 Please join in a moment of centering silence so we can be 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 who can argue with that? Good morning everybody. And on this Valentine's Day, let me offer a heartfelt welcome to First Unitarian Society, where independent romantic thinkers gather... I'm wearing my Valentine's Day sweater for all of you. 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 and very lovable member of this congregation, and I'd like to extend a special welcome to any guests, visitors, and newcomers, including our guest speaker, about whom you'll hear a little bit more later on. If this is your first time at First Unitarian Society, I think you'll find that this is a special place. And if you'd like to learn a little bit more about our special buildings, we offer a guided tour after this morning's service. Just gather over here by the windows after the service, and we will take care of you. Speaking of taking care of each other, I think you know the drill by now. This is a perfect time to silence those pesky electronic devices, because you will not need them for the next hour. Thanks for taking care of that. And speaking of taking care of people, if you're accompanied this morning by a youngster, and you think that youngster might worry about you getting fidgety during the service, we offer a couple of options for you and your youngster to enjoy the service. One space is our child haven in the back corner of the auditorium, and we have some seating right outside the doorway in the commons for you. And this is my favorite part of the announcement, because this is where we offer thanks and appreciation to the volunteers who are making this service possible this morning. So as I read their names, just think about the fact that if you join this team, you too will be able to hear your name announced from this microphone. And I'm talking about Mary Manoring, who's handling the sound system today. Tom Boykoff, thanks Tom for being our lay minister. Greeting us upstairs has been Kareen Peran, thank you Kareen. Nancy Daly and Ann Ostrom are the ushers today. Nancy Kosoff is handling the all-important, much-appreciated hospitality and coffee after the service. Our greenery has been lovingly watered by John Tewes, and our tour guide a little later on today is John Powell. A couple of announcements before the service begins. One, I mentioned that these are special buildings, and I don't know if you noticed it or not, but we received an announcement in the mail this week that on February 29, Monday evening, in the Gabler living room, we'll have a chance to hear about Frank Lloyd Wright and the Unitarian Meeting House, a history sponsored by the Board of the Friends of the Meeting House. Good opportunity to enjoy that historical perspective on the landmark building across the parking lot. And it's on February 29, so what a great way to take advantage of leap year. And speaking of leaping ahead, last week I told you that it was 75 days until cabaret. That means that today marks what number of days? 65 is close, that's my age. So you get a special prize. 68 days until April 22, where this entire building will be transformed into one big party and fundraiser, gourmet feast and musical extravaganza in support of that place we love so well known as First Unitarian Society. So that concludes the announcements. I invite you to sit back or lean forward to enjoy our special treat today with our guest speaker. I know that today's service will touch your heart, stir your spirit, and trigger one or two new thoughts. We're glad you're here. Come into this place. There are healing waters here and hands with soothing balm to ease your troubled days. Bring your and your aching hearts. Your scars too numb to feel. Your questions and complaints are all welcome here. Rest a while. Let the warmth of this community surround you, hold you, heal you. When you feel a bit stronger, just a bit, notice those who need you too. They are here. They are everywhere. Weep with them. Smile with them. Work with them. Laugh along the way. Pass the cup. Drink the holy fire. Take it with you into the world. We are saved and we save each other again, again, and yet again. And if you will rise now in body or spirit, joining together in the words of affirmation as we light our chalice. Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, you owe me. Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole world. And before we join together in song, if you'll take a moment to turn and greet your neighbor. Please be seated. It's my pleasure this morning to introduce the Reverend Karen Quinlan. There she is in all her glory. She's not only my dear friend. She is also the minister of the James Reeve UU congregation, which is on Madison's east side. Karen comes to our ministry out of a background in ecology and understands the interconnected web of all existence as both a physical and a theological reality. Karen lives near Olbrick Park with her partner Paul, their daughter Catherine, and their dog Boone. And it is my extreme pleasure that she's here with us today. So I would like to invite anyone who wants to come forward for Karen's message. It is interactive. You get to take part. So please come on up. Good morning. Look at you all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. You're Catherine's mom. I am Catherine's mom. Yes. So I have a story today. It's a story about an old woman and her family, which is kind of suitable for