 and welcome to the First Unitarian Society of Madison. I'm Janet Swanson, Director of Membership and Adult Programs. I'm joined this morning by the Reverend Kelly Crocker, Drew Collins, Heather Thorpe, Linda Warren, Daniel Karnes, Stephen Gregorius, and Leslie Ross and E.B. Rossmore, who will be leading us in our chalice lighting. We're so glad to have you join us virtually this morning. Though not together here in our beloved meeting house, we remain tied together through the bonds of community and affection. In this community, we gather to grow our souls, connect with one another, and live our UU values in our lives, our community, and in the world. We hope you'll join us in the virtual coffee hour immediately following our service. The information for that will be on your screen following the postlude. I invite you now to take a few deep breaths to be present here together and to bring ourselves fully into this time that we share. Bring your broken hallelujah here. Bring the large one that is beyond repair. Bring the small one that is too soft to share. Bring your broken hallelujah here. I know that people have told you that before you can give, you have to get yourself together. They overstated the value of perfection by a lot, or they forgot. You are the gift. We all bring some broken things, songs and dreams and long lost hopes, but here together we reach within. As a community, we begin again, and from the pieces, we will build something new. There is work that only you can do. We wait for you. And now I invite you to light a chalice or a candle at your home as Leslie Ross and Evie Ross Moore lead us in our words of affirmation. Across the distance, the light from within me shine, sending love to all. Across the distance, your light is fuel that warms me and helps to keep my own light burning. Together, we keep the flame of community burning bright. Rise up, O flame, by thy light flow. Fisal man. Sing with us hymn number 354. We laugh, we cry, we'll sing verses one. I'm excited to show you my bowl. My granddaughter made it. It broke on the way here this morning and I don't know what to do. I can't believe I broke it. Do you think we can try and fix it? I think we can try. Oh, I'm so sorry that broke. Hang on, let's see. I have glue. Okay, I've got tape. I've got this kind and I've got this kind. I don't think so. Okay, hang on. I think I have chewing gum. Do you think if we put chewing gum it could stick? Probably not chewing gum. Okay, let me think. I have one more idea. It's called kintsugi. What is kintsugi? So kintsugi is this ancient Japanese art of repairing exactly that broken pottery, ceramics, just like what your granddaughter made. The folktales say that it started in the 15th century in Japan. When this king sent away a broken pot that he loved to have it fixed and when it came back he thought it looked awful. Did he just throw the pot away? No, he called all these Japanese artisans to him and they found a way to take this broken pot and make it even more beautiful than it was before. They mixed gold powder with a lacquer and what it did was it didn't hide the breaks, it highlighted so that the imperfections remained when the pot was repaired. So the point of kintsugi isn't to hide the broken parts but to show that even when it's broken it's still beautiful? Exactly. The gold is used to remind the user over and over every time you see it. That something that was once broken is whole again and now it has this different kind of beauty. In a way, that's what happens when other things break, right? Huh, what kinds of things? Like relationships, friendships. Sometimes we hurt each other's feelings and it's like the thread between two or more, people breaks. But as Unitarian Universalists, we don't ignore that. We try to rebuild the relationship so that it's stronger than it was before. That is so true. The work of healing is all of our jobs no matter how big or how small we are. And when we repair our mistakes with love, when we stick together and do that sometimes really hard work of repair here in our community, we remember that our relationships can be even more beautiful. Once we've acknowledged the herd and we've asked for forgiveness, we've changed. We correct our mistakes. And we make this sacred promise together to do better in the future. I love that about being in community here. Do you wanna help me fix this bowl? I sure do. 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 within and beyond First Unitarian Society. Outreach offering today will go to Gsafe, an organization that increases the capacity of LGBTQ plus students, educators and families to create schools in Wisconsin where all youth thrive. They do this by developing the leadership of LGBTQ plus students, supporting gay straight alliances, training educational staff, advancing educational justice, advocating for public policy and deepening racial, gender, trans and social justice. You'll see on your screen that you can donate directly from our website, fussmedicine.org. You will also see our text to give information as well. We thank you for your generosity and your faith in this life that we create together. We began our service this morning with the words of Reverend Teresa Soto. Bring your broken hallelujah here. Bring the large one that is beyond repair and bring the small one that is too soft to share. Bring your broken hallelujah here. We were reminded that we all bring some broken things, songs and dreams and long lost hopes, but here together we reach within. As a community we begin again and from the pieces we build something new. I love these words and the recognition within them of all that we bring together, that each time we are with one another, we are carrying with us dreams and hopes, holding all that we love and all that we've lost. I love the recognition that when we gather here week after week, that it is a form of beginning again, a chance to build something new, something beautiful, something strong, something that can be repaired with gold, even if it feels like the only prayer on our lips is a broken hallelujah. We are coming up on one year of living in this pandemic time, one year of loss, of loneliness, of services here in