 Welcome to First Unitarian Society. I'm Roger Birchhausen, one of the ministers here today. I'm joined today along with my colleague Reverend Kelly Crocker by Drew Collins, Linda Warren, and Heather Thorpe from our music department, Daniel Kearns and Stephen Gregorius from our AV department, and the Felton Ryder family who are leading our chalice lighting. Here at FUS, we grow our souls, connect with one another, and embody our UU values in our lives, our community, and our world. This morning, we would like to call your attention to an upcoming service and workshop that are part of our Joyce and William Wortman series. On Sunday, February 7th, we will be joined by Alex Capitan from the Transforming Hearts Collective for worship, and then for a workshop that same day at 12.30 PM. Alex will help us imagine a culture that creates safety, inclusion, and justice for people of all genders and sexualities, both inside and outside our congregational walls. You can find more information on our website under the Happenings tab. And we encourage everyone to consider registering to be part of this essential conversation as we continue working toward being a people of radical inclusion and welcome. So we hope you'll join the workshop as well. Also a reminder that next week's service, which is a special community-wide celebration of the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., will premiere at 11 AM rather than 10 AM. And we will have, as usual, our coffee hour beginning immediately after that service that starts at 11. We warmly invite you to join the virtual coffee hour immediately after today's service as well. And the information on how to do that will appear on the screen at the end of the service. I invite you now to take a few deep breaths to be present here together in this virtual space to bring yourself fully into this time we share together. Let this be the place you consider what you've never considered. Let this be the place you imagine for yourself something new and unthinkable. May this hour bring dreams of new ways of being in the world. Come, let us worship together. And I invite you now to light a chalice or a candle in your home as the Felton and Ryder family leads us in our words of affirmation. In small towns and big cities, in living rooms and kitchens, many of our fellow Unitarian Universalists are also lighting a flaming chalice. As we light our chalice today, let us remember that we are part of a great community of faith. May this dancing flame inspire us to fill our lives with love, justice, and truth. A different sort of message for all ages today. It's a portion of a TED talk that I heard several years ago. It's about a person who cannot see colors, but with a little help from other people, he figures out how to hear colors. His story is really stuck with me. Let's meet Neil Harbison. Well, I was born with a rare visual condition called achromatopsia, which is total color blindness. So I've never seen color, and I don't know what color looks like, because I come from a gray-scale world. To me, the sky is always gray. Flowers are always gray, and television is still in black and white. But since the age of 21, instead of seeing color, I can hear color. In 2003, I started a project with computer scientist Adam Montandon. And the result with further collaborations with Peter Keche from Slovenia and Matias Lizana from Barcelona is this electronic eye. It's a color sensor that detects the color frequency in front of me, and sends this frequency to a chip installed at the back of my head. And I hear the color in front of me through the bone, through bone conduction. So for example, if I have like, this is the sound of purple. For example, this is the sound of grass. This is red, like TED. This is the sound of a dirty sock, which is like yellow, this one. So I've been hearing color all the time for eight years, since 2004, so I find it completely normal now to hear color all the time. At start, though, I had to memorize the names you give for each color. So I had to memorize the notes. But after some time, all this information became a perception. I didn't have to think about the notes. And after some time, this perception became a feeling. I started to have favorite colors, and I started to dream in color. So when I started to dream in color is when I felt that the software and my brain had united. Because in my dreams, it was my brain creating electronic sounds. It wasn't the software. So that's when I started to feel like a cyborg. It's when I started to feel that the cybernetic device was no longer a device. It had become a part of my body, an extension of my senses. And after some time, it even became a part of my official image. This is my passport from 2004. You're not allowed to appear on UK passports with electronic equipment. But I insisted to the passport office that what they were seeing was actually a new part of my body, an extension of my brain. And they finally accepted me to appear with a passport for them. So life has changed dramatically since I hear color. Because color is almost everywhere. So biggest changes, for example, is going to an art gallery. I can listen to a Picasso, for example. So it's like going to a concert hall because I can listen to the