 My name is Kelly Crocker, and I am one of the ministers here. Today, I'm joined by my colleague, the Reverend Kelly Asbruth Jackson, and the worship team of Linda Warren and Daniel Carnes. The vision of First Unitarian Society is growing souls, connecting with one another, and embodying our Unitarian Universalist values in our lives, in our community, and in our world. If you are visiting us today, welcome. We're so very glad that you are with us. If you'd like more information about First Unitarian Society, please stop by the welcome table located out in the commons, out these doors, and to my left. And we hope that you'll be able to stay and join us for our fellowship hour, which happens right out in the commons after service. Our all ages after service activity this morning will be down at the end of the commons in the religious exploration area. We will be creating our very own pride flag together. And for those of you connecting with us virtually today, we are glad that you are with us as well. And we hope that you'll be able to join us for our virtual coffee hour immediately following today's service. The information for joining can be found on the homepage of our website, fussmedicine.org, as well as on the slide that will be seen again after the postlude. Our announcement slides will also be shown briefly after today's service and we encourage you to take a look at those and learn more about upcoming programs and activities. And now, I invite you to join me in a moment of silence as we center ourselves, bringing ourselves fully into this time, joining together once again in community. People sometimes ask, is pride a protest or a party? And the answer is, of course, yes. And why not? Why not rejoice as we resist, dance as we demand change, celebrate as we create community that delights in all of who we are? So bring all of that with you this morning. Bring your policy demands. Bring your glitter. Bring your Supreme Court broken heart. Bring your rainbow socks. Bring the emptiness you feel for our siblings gone too soon. Bring your Gloria Estefan remix. Bring your tender hope for change. Bring your most garish eye shadow. Bring your spirit. Tattered and battered by a world that seems insistent on choosing fear and hate. Gather up all these things and bring them here to a place where we don't have to shoulder these burdens or celebrate these joys alone. Come, let us worship together. And I invite you now to rise in all the ways we do and join in our words of affirmation as we light our chalice. We light this flame to ignite our hearts and minds, the spark of knowledge that enlightens, the shimmering hope that burns, the blazing love that engulfs our actions, the bonfire of our commitment. Now will you please stay risen in body and our spirit as we sing together hymn number 10-07 as a river flowing in my soul. We seated. And if anybody would like to come up closer for our story, please do come on up. I saw your sister covering her ears and running out. It was amazing. Robin, how you been? Your poem was amazing last week. Did you see it? It was so good. Well, our story today is about a peacock. Have you ever seen a peacock? Don't you? I love wild crats. Absolutely. I kind of want to live in the Tortuga. I kind of want to live. I once lived in a house where a neighbor had peacocks and two of them escaped and lived in the trees in our yard for a few weeks. They make a really awful noise at 3 a.m. I was not a fan of peacocks after that, but they're beautiful, aren't they? So today is a story about Peter. So this is Peter who was born a peacock. Don't add this. He says, my name's Peter. I was born a peacock and don't ask me how it happened, but somehow some way I grew up in a flock of pigeons and being a peacock in a family of pigeons isn't easy at all. You see, pigeons do not always like others who are different. Sometimes pigeons can treat other birds like they're not good enough just because they don't look the same or fly the same. They call them names and make them feel like they're strange, weird, or they don't belong. My pigeon flock thought I walked funny. They thought I talked funny, and they said my feathers were too colorful. And when you grow up with no other peacocks around, it can be easy to think they're right. I spent a long time hiding my colorful feathers and pretending I was a pigeon. What do you think? Did it work? No, it doesn't work. I tucked my feathers away and covered myself with mud and dirt to hide my bright colors. I walked upright like a pigeon. I puffed out my chest like a pigeon, and I kept my tail from swishing and swaying so no one would notice how different I was. But it was no use. Whenever I relaxed, one of my flashy feathers would slip out and everyone would notice and point and laugh. My pigeon friends would call me names. They would pretend to walk like me and make fun of my voice. And even though I acted like them, any beak with two eyes could see I didn't belong. One day, when no pigeons were around, I walked by a puddle and I looked at my reflection. Ugh, the bird I saw looking back was this ugly bird who was