an empty room, of seeing one another's faces only on screens, of so many tears, of feeling like maybe we are living in unending brokenness. Yet over this past year, as we have been building community in new ways, we have also seen healing, we have seen repair, we have seen creativity and innovation, we have witnessed deep connection, we have learned to love each other well through challenge and loss. As I think about the fullness of life that we have shared together, I am reminded of the poem, The Facts of Life by Padre Gotouma, that you were born and you will die, that you will sometimes love enough and sometimes not, that you will lie if only to yourself, that you will get tired, that you will learn most from the situations you did not choose, that there will be some things that move you more than you can say, that you will live, that you must be loved, that you will avoid questions most urgently in need of your attention, that life isn't fair, that life is sometimes good and sometimes better than good, that life is often not so good, that life is real and if you can survive it well, survive it well with love and art and meaning given where meaning is scarce, that you will learn to live with regret, that you will learn to live with respect, that the structures that constrict you may not be permanently constricting, that you will probably be okay, that you must accept change before you die and you will die anyway, so you might as well live and you might as well love, you might as well love. My friends, over this past year, we have learned that life is sometimes good, sometimes so much better than good, and we have learned that sometimes life is often not so good. Through it all, we have remembered that in this life, as long as we might live, we might as well love. That message has been carried through this month of examining beloved community. At the beginning of the month, Zeister Alex Capitan joined us to share a message of radical transformational love. Alex shared the harsh truth that there are many who do not feel welcome in bringing their whole selves into our life here. Alex's message ended with a call for us to create a community of unconditional love, welcome and belonging. Alex called us into the difficult work of becoming, becoming a place where we are broken, open and held, healed and sent back out into the world to keep fighting. Alex recognized that this is messy. This is uncomfortable. This is possible only if we are open again and again to being made new. The next week, Roger shared a message of exploring the power of love by looking at the wide assortment of love that fills our days. He told us that love is so much more than our narrow understandings and asked us to celebrate love in all its forms. The love of family, the deep love of friends, love for ourselves, romantic love, love for all life and this planet we share. Roger called us to open ourselves to the many types of love that we find and asked us to remain open to all the love waiting behind that next door. And last week, Roger brought forth the vision of Dr. Martin Luther King who saw beloved community as something that happens when we enter into an interdependent relationship of love, mutual respect and care. A simple working definition is a community ordered by love. Roger acknowledged that Dr. King was an idealist and he was a realist. He understood that all people, including himself, make mistakes. Communities are made up of people. Therefore, no community completely and perfectly embodies the idea of beloved community. So here we are on this last day of the month at the end of our month of exploration and I am wondering where does all this leave us? First, I believe we have learned that we are the beloved community and we are not. Beloved community begins with us here in this congregation with you and me. It begins with the ways we treat one another, our staff and our larger community. It is in all the ways we show up here. In all the ways we are open to trying again and again to bring the values we espouse into practice. As the Unitarian Universalist theologian James Luther Adams would say, we go to church to practice being human. All of this, all we do together is practice and in our practice we help each other be better humans. We help each other live into being the beloved community. Small groups and regular worship shared service both within and beyond the congregation, our upcoming relational covenant work that you'll be hearing more about. All of these are our practice. And this is a big and. Part of our work together is seeing this world and one another with new eyes. We need one another and our community to be a place that can remind us of the harsh realities of the unacceptable truths. Remind us that this is not the world we were meant for. We need to be a place where we can confess our heartbreak and confusion and our vulnerability. We need to be able to let down our walls and our coping mechanisms and begin to call forth the life we wish to create. Because we are not in community to be with people who want to sing the same music or rally for the same cause or attend the same retreats. We are here as we heard Alex and Roger say to learn to love better. And this can only happen when we love past our disappointments and return to a place of acceptance and affirmation. This leads me to our next learning. This work is a deep spiritual practice that requires us to have a lived theology. As the Reverend Gretchen Haley wrote, sustained openheartedness requires feeling connected to something greater than ourselves. Call it what you will. A greater love, the interdependent web, the universe, the spirit of life, God. And sustained waking up requires meaning making around this something greater. We need constructive, positive theology, not just the stuff we know we don't believe. We need to know the words we want said at our bedside or at the bedside of the one we love and we need to have a sense of how and why we keep going in the face of loss and disappointment. And then we need to tell each other about these things, share with one another what it is that brings our lives meaning in a world of beauty and pain because we're gonna need to be reminded a