paintings. And supermarkets, I find this is very shocking, very, very attractive to walk along a supermarket. It's like going to a nightclub. It's full of different melodies. Especially the aisle with cleaning products. It's just fabulous. Also, the way I dress has changed. Before, I used to dress in a way that it looked good. Now, I dress in a way that it sounds good. So today, I'm dressed in C major. So it's quite a happy cord. If I had to go to the funeral, though, I would dress in B minor, which would be turquoise, purple, and orange. Also, food, the way I look at food has changed. Because now I can display the food on a plate so I can eat my favorite song. So depending on how I display it, I can hear and I can compose music with food. So imagine a restaurant where we can have lady gaga salads as starters. This would get teenagers to eat their vegetables, probably. And also some Rachmaninoff piano concertos as main dishes and some Bjork or Madonna desserts. That would be a very exciting restaurant where you can actually eat songs. I invite you into this time of giving and receiving, where we give freely and generously to this offering which sustains and strengthens our community, a community of memory, hope, faith, and love. This week, our outreach offering is shared with the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee whose mission is to advance human rights and social justice around the world, partnering with those who confront unjust power structures and mobilizing to challenge oppressive policies. Their work is grounded in the belief that all people have inherent worth, power, and dignity. You will see on your screen that you can donate directly from our website, fussmedicine.org. And you will also see our text to give information there. We thank you for your generosity and your faith in this life we create together. What I saw, the photo of the Capitol Police crouching behind a desk they'd used to barricade the door to the house chamber, guns drawn, insurrectionists clearly through the broken window, struggling to get in the room. I thought to myself that this will be the lingering image of this insurrection, this terrible event that beset our nation this week. It'll be like the Iwo Jima picture or the girl running out of the napalmed village in Vietnam, the picture that we conjure in our minds when we think of these events. Another photo though is haunting me from this past week in a different way. It's a photo of the insurrectionist who went into Nancy Pelosi's office and sat at what he thought was her desk. He clearly was making himself at home. His feet were up on the desk, looking at his cell phone. He claims that he left her a misogynist note and stole an envelope. I'm reminded of the words by Hannah Arendt about the Nazis, about the banality of evil. An opinion piece from Monica Hess in the Washington Post named the truth that this photo conveys. She writes that the Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol believed they were owed this opportunity to terrorize their elected representatives. They were allowed. They were the true guardians of democracy, not the officials who voters had chosen for the job. I read elsewhere that one of the chance that was used in the House by the insurrectionists and in the Capitol was this is our house. And they certainly acted as if they believed that. Monica Hess concludes her column, lawmakers have rushed to explain that these people don't represent America. Frankly, I don't think these people wanna represent America, a country full of immigrants and liberals and low income people, a majority of whom voted to boot Trump out of Washington. They couldn't represent America if they tried. I think they just wanna act like they own the place. That, friends, is the underlying premise of white supremacy. White Americans own this country. White Americans should be able to do what they want. If enough non-whites managed to vote in spite of voter suppression and carry the day, then it's time to storm the Capitol and overturn the vote. In this viewpoint, the Capitol belongs to white nationalists, not people of color or their white allies, especially not black people as the presence of the Confederate flag so aptly illustrated. Wednesday's insurrection and so much of what happened before was about making the Capitol and our government the white's house. Even if it's true that enslaved blacks largely built the Capitol. This is an unvarnished picture of white entitlement. Beneath the coded and uncoded language, Trump and his enablers are trying to restore, preserve, and protect white entitlement. That the Capitol was not ready for this onslaught in spite of Trump and others telegraphing that it was coming. In spite of the kid glove treatment that was clearly in evidence of the rioters, the insurrectionists, what we're seeing here is white privilege in action. It's white entitlement in action. And its embodiment is this guy acting like Speaker Pelosi's office is his living room. Make America Great Again is at its core about white domination of public space and white ownership of the bodies of blacks, indigenous people, and people of color. Our Unitarian Universalist principles and sources present a different view of our country and our