Valentine's Day, right? Valentine's and families and people we love making candy too. There's no candy in my story though. I'm sorry. That's a lot of good stuff. Awesome. And now I'm going to tell you a story. It's a story about an old woman who lived on a beautiful farm out in the country. And when she looked out her window from her farm, she could see beautiful fields of grain that they were growing on their farm. She could see her barns filled with animals and she could see orchards and forests out there. The farm was really, really special to this old woman because she had grown up there and the farm had been in her family for so many generations. She lived there her whole life and she had her children there and had her family there. And now she was old and her husband was dead. And she was getting to the place where it was almost time for her to die too. And the old woman, you know, even after having this beautiful life on this beautiful farm, the old woman was sad. She was sad because her children argued with each other all the time. She could hear them arguing day and night. And they argued over who was best at what and over what was the most important thing. So like some of them, they were really good at farming and some of them were really good at working with the animals. And some of them were good at cooking or preserving the food that they grew. And every one of them thought their job was the most important one. And they argued about that. They were all grown-ups but they held these grudges against each other. And the old woman, this made her really sad. She tried talking to them about living in peace. And they seemed, even though she talked about them with them all the time, they seemed more and more mad at each other all the time. She was sure that they wouldn't be able to keep the farm in the family because they were so argumentative. So one day she had an idea. She called them all to her bedside and she said, I have one last favor to ask of you. I want each of you to go out in the woods and get two sticks. And they did. They went out and they each got two sticks. And they brought them to her. And what she said was, take one of your sticks and put it down. Can you do that? Take one of your sticks and put it down. And then take the other one in both your hands and see if you can break it. You don't have to if you don't want to. Easy, right? Very easy to break one stick in half. And then she said, give me the stick you haven't broken. Can you all give me the stick you have not broken? And she gathered them all up. Okay. That's okay. You know what I'm going to do? You think she made a fire? Yeah? That would be a neat thing to do with all these sticks, wouldn't it? Oh my goodness, look at all these sticks. All right. She did not make a fire. One more. Whoops. Let's grab it. She took all those sticks and she found some string. And she tied them together. I do. I don't have any string. Can't put anything over on you guys, can I? All right. She took a couple of rubber bands. And she tied all the string, all the sticks together. And then she said, let's try to break this. Who's strong? Who else is strong? Who's feeling really strong today? Let's see if you guys can do it. Uh-huh. So the children of the old woman, they passed the bundle around just like you're doing. And they tried to break it. Do you think they could? Uh-uh. They couldn't. Oh, no taking the rubber band off. And so the old woman said to them, you my children are like these sticks. If you go your separate ways and you argue all the time and you hold grudges to each other, you will be like one stick. The hard things in life will easily hurt you. But if you work together and you stick together like this bundle and you appreciate each other's strengths and what you have in common and you care for each other, nothing in life can break you. And so the children, what do you think they did? You think they actually tied themselves together? Yeah. You're close. Because this is a story and it's a very good story. It has a happy ending. The children made like they were a bundle of sticks and they listened to their mom and they said, it's really silly to argue all the time. We're going to stick together and we're going to work together from now on. And the farm stayed in the family and they kept running it and the old woman was able to die in peace. Thank you for listening to my story. I believe, oh, you want your sticks back? Yeah! Boy, is that okay? All right. Y'all take your sticks back. And you can take them to your RE classes with you. And I will invite those of us who are staying to rise in body or spirits and join in singing hymn number 18, What Wondrous Love. Alistair Luterman was born in 1958. She was raised in Massachusetts. And in this poem, which I've adapted slightly, she refers to the Shema, which is the central prayer in the Jewish prayer book, which many Jews say at least twice a day. Don't tell anyone, but I love Jesus. I love his big, dark Jewish eyes so full of suffering and soul like an unemployed poet's and his thick, sensuous Jewish lips and his kinky, curly hair just like mine, uncontrollable despite conditioners. And the way he always argues with everyone and will go to hell for love. He's just like that Buddhist god, Avalokiteshwara, except his name is easier to pronounce. When you're in trouble, it's hard to remember to yell for Avalokiteshwara, but oh Jesus arises naturally every time a crazy driver, hot dogs, passed me on the