lot. And this brings us to our last learning. Beloved community is all about relationship. From a position of companioning, we are invited to walk alongside one another, unlearning the dehumanizing patterns of racism, classism, ableism, sexism, dehumanizing patterns for us all and establishing new habits and patterns of collaboration and partnership, hearing each other's stories, discovering who we are and what we love rather than what we think we know about one another, widening and widening our circle time and again until it truly includes everyone. And then we will find that radical transforming love Alex called us to create. Remembering what Audrey Hepburn said, people, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed and redeemed, never throw out anyone. This relational foundation means beloved community does not compete for resources but collaborates towards more for everyone. Simply put, the beloved community paradigm causes us to strengthen our ties, help each other out, offer the unique gifts we have, never throw anyone out and rejoice in the working together. This is complicated and messy work. Years ago in our new UU class, a tradition started. First, when Jean Sears was our coordinator of member programs and this tradition continues now with Janet Swanson, toward the end of each session, they will look at me and they will say, go ahead, give them the disclaimer. I felt like this was a good moment to give everyone the disclaimer. And the disclaimer starts with a story. Once upon a time, there was a man stranded on a desert island for many, many years. One day while strolling along the beach, he spotted a ship in the distance. This had never happened and all the time he was on the island, so he was so excited about the chance of being rescued. Immediately he built a fire on the beach and he generated as much smoke as possible and it worked. Soon the ship was heading his way and when the ship was close enough to the island, here came rescuers. And after some preliminary conversation, one of the rescuers asked the man on the island, how did you survive for all of these years? And the man replied by telling them about how he found food, how he was able to make a house to live in. And he said, in fact, look up there on the ridge, there's my house. And they looked in the direction of his house and they saw three buildings and they inquired about the building next to the man's house. And he said, that's my church. I built that so that I can go there and worship on Sundays. And when they asked him about the third building, the man replied, well, that's where I used to go to church. We tell this tale time and again to point to a very real truth in this work of building beloved community. We will disappoint one another. We will fail each other and ourselves and we will need to choose to come back time and again. We will have our hearts broken, you, me, all of us. And when those moments happen, we will have a choice to lean into the discomfort and stay, doing the hard work of repair or to leave. And what I want to invite you to do here in community is to consider the possibility of opening your heart and coming in closer. There is really only one choice between imperfect community and no community. Again and again, we are all called to choose to commit ourselves to building something beautiful, something with the power to transform ourselves and our world, something that is the ever messy and imperfect beloved community. We all bring some broken things, songs and dreams and long lost hopes. But here together, we reach within. As a community, we begin again and from the pieces, we build something new. May we be brave enough to make it so. Each day, we are greeted by the life that arrives at our doors. Some days we are greeted by great joy and celebration, a reminder of all the goodness that we are blessed to share. Other days, we are called to welcome in grief and sadness, pain and loss, a reminder of all we carry and the need to surround ourselves with others who can help us carry these loads when we are so very tired. We bring these joys and these difficulties here, sharing them with one another in love and in trust. Today we light a candle of strength and hope for Lea Sinclair after a recent hospitalization. We send Lea our love and prayers for healing and our hopes that she is feeling stronger and more like herself every day. And we light a candle of sorrow and loss for the life of Dennis Collins. Dennis passed away this past Thursday surrounded by his family. We send them our love as they mourn this great loss and we hold Dennis's gentle spirit and warm smile in our hearts. And we light a candle of lamentation in the recognition of the grim milestone of passing 500,000 deaths to COVID-19 here in the United States. We hold in our hearts these many lives lost in the devastation and deep grief this has caused in families and communities. We give thanks for all those healthcare workers who give of themselves day after day in love and in service to us all. May we pause for a moment to hear these words of hope from Jennifer Pratt-Walter. See how the winds have shaped her hands to hold hope. So tenuous it trembles like a hummingbird's heart. She gently carries hope to a nest in the midst of the maelstrom and tilts it into the bowl of tiny feathers and mosses. Hope is so hard to hold. She might need your help. You can help when it seeps through the cracks of her fingers. Place your hands around hers. Together it can be done. And when it hatches, when the nest is no more, may you watch the wind pick up hope and lay it softly into the welcome of your upraised palms. Blessed be and amen. I say ours is a story of faith and hope and love I say it is our need for one another that binds us together, that brings us laughing and limping into relationships and keeps us at it when we might otherwise despair at the fix we are in. I say it is the holy we need, the eternal beyond our comprehension and one place we can find it is here in this life we create together. And I say that there is a transcendent value worthy of our loyalty upon which we may set our hearts and it lives here among us as love. Blessed be, go in peace and know that you are loved.