations featured the diversity of these Christian clubs as they were known. And moreover, the people who belonged to those clubs were admonished, no matter where they stood in the social pecking order, not to flaunt their rank or their privileges. All were equal within those Christian communities. And the word, the word that those Christians used to designate those communities, it was a Greek word, ecclesia. And that word is telling. It translates as church in English, but ecclesia referred in ancient times to a gathering of citizens. It was a political term associated with the demos, with collective decision-making. And that term fit those early congregations, because while they did feature differentiation of roles and functions, nothing like the monarchical structure of the later church was present at that time. They were largely egalitarian and democratic. And then finally, early Christian communities were unusually receptive to female leadership. Women frequently broke through the normal expectations of their gender, which was in distinct contrast to their subordinate status in both Roman and Jewish culture. Not that that didn't generate some controversy and male ambivalence over the role of women in congregational life is clearly recorded in the New Testament. At times, their contributions are celebrated in Paul's epistles, but in other passages, women are instructed to remember your place, stay quiet. For today's purposes, I would have us remember that unitarian universalisms, early acceptance of women ministers and our embrace of democratic principles and our affirmation of every individual's worth and dignity, all of these are foreshadowed in first-century Christianity. Now that, of course, is not the whole story. Wayne Meeks reminds us that these early Christians also availed themselves of miracle workers and exorcists. The world they believed was full of maligned forces that caused accidents and misfortunes. As Wayne Meeks observes, in explaining a change in his travel plans, the apostle Paul can say, Satan prevented me just as casually as we might say, my car had a flat tire. And one's opponents back then were accorded the same treatment. They were often described as the children of Satan. It was a very black-and-white world that they occupied. But now, after this brief excursion into the ancient Christian world, what is our takeaway? What meaning might all of the foregoing hold for us today as Unitarian Universalists? Well, I think it is always helpful to know, or in some of your cases, to be reminded, that Unitarianism and Universalism did not arise in Western civilization as a heresy, and that its intellectual lineage is at least as ancient as that of conventional Christianity. It remains an open question whether our perspective on Jesus is the right one, the most valid one, but it is a viable alternative to orthodoxy's traditional claims. And this knowledge can allow us to be less defensive and more definitive about our long and illustrious faith tradition. And then finally, this review also informs us that until the fourth century, the concept of orthodoxy was unknown in the ancient world, and that those early congregations featured significant theological diversity, just as ours do. What mattered most, Elaine Pagel's writes, was to share and to practice in the values of God's people. Or, as our own bond of union puts it, composed 1,700 years later, we accept into membership those of whatever theological opinion who wish to unite with us in the promotion of truth, righteousness, reverence, and charity among all. Long has it been so. May it remain so for decades to come. And as we know, our European forebears dwell in Transylvania yet today, and we have a partner church in Transylvania that we try to support from time to time. They are far less wealthy than we are, and so today, the offering will be dedicated, at least in part, to our partner church in the Joy to Romania. Please be generous. Cares of the congregation book today, but in lieu of sharing any personal cares, I wanted to read a pastoral letter that was composed by a number of local clergy, and they have encouraged us to read this letter during worship this week. And the letter was written in the aftermath of Tony Robinson's death and also growing awareness on the part of our community of the equity gap between African-Americans and the rest of our citizens, the achievement gap, and the phenomenon of mass incarceration that we experience in our state. Our Moses Ministry team and our equity task force have been working diligently on both of these issues, and will continue to do so, and from local clergy, and I've also been meeting with them myself as we try to move our congregations forward. We call upon our churches to gather for a season of discernment and self-examination. Amidst the tragedy of the death of Tony Robinson, and at a time where racial disparity continues to impact the lives of people of color, we in predominantly white churches are called upon to examine the privilege and the meaning of whiteness. And of course, we've had two white privilege classes right here at FUS. In this call, we hope for an honest and forthright conversation that not only leads to deeper understanding, but also to a plan of action for our congregations that will enable change to take place in our communities. We must confess our own complicity and apathy as a church in systems of inequality and racism that lead to the deaths of young black men. We must confess our lack of understanding of the dangers and struggles that our police face in their service to the community. We must confess that we have failed both people of color and the police by not witnessing more strongly for a peaceful, just, and reconciled society. And so we urge our faith communities to engage in the work of justice and reconciliation, in gathering together to examine and confess the nature of whiteness and privilege in our society. By doing this, we hope to identify and work toward strategies in partnership with communities of color that lead to real and effective change. Let us pray for our divided city, loving one another with mutual affection, trusting that amidst the frictions of our time, justice will prevail. Let us pray for the Robinson family, sharing in their continuing group. Let us pray for Officer Kenny. Let us pray for the protesters demanding justice and for the police who serve and protect us. That ends the pastoral letter and I invite you to join me in just a moment of silence and sympathy and in compassion. Blessed be and amen. Now I invite you one final time to rise in body and spirit as we sing together hymn number 78. From the meeting house or from this auditorium today, you can select a flower that is different from the one you brought with you. Pay attention to its particular shape, smell, and texture. This flower is a gift someone else brought to you. It represents that person's unique humanity. Handle it reverently with a sense of how important it is for each of us to address our world and each other with care and consideration, gentleness, and respect. We will end our time together today by sharing in this Unitarian Universalist ritual of communion and mutual appreciation. Please be seated for the benediction and the postlude. And so like a prairie whose health depends on its diversity of life forms, our free congregations prosper when they permit a diversity of perspective, when they are fertilized by curiosity, when they are watered by mutual respect and honor. Touched by the spark of all that is holy, let us go forth in peace resolved to act upon our most cherished values. May it be so. Amen.