freeway. I know I should say the Shema when I'm about to die, but will I be able to remember Hebrew at a time like that? I don't want to die saying, oh damn it. I'd like to leave my body consciously like a Tibetan llama sitting in full lotus with my head turned toward where I'll reincarnate next. But let's be realistic, I probably couldn't meditate enough to become enlightened in the however many years I have left. Jesus seems easier. All you have to do is love everyone. Well seems is the key word here. Sometimes the more you try to love people, the more you hate them. Maybe it would be better to try not to love people and then watch the love force its way out of you like grass through cement. Anything is better than organized religion. I don't like singing in churches. All those hymns in major keys. I don't think religion should be so triumphant. It should be humble and aware of the basic incurable pathos of the human condition and in a minor key and sung in a mysterious ancient language like Sanskrit or Hebrew. Is it okay for me to love Jesus and not be a Christian? I could try to open my heart and give away all my possessions. It's not that different from being Buddhist after all except for a history of witch burnings, the inquisition, the subjugation, rape and pillage of indigenous peoples all over the world. Not to mention 20 centuries of vicious anti-Semitism. That's a lot to overlook to get back to a baby born among animals to a Jewish mother, Miriam. And what about that other Mary, the sexy one? Jesus, I don't believe you died a virgin. I think you needed to taste everything human to inhabit the whole mass. Blood, poop, flies, envy, regret. Why me? I owe you and all the other bodhisattvas and sages and newborn babies a debt of thanks for agreeing to come back and marry yourselves to our painful predicament again and again. And I do thank you, bowing to the infinite directions. Like Miss Lunarman, I'm not a Christian. But I have to admit that I do love Jesus. His story is a pretty wondrous one. I don't mean the miracles and the coming back to life stuff. I mean the stories, the awareness-raising, the intentionality, the love. I especially love his ideas about justice and compassion and hope. Take the sermon on the mount, for example. The meek will inherit the earth. The merciful will receive mercy. The peacemakers will be called the children of God. He articulated the golden rule during this sermon as well. In everything due to others as you would have them due to you. And he helped people think of doing good works in a new way that it came from inside them telling them, you are the light of the world. Let your light shine before others. Jesus hung out with sinners, with lepers and prostitutes. People who weren't just ignored by society but purposefully marginalized by the religious leaders of the day. He ate with them and listened to their stories. And he told story after story to try to teach people how to be in right relationship with each other. And he showed them by his own example. And he challenged them to learn how to be their best selves, like in the story of the rich man who came to him asking what he had to do to be saved. Jesus reminded him of the commandments which the man replied, teacher, I have kept all of these since my youth. Jesus looking at him loved him and said you lack one thing go sell what you own and give the money to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven then come follow me. His challenge to us to learn how to be our best selves is grounded in a message of radical love and hospitality. The book of Matthew tells us that Jesus when asked by the Pharisees which commandment was the greatest replied you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment and the second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. And then as Luke tells it when pressed to define neighbor Jesus affirmed the unity of humanity with the parable of the good Samaritan. The story where the man cares for an injured Jew and finds him shelter after finding him on the road after being beaten. The defining characteristic of this story is the deep hatred between Jews and Samaritans. We are to love God and everyone with our whole being. And as far as we can tell from what has been written about his life this is exactly what he did. Love his friends and his enemies helping them be their best selves and forgiving them when they inevitably weren't. The Gospel stories clearly show that the disciples were often greedy and obtuse and self focused and what Jesus did is tell them over and over and show them over and over what was really important in life. Love. And so, like many early anti-Trinitarian heretics who expanded the definition of Christianity it is the example of Jesus that I love. Like Faustus Sinus a 16th century member of the Polish Reformed Church I believe Jesus was fully human. No more or no less divine than you and I. And I believe it is his humanity that makes his example accessible to us. If Jesus was divine or even somewhere between divine and human as some early theologians reasoned how realistic could it be for us to think that we might emulate him. But if he was human it becomes possible. We see throughout the gospel stories of his life how he centered himself in his God how he was able to move through his life in love. If he could love his enemies forgive them when they nailed him to a cross and executed them out of his own fear then oh my God what does that say about the