too flashy, too flamboyant, and embarrassing. I thought my blues were too blue, my greens were too green, and my golden hues were much too shiny and bright. I believed what the other pigeon said, and I did not like the bird staring back at me. But there was no use trying to be a pigeon. I'd never be able to change my feathers. It was time to fly out on my own. At first, my journey was a lonely one. But one day, I met a cardinal named Craig. He was sassy and he was bold. He told me funny stories that made me laugh and laugh. He didn't seem to mind being around a peacock like me. Craig introduced me to his canary friend, Sarah. Sarah was very friendly and had a sing-song voice that made me smile. Do you know what she told me? She thought my feathers were beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, she wanted to introduce me to Owen, the owl. Owen was smart. Owen was sophisticated. Owen moved like no bird I had ever seen before. He said he liked the way I moved, too. Craig, Sarah, and Owen introduced me to more of their friends, each unique and beautiful in their own way. There was Fanny the Flamingo, who made even me feel plain and ordinary with her dazzling pinks and whites. There was Henry the Hummingbird, who never finished a sentence before fluttering away. There was Benny the Bluejay, the fastest bird I'd ever seen. And there was Penny the Parrot, who was very nice and, whew, did she love to talk. There were so many different birds. Some bold, some sweet, some smart, some funny, each one special in their own way. On one very special day, I came upon a beautiful bird I had never seen before. He had the brightness of yellow like Sarah, my canary friend, the boldness of blue like Benny the Bluejay. His tail swished back and forth like he was dancing and his feathers had a beautiful starry glow. On the very top of his head, he had a funny crown of feathers that fluttered about. He was the most beautiful bird I had ever seen. I just had to take a closer look. I took a few steps closer, but the beautiful bird disappeared. Instead, I saw the ripples of a puddle I had just stepped in. What do you think was happening? Anybody have a guess? Who's the beautiful bird? It's him, isn't it? I squinted my eyes in disbelief. It was my own reflection. Could it really be me? For so long, I only saw what the pigeons saw. And although my feathers never changed, I saw myself differently after meeting new birds who were special and liked me for the peacock I am. I wasn't just a silly blue bird with flashy feathers and a funny walk. My flamboyant tail filled with bright colors no longer embarrassed me. And I didn't want to be just like the rest of my pigeon flock. I was happy to be me. So whether you are bright as a canary, as cool as a cardinal, as flashy as a flamingo, your feathers are what make you special. So embrace who you are from your beak to your bird feet and never let anyone break your stride. And always remember to love the feathers you were born with. That's our story of Peter the peacock. Thanks for coming up here. What'd you like best? You like Benny the Blue Jay because he was fast? You can run faster than your dad? Yeah, that's not all about it. Yeah, what about you, Cam? Can you run faster than dad? No, I can just run. You can just run. Yeah, I want to run. You'll get there. That's right, when you get bigger, you're going to run just as fast as Cade. Thank you all for being here and for listening to our story and you can head back to your seats. And I now invite you into the giving and receiving of today's offering. We give freely and generously to this offering which supports the ongoing work of this community. You'll see on the screen that you can donate directly from our website, fussmedicine.org. You'll find the text to give information there as well. In addition, there are baskets at the exits of the auditorium for those of you here in person. And we thank you for your generosity and your faith in this life we create together. I want to tell you a story from the Yoruba tradition of West Africa, which spread actually from there to points in the Caribbean and North and South America throughout the African diaspora. It's a very important tradition and the figure of Obatala is one of the most important characters in that tradition. It's said that Obatala descended from heaven on a chain and reached the earth and set about making humankind. Now, you need to understand that in some stories, Obatala is shown as a man. In other stories, Obatala is shown as a woman. In still others, Obatala might be something else entirely. Sometimes they're a dove, for example. So I'm not actually sure what Obatala was in this, who he, she, or they was in this story, but they set about making human beings out of clay. And it's long, hard work to make all the human beings that would ever be in the universe. And eventually Obatala got tired and someone, probably someone who had mischief on their mind offered Obatala something to drink, to renew their energy. And what they offered Obatala was palm wine. Has anyone here ever had palm wine before? I haven't, but