world. We believe in the inherent dignity and worth of all people. And in the last few years, we have moved toward an understanding that we cannot respect the inherent dignity and worth of all people if we don't prioritize black and brown lives. When we fail to prioritize black and brown lives, we become accomplices to white supremacy. We've done this too much in our recent and distant past. This is a painful moment of reckoning for we as Unitarian Universalists. I've been talking a lot this year about widening the circle of concern, the report of the Unitarian Universalist Association's Commission on Institutional Change. It is an impressive and consequential work. And as I've said before, I'm really delighted that our board of trustees is reading it, engaging with it, as is our racial justice learning circle, in fact, this very afternoon. So one of the interesting things about widening the circle is its front and center assertion that we must dig into our theology and our spiritual practices if we are going to be able to widen our circle. As our UU faith got out of whack in the 20th century with an exaggerated focus on individualism making an idol of individualism, we ended up privatizing theology. What I mean by this is we kind of got to the point where the sense in most UU congregations that people ought to just sort of figure out what they believe on their own, mostly anyway, and that developing beliefs as an individual sort of private action, not part of a communal effort. Privatizing theological work and spiritual practice deprives Unitarian Universalists of the company of others as we fashion our individual beliefs and practices. And I think this is a really big loss. I am part of a congregation because my spiritual quest is enhanced immeasurably by the questions, the insights, the wisdom, and on occasion, the challenges of my fellow travelers in the congregation. If I'm on my own figuring out what I believe, I have no accountability to anyone. I have no help in thinking through the impact of my lives, my beliefs, and how I translate my beliefs into action. I believe that we're better together. That's why in addition to practicing my spirituality at home and in nature, I belong to a congregation. It's why I believe so strongly in creating opportunities here like the journey circles where we can explore and share in our spiritual journeys together. It's why I started pub theology here, which sounds like kind of frivolous, but it's really anything but frivolous. It's a chance to explore with others what we most deeply believe, what we give our hearts to, and how we practice our faith. Widening the Circle points out another problem of privatizing theology and spiritual practice in our congregations. It's that we have a too thin theology then and a lack of regular spiritual practice, and that makes it harder to sustain the work of justice over the long, slow hall. Most of us need a liberating theology and regular spiritual practice to keep on keeping on with the justice work. And a lack of these things facilitates burnout. The Commission on Institutional Change recommends that we re-engage with our theological legacy. And in order for our theology to become more liberating, it furthermore recommends that we center the theology of black scholars, indigenous scholars, and people of color who are scholars, both professional and lay. And I'm excited about these recommendations. I believe that creating our theologies and developing our spiritual practices should be at the center of our mission as a UU congregation. This work is as important as the justice work and in fact undergirds the justice work. I need to be clear that even as I lament the privatization of creating our own belief systems and practices, that I'm not advocating for a monolithic one size fits all single theology. Quite the contrary. My vision of a UU congregation is that there are as many unique theological viewpoints as there are people in the congregation. Our congregations should embody really wide theological pluralism. And the key to having wide and deep theological pluralism is making space for others. If any of us acts like, this is our house and only my way of seeing the world is allowed here, then we're acting like the guy in Speaker Pelosi's office. I cringe when I hear Unitarian Universalists declare things like, we don't believe in God here or we're not religious here. In a truly pluralistic Unitarian Universalist congregation, there will be folks who believe in God and folks who don't. There will be folks who describe themselves as religious and those who don't. Enforced oneness is an expression of white supremacy culture. And it happens too often in our congregations. It's part of why I think we remain overwhelmingly white in this increasingly diversifying country. Rosemary Bray McNat, who is the president of Star King School for the Ministry at Unitarian Universalist Seminary, writes about a conversation that she had several years ago with Coretta Scott King. Coretta King told Dr. McNat that she and her husband, Martin, had been tempted to join a Unitarian congregation, but they realized that they would never be able to build a mass movement of black people as Unitarians. McNat asserts that becoming Unitarian for them