love we are capable of and what kind of amazing things might we do with that love. This understanding of life affirming love is one of the things I take from our Christian heritage love that can change hearts and minds and the world as shown to us through the lived faith of a man who walked the earth 2,000 years ago. So what might it mean for us to love God with our whole hearts and souls and minds and love our neighbors as ourselves. I certainly can't speak for all of us especially about the first great commandment given the wide diversity of God concepts held by people in our tradition probably in this room from humanistic or atheistic beliefs that don't include any God at all to redefined ideas of God to more traditional concepts of a personal God. But for me I use God language to describe that which arises between us or between ourselves and our surroundings when we're intentionally in harmony or appreciating each other. And so for me loving God with my whole heart and mind and soul is descriptive of opening myself to that which is around me of being receptive and aware and grateful for knowing that I'm connected to all things and all beings on many, many levels. When I'm in this state of appreciation I'm more able to start thinking about how I might love my neighbor as myself. This is how I'm able to work into my potential for following the example of Jesus' love and I'm best able to do this in a safe, intentional community. This is one of the core pieces of Unitarian Universalist practice, right? Our seven principles are grounded in this notion of wondrous radical love and they serve to guide us as we learn how to live out the ideal of loving our neighbors as ourselves. It's what at our best is freely given when we work together toward the best in our potential when we practice being our best selves in community and when we learn to make positive change in the wider world. We show love for our neighbors when we share our stories and hold them together within our church communities. You show love for your neighbors when you share your offering plate, when you volunteer at Salvation Army shelters, when you prepare and serve meals at the Porchlight Men's Shelter, when you donate to the Eviction Prevention Fund, when you show up, when you show up for the Pride Parade and for Moses events and for YGB events and work with your equity team. These are ways in which we make the kingdom of heaven exist in the here and now which is what Jesus said should be our goal. Hosea Baloo, a 19th century universalist preacher called this our salvation. He wrote that being made in God's image meant that there was no such thing as eternal damnation, that as a good and perfect being, God could not have made us as anything less than good and that as his children, God loved us so much that he couldn't possibly bear to send us to the tortures of hell. He called this universal salvation. We are all saved simply by virtue of being loved by God. Over the course of Baloo's ministry, this belief evolved into an even deeper understanding of love, one that lent to his conclusion that the kingdom of God was indeed here on earth and that living a life of love resulted in such happiness that salvation was achieved. Salvation, the kingdom of God is what happens when we allow love to be our guiding force. There's a story told about Baloo from his days of being an itinerant preacher. One afternoon he's riding circuit with a Baptist preacher and they're arguing over theology. The Baptist said to him, Brother Baloo, if I were a universalist and I feared not the fires of hell I could hit you over the head, steal your horse and saddle and I'd still go to heaven. Baloo looked over at him and said, Brother, if you were a universalist the idea would never occur to you. God's great commandments tell us that we are to love him and each other. These commandments are universally binding in this theology and constitute universal salvation. Loving God and each other with all our hearts are universal salvation and this salvation is a life of bliss. If we believe this, doing wrong to our neighbor just isn't part of our vocabulary. I love this idea. It grounds me, it gives me hope for the possibility of finding or making real, beloved community. It helps me think about my own actions, helps me think about wanting to try to start from a place of good facing the consequences when I choose poorly and I understand the reality of our world. Universal salvation only works if everyone buys into it. If doing wrong to our neighbor isn't part of our vocabulary. I know that half the time I'm not in the place of appreciation and openness that I described earlier and I can observe that neither are a lot of my neighbors and so I wonder whether Hosea Baloo's beautiful idea isn't more of an ideal and optimistic but unrealistic ideal. The Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing, a contemporary of Baloo's, had a slightly different take on our goodness writing in 1828 that quote, the great work of religion is to conform ourselves to God or to unfold the divine likeness within us. So Channing thought that we were made to learn to be good, that we had to work at it. He recognized that as imperfect humans we did sin and like most Christians he believed that our salvation lay in the redemption offered by Jesus' death. This is called atonement theology, this idea that the sacrifice of one special person can redeem all people and it's the basis of the traditional Christian