my understanding is that it can be very strong. So Obatala was not in the most confident state of mind to be working with their hands after having had that palm wine. And some of the people that Obatala made out of the clay were shaped differently than all the other ones that Obatala had made up to that point. Now the story goes that when Obatala woke up the next day and realized what had happened, Obatala felt ashamed, but also deeply responsible for all of these people with the different bodies that weren't shaped like all the other bodies that they had made. And so Obatala took them under their protection, very specifically. Now here's the thing about stories. We don't have to take them literally, but if they're worth telling and listening to, we ought to take them seriously. You ought to be willing to sit with them and try to puzzle out what they could mean for us in the here and now. So let's sit with this for a second. Obatala is a character who can have many different bodies, some male, some female, some both, some neither. Obatala, according to the story, has a deep, deep protective love for people who are different, particularly in their body, but perhaps we might extend that to their mind or their heart, people who don't fit in for one reason or another. Now this story, the plain meaning of this story, is that something went wrong when those people got made. And Obatala feels responsible and ashamed about that. But if there is truly a God, any God, Obatala or anybody else, who loves the people who are different, it doesn't make much sense to me that that difference would be because there was a mistake, because something went wrong. So maybe the story behind the story is just an attempt to explain why does the divine have such love for people who are different, filtered through the minds and the voices and the ears of people who are used to being the same and can't understand difference in any way other than as a mistake. I'm going to invite you to rise in body and or spirit, and we're going to sing together our middle hymn, number 303, We Are The Earth, Upright and Proud. Much younger than we are now. I was sitting with my daughter on the couch, watching Sesame Street. And we saw a vignette from the show that I had missed in the 20-odd year break that I took from being a regular viewer. The most commercially successful furry red monster in the history of children's television was singing a duet with a rock star from the mid-90s about pride, about believing in yourself, loving yourself. They do that sometimes on that program. They'll take a popular song and put different words to it about counting or learning to tie your shoes. Now, this particular song that Elmo's was based on, I remember from when I was in high school, and I remember just hating it. But watching that fuzzy red muppet dance and sing to the same tune, I didn't mind it so much because his message to have respect and love for yourself is something that I want my child and every child, every person to learn. Religion has often taken a negative attitude towards pride. Consider, for instance, the recurring line in the Gospels that those who exalt themselves shall be humbled, but those who humble themselves shall be exalted. Humility is a common religious value, and it does good when it teaches the powerful to be mindful of the struggles of the powerless. One of the finest things that religion can do for us and for the world is to root out our comfort and our complacency and to call us to account for the ways in which we have fallen into selfishness. But too often, the only people who hear the message of selflessness are the folks who have already been humbled by the world that they live in, ground down by prejudice and oppression and made to feel small and empty by the inescapable message that their lives and experiences mean less than certain others. The poet and activist Eli Clare uses the metaphor of a mountain to talk about the experience of being marginalized, the feeling of being denied full personhood on the basis of class or race or disability of sexual orientation or gender identity. At the pinnacle of the mountain is comfort, privilege, normalcy. Around the base are all the identities and ways of being that do not fit at the top of the mountain. People who have been cast out and bullied are told time and again in subtle and unsubtle ways to climb that mountain, to change themselves, to be more acceptable somehow. Eli writes about the pain and futility of the struggle to conform in order to survive, describing the experience of people who try to climb from the base to the top. We are afraid. Every time we look ahead, we can find nothing remotely familiar or comfortable. We lose the trail. Our wheelchairs get stuck. We speak the wrong languages and with the wrong accents, wear the wrong clothes, carry our bodies the wrong ways, ask the wrong questions, love the wrong people, and it's goddamn lonely up there on the mountain. Some of us recognize that story because we have lived through it. And some others of us know it because we love somebody who has struggled on those rough