in the mid-20th century would have meant a fatal separation from the sources of Dr. King's power, a faith in a suffering God who stood with suffering people despite their mistakes and failures and covenantal love between himself and oppressed African Americans. There simply was not space created in Unitarianism in the mid 1900s for someone to have that viewpoint. McNat then asks some questions that shake me to the core. Do we really understand that in pursuit of this goal of an anti-racist Unitarian Universalist Association, we are risking more than we realize? Do we realize that we are risking being informed by varieties of religious experience not entertained in our churches for decades, if ever? Are we prepared to accept that even among people of color at comfortable economic levels, as opposed to those poor, uneducated people don't know any better than to praise God, there may not only be a theological but a cultural understanding of the divine that travels with them into our sanctuaries? These are such good questions. Too often blacks and other people of color have come into our sanctuaries and had members implicitly and once in a while even explicitly say, this is my house. You're welcome to be part of it if you act and believe like I do. If you can't do that, find somewhere else to go worship. For me, I would love to be in a genuinely pluralistic, eventually multicultural congregation in which people see and maybe even hear the colors of the world in different ways. Wouldn't it be amazing metaphorically to have a wide variety of Neil Harbison's, the guy who did the TED Talk, sharing how they see and hear and experience and understand the world in radically different ways? This is how all of our theological imaginations could be unleashed, stretched to the betterment of all. And so let's find ways to invite and welcome in different kinds of folks into this house of worship and let's embrace the understanding that as we do so, this house that we love, the way it is, is gonna change and it's gonna be a beautiful thing for all of us. We have a unique opportunity as Unitarian Universalists to create houses of worship with an incredibly wide variety of people and beliefs. I think our nation needs us to do this. I think the world needs us to do it and I think we need us to do it. May we do this good hard work. We gather here, hearts heavy with sorrow and hearts filled with joy. We share these here in community knowing that they are held in love. This week we light a candle of joy for Charlotte Wolf on the occasion of her 80th birthday this past Wednesday. Though not how she would have imagined spending this milestone, the day was filled with reminders of love and affection from those near and far. Happy birthday, Charlotte. A candle of love and healing for Nancy Shuler who is recovering from heart valve replacement surgery. We are so very glad to hear that she is doing well. We send Nancy our hopes for strength and continued healing. A candle of sorrow and loss for Jennifer Gaber as she mourns the passing of her uncle Mark. His life was filled with love and compassion and he will be deeply missed. And we light a candle for our nation, for our fragile democracy, for our bruised and aching and despairing hearts over the events of this past week. We light a candle for the joy and the pain, the hurt and the hope. If you'll join me now in a moment of prayer with words from the Reverend Douglas Taylor. Spirit of love and hope. We gather this hour as a community of faith seeking to transform our world through prayer and action, seeking to transform our lives through justice and beauty. We pause together to reflect. We reflect upon our times, our culture and ourselves. We reflect upon the needs of all people, upon our own needs and those of the ones we love. And yet we gather this way every week. Every week we work for and pray for goodness and love to triumph. Every week we speak of the power of hope and justice. Every week we take one step more for peace. And yet every week there's something else that we struggle to comprehend. Every week there's more tragedy, more injustice, more suffering. Help us to find hope against the embittering despair. Help us to remember joy. To find strength to act in the face of continued injustice and apathy. To find courage to still believe in those ideals of justice and beauty and common good. Help us to reach out from our very being to transform the world and to be transformed ourselves. Help us to know despite the messy complexity of life that we do not labor in vain, that we do not do this work alone. That peace will one day prevail. That perseverance will be rewarded and that hope is a powerful response in the face of despair. This we pray to the name of all that is holy. May it be so and amen. Please rise and body into our spirit and join us in singing hymn number 396. I know this rose will open. We see you. First Unitarian Society friends, we have worked to keep doing inside our walls, inside our virtual community. We have worked to do, to build a strong, diverse, beloved community within this congregation and then we can do better in building a beloved community beyond these walls. May we continue that sacred work. May we keep moving forward. May you go in peace.