idea of salvation. Adam and Eve in listening to the serpent and eating from the tree of knowledge disobeyed the rules that God had established and therefore tainted all of humankind with original sin. This sets us up to need to be saved and this is what Jesus' death was supposed to accomplish. His sacrifice was supposed to atone for our sin. I reject this idea because it's based on what I see as a theological contradiction. Even if I could get my head around the idea that one person's sacrifice could make up for the sins of all I cannot see as valid the idea that salvation could come out of the violent beating and death of a man who was feared by the establishment for his radical ideas of how we humans should act toward one another. I've heard women in domestic violence shelters talk about confiding in their priests and pastors only to be told that their faith requires them to submit to the will of their husband and if that submission means they are beaten they should suffer this fate willingly and silently as Jesus suffered his. Their reward will come later they say as an afterlife of heavenly bliss. They call this salvation and they base it upon the death of their savior. I call it violence begetting violence. And beyond this I reject the concept of original sin from which we are supposed to have needed salvation. I think Eve did a brave and amazing thing in choosing to disobey the divine order to limit her understanding of the world so she could remain in paradise. I believe that Eve brought humankind our freedom to explore the world and how we might fit in it. It wasn't a fall it was an awakening and so we are trying to be saved from. Or do we? One of the consequences of our ability to freely explore the world and how we might be in it is that we have choices and we are just as free to choose paths of fear or anger or hatred as we are to choose paths of openness balance and love. So what do we do in the face of airplanes being flown into buildings of fundamentalist righteousness? What do we do in the face of violent taking of life in places that is supposed to be safe in movie theaters and churches and schools and on our streets? What do we do in the face of institutional systems that still, still despite the hard work and the awakening of so many people serve to treat people of color and people of little means inequitably and violently? I have come to think of salvation as the thing that helps us deal with the darkness in our lives. That Baptist minister arguing with Hosea Baloo had a real point as did Reverend Channing they had thought about the darkness inside us. Our lives and our choices are multifaceted and difficult. And it is not always easy to be guided by love. There is pain and there is suffering and there is fear. Some of it is blameless some of it is intentional. We humans are complicated in our understandings of right relationship and many of us maybe even all of us at times are less concerned about the impact of our actions on others than on ourselves. And yet as people of faith we aspire to more. We aspire to allow love to be our guiding force and sometimes we even manage to get there. And this is salvation. When thought of this way, salvation is a process one with several components. I draw here from the work of Dr. Monica Coleman who is a feminist process theologian who defines salvation as that which makes us whole. It is concrete and it's part of this life. It's survival and it's justice and it's quality of life. It is what she calls making a way out of no way in which God offers us the resources to make change but it's up to us to take advantage of them. The no way part of this does not mean that a path to salvation just magically appears out of no way, out of nowhere but out of places not yet seen in the past. Making a way out of no way has four parts. There are unseen unforeseen possibilities. There is human agency. There is the goal of justice and there is the challenge to the existing order. As an example, Dr. Coleman writes about a child she knows abused by her mother who was abused by her mother. She writes that the child has the freedom to decide how to treat her own daughter in her turn and that that choice does not have to be based solely on her family history. She writes that it's possible to find the love and support she needs to choose to end that pattern. Dr. Coleman says that salvation occurs when people work for the transformation of the world by imitating Christ. Salvation is not always liberation and freedom from all pain and all suffering but the survival and quality of life and it requires the cooperation of the world in which we live. A couple of summers ago I went on a service learning trip to Haiti and I saw a great example of this process of salvation. While I was preparing for my trip I learned about the Makuts the violent enforcers of the bloody regimes of Hades not so distant past. One of their practices was what they called the necklacing of resistors where they would take tires and place them around their necks fill them with gasoline and light them. While working with the people of the peasant movement of Papai a grassroots change organization in Haiti I learned about and I got to try one of their practices of making a way out of no way. They transformed old tires into container gardens. Two of those gardens could grow enough vegetables to feed a whole family. There was unforeseen possibility in those tires human agency in the deliberate use of an old symbol