slopes. We live in a world in which the ethos that some are superior and others inferior is powerful and prevalent and not something that can be written off as the fault of a small minority of villains driven by greed or bigotry. The injustice is a part of the way our society is formed and it dwells even in our own hearts. Changing this is not simply a matter of building better roads or blazing additional trails to the top of the mountain of privilege. Instead, it is about tearing down the mountain entirely until there is no longer a center of normalcy and a margin of abnormality. This requires an active confrontation, digging down and smoothing out the terrain beginning with the parcel that we live on. As much harm as religion has and continues to do, disrupting and dismantling that harm is deeply religious work too. We are called by the suffering of inequality to fulfill the words of the prophet Isaiah. Let every valley be raised up, every hill and mountain made low, let the rugged ground become level and the ridges become a plain. This is because our faith affirms the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Our tradition teaches us a reverence for human beings and it does not grant us the luxury of exceptions. The potential to do good, to choose life, to make the world whole is present in all people as the Unitarian poet Lydia Child said that every human soul has the germ of some flower within. The flower is evidence of our inherent worth and dignity, but it is the seed in which these qualities reside. Circumstances and human actions, whether others or our own, may damage the plant and rob it of potential to flower and grow, but the seed is eternal. Even death cannot reliably destroy it. Our dying cannot make certain that no good will ever come from our having lived. The power of the soul to bless the world is joyfully persistent. And that, friends, is something well worth feeling proud of. Proud for our species, proud for everyone in it, including ourselves. Now one of the great virtues of pride is how contagious it can be. Minerva Jane is a performer and writer who appeared on a recent podcast about the stage and film icon May West. Minerva explained that growing up in a small town in Idaho and refusing to live in the closet or to be pushed back into it, she did not have many friends or sources of support, but she took some solids in a love of old movies and she drew particular strength from the example of May West. May was famous for her unabashed, unrepentant sexuality, both on screen and in her real life. She of the, why don't you come up and see me sometime, she was put on trial and convicted on the grounds that one of her plays was obscene. Minerva explains that this inspired 13-year-old her to be fully herself, not because she got in trouble with the law, but because it didn't matter what other people thought. And May West herself, besides being a reliable ally to the LGBTQ community, drew inspiration for some of her key creative projects and perhaps some personal inspiration as well, from the very sorts of gender transgressing performance artists that Minerva Jane herself grew up to become, living out loud, in defiance of forces that would minimize, denigrate or erase us. Isn't just good for the person who does so, it is a gift to the future as well, to all the lives who will benefit from such a courageous example. Now in much more recent news about my children and television programming aimed at preschoolers, I had to give my son an important history lesson recently. We'd seen a passing reference to Mr. Rogers, and he asked me who that was. His theory was that it must be Steve Rogers. That's the name of the comic book and movie character better known as Captain America, in case you don't know. So I corrected his misunderstanding by explaining the program to him. Mr. Rogers was a middle-aged man who had roughly the same haircut for 30 years. Every time he entered or exited his house, he would change his shoes in his outfit and sing. He liked to feed his fish, play with a toy trolley, and learn about different foods and consumer goods and how they were made. He gave his audience of small children lots of advice and encouragement by speaking directly into the camera. And he had an extensive collection of house sweaters. When I was a young child, I was an avid viewer of his program. My mother, however, was less than impressed by the show. Mr. Rogers was, after all, something of a square. One day she asked me why I liked watching it so much. I thought for a minute and responded, because I think he loves me. At its root, pride is just the belief that we are worthy of love, that it is possible for other people to care deeply about us and want us to be happy and well. That is a feeling that every person needs and every person deserves. It is one of the great purposes of a congregation to welcome in new folks and to show them that they are loved. So the question should always be before us, as individuals and as a community what can we do in this moment to move towards becoming the proudly open and radically welcoming community that we are called to be? It is a mutually reinforcing proposition that loving others and receiving love from others helps us to better love ourselves. While it is only when we love ourselves that we can truly begin to love those around us. It is hard work, but it is worth doing and worth doing together. We gather each week carrying with us the joys, the sorrows, the struggles, and the celebrations of recent days. We share these here, knowing they are held in the love of community. Marcia Seek asks us to light a candle of joy for the birth of her grandson, Sibelius, on June 29th. He joins Sister Nelly and parents Adam and Sasha. Congratulations, Marcia. Welcome to the world, Sibelius. And we invite you to join us in a moment of meditation as we offer prayers, prayers of lamentation, hope, celebration, and love for all those in the LGBTQIA community. We light a candle for all those who are struggling this day, who believe they are hard to love, who are surrounded by words of rebuke, shame, anger, who live in fear and uncertainty, who feel so very alone. We light a candle for all those who long for healing, who ache with exhaustion, who have been alone far too long, who know in their bones how very good it is and how very much it can hurt to keep living in truth, to keep loving despite it all. We light a candle for all those lost to violence for being who they are, for those who face violence on a daily basis, for those who have lost loved ones and those who worry for the ones they love. And we light a candle for all who celebrate today, who know they are nothing less than a holy encounter, whose flesh is a testimony to the power and the beauty of wearing your own truth. Dear ones, may you know you are birthed from something wildly holy. You are made from and for a dream of flourishing. You are the dream of your ancestors, the ones who danced cheek to cheek, marched arm in arm, found the holy in one another, in the streets and in the choir lofts. You are the promise of the trans godmothers with bricks in their hands and the strength and softness in their flesh. While death and destruction remain, so too do life and love, because the ancestors knew, because we know disconnecting from delight is deadly. Trusting in delight is a necessary spiritual practice of survival. Blessed are you, our beloveds, gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, non-binary, queer, beloveds. May you all be held this day in love. May you be blessed in celebration. May you be emboldened for the holy work of living and loving, for the sake of collective survival and also always for joy. May you be held in the grace of community and may you know without a doubt that you are precious. You are beautiful. You are here and you are loved. Blessed be and amen. Our closing hymn this morning was written in the early 1980s by a folk singer named Fred Small, who would years later go on to become a Unitarian Universalist minister. His song has also gone on to new accomplishments later in life. Among other things, it became the signature anthem of the Boston Gay Men's Chorus. The piece imagines a parent telling their child how expansive and unlimited the ways of being in the world are. As a community, which seeks to include and to celebrate the full range of gender diversity and not neglect or ignore our transgender, non-binary and gender non-conforming siblings, you might find the range of examples Fred's song provides to be limited, a limitation that I know he acknowledges. But the entire point of the song is that what is possible for the child, for every child, for every person is beyond the imagination of any parent, even the most loving and supportive. And I want to invite you to sing this song with me at least in part as an act of humility. Let no one within the sound of my voice, no matter how expansive your moral imagination, believe that two generations from today there will be no person whose full identity you have already fully conceived and welcomed in. We create a truly welcoming community and world only when we make space in our hearts even before discovering who will need that space. I should also say, this is a challenging song. You are completely welcome to join me on the verses if you know it or you are brimming with confidence. But if you're not, I invite you to listen and to join in on the chorus, which... Oh, oh, you can be anybody you want to be You can love whomever you will You can travel any country where your heart leads And know that I will love you still You can live by yourself You can gather friends around You can choose one special one And the only measure of your words and your deeds Will be the love you leave behind when you're done Okay, friends, with that, let's rise in body and or spirit and join together in singing hymn number 1019, Everything Possible. Be beer off the table Let me sing the last tradition Love, life, joyous May you find the miraculous May you continuously find gratitude May you love the messiness May you love yourself May you love all you love well and well So may it be Blessed be, go in peace, and please be seated for the postlude.