of terror to make a practical and symbolic use of hope and the goal of justice and challenge to the existing order by this activist organization that held that practice all in one act of cutting tires and putting them inside out. Survival and justice and quality of life all become possible in the single action done in community. And so as I think about whether salvation can have any meaning in my own theology or in Unitarian universalism I find myself convinced that it must be based on the living exemplar that was Jesus rather than on the single event of his death. His ministry offers us tools with which to move into salvation teaching healing praying suffering with. These are all things that are done in community. So for me salvation happens in community. In our understanding that we are all connected in my understanding of a God that is interwoven into those relationships with each other and with everything around us. Salvation is in our ability to care for each other in the face of hate and evil and fear. It's in our ability to try to protect our vulnerable and to continue to try to make change in the world and to try to live into our own ideals. It is in our ability to face those fears when we are supporting each other. We can ground in the idea that everything we do is based on what happened in the past the possibilities for the future and how we combine those things in the now. May it be so. May we make it so. And I now invite you into the giving and receiving of this morning's offering. You will see in your order of service that the outreach offering will be shared with the Lucia Community Education Center. You can find out more about their good work in your order of service and we thank you for your generosity. My name is Sandy Eskrich and I'm a longtime member here. As we come into spring or hopeful the idea that spring might be hopeful we have our annual campaign and we have our members as any of us are asked to share the reasons that we are supporters of our organization and so I will. I've been a member here for 23 years ever since my family moved to the Madison area. My three kids have gone through religious education here. They've spent every Wednesday night of their life in choir in the old meeting house with Heather and I believe that one of the things that has been of value to me is not just the experience they have but the life, how it has impacted their lives as individuals. I believe they look at this place as their spiritual home. They consider Kelly and Leslie and Heather as life mentors for them. I also have been involved in our society as a religious education teacher for several years. Got to teach great classes like mind, body and soul and hopefully I will again. I got to serve on the board of trustees for a period of time and understand how our organization works from the inside out. How our nearly $2 million budget is managed. How our $2 plus million foundation does the work to fuel does the investing and the work to fuel the work that we all do. Next weekend I will be skiing with the trees for tomorrow people and last Tuesday night I spent in the old landmark meeting house with Everett Mitchell as he talked about justice or lack of justice for some in Dane County. This organization provides me with all kinds of experiences and perspective to live my life a better life, to live a better life and I think that on Sunday or on Saturday afternoon I come here and I get sort of recharged to do the things that I do all week long as I think many of us do. The principles of the Unitarian Universalist community allow me to do my job just as it allows all of you to do what you do for the rest of the week. I'm a middle school principal so I get a lot of opportunity to sort of live those principles of just imagine that for a minute. But you know at this place I'm not just a consumer of our organization I really believe that that I make up the organization just as all of you do and as as I try to do the right thing as I walk through my week and you all do the right thing as you walk through your weeks the power we have leveraged together are like Karen Sticks. We bundle ourselves together in an organization like this and we empower an organization like this to really leverage the good that we all can impart to our community. I make a financial commitment through auto transfer from my checking account and that financial support fuels the work of this place. We as you'll see in the brochure that's out in the commons and Monica's out there and I imagine Rob will be out there and I'll be out there. There's a lot of information in here but one of the things it says is we have $1.2 million to fuel the work of this organization and none of us can do that with our own little flimsy stick but together we can have a big powerful bundle that can do the good that we all try to do in the community. So please consider your own financial commitment as empowering the work and leveraging the good that you do in a bigger way. Thanks. The closing hymn is 2018. Imagine that. This little light of mine. And now as we leave this place this place that we make sacred with our presence and our intention and we move into the wider world may we remember that we take with us the power to make that world sacred. May we hold the love the courage and the strength that we learn and practice here and do everything we can to move them out into the world knowing that we have enough and that we are enough. Go in peace. Blessed be Amen.