 Good morning and welcome. I'm Roger Birchhausen, one of the ministers here at First Unitarian Society. At First Unitarian, we grow our souls, connect with one another, and embody our Unitarian Universalist values within our community and beyond our walls. I'm joined in worship today by our musical team of Drew Collins, Linda Warren, and Heather Thorpe, and our AV team of Daniel Kearns and Stephen Gregorius, as well as our chalice lighters, the Lindbergh family. We are so glad to have you join us today, and we warmly invite you to stick around and join our virtual coffee hour immediately after the service. You'll find instructions on how to do that at the end of the service. A note about the music today, which I'm really excited about. There will be four pieces today with each one representing a different manifestation of love as the ancient Greeks understood love. So the prelude, which we've already heard, by Scott Joplin represents ludus or playful love. The offertory is my funny valentine, and it represents eros or romantic erotic love. The musical reflection is a familiar James Taylor song, and it represents storge or familial love. And finally the postlude is a spiritual and it represents agape or universal selfless godly love. And now I invite you to take a few deep breaths to center yourselves in this virtual worship together in the community of First Unitarian Society. Take a few deep breaths in center. Our opening words today are from a play called True Love by Charles Me. So love is who you are and how you are. What kind of person you are. So love is who you are, how you are, what kind of person you are. I invite you now to join in our chalice lighting by lighting a candle at your home. Today we'll be led in the chalice lighting by the Lindbergh family. We light this chalice to find inner peace, love for each other, and faith in ourselves. Also to be welcoming to whomever we meet, and kind to all living creatures. So gather around this light of hope as we share this time together. Our message for all ages today is a piece that I've adapted from Molly House Gordon called Beyond Every Door. I bet a lot of you of all ages have encountered the book or the movie The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. Remember how Lucy Pevensey discovers Narnia? She looks for the perfect place to hide and opens up the door to a big wardrobe. She goes through the door and into the back of the wardrobe and suddenly she's in a whole other world, a magical world with witches and fawns and talking beavers. Wouldn't it be cool if there were a magical world beyond every door? When Lucy opened the door to Narnia, it didn't look like anything special. It was just a boring door to a wardrobe full of old clothes and coats, but across its threshold was magic. Lucy already had a foot in Narnia in the middle of winter, no less, before she quite realized what was happening. Many of the thresholds in our lives are like this. We don't know that we're crossing into another world until we're already halfway there. The door of a church takes us down a pathway of growth we might never have expected. The door of the doctor's office suddenly opens out into life with a hard diagnosis. A restaurant door opens onto a first date and echoes forward into the relationship of a lifetime. A beloved person's door closes behind you and sends you out into the world heartbroken. The door to a library or a gym or a dance studio introduces you to a life's passion you might not have otherwise discovered. We cross these thresholds every day of our lives for good and for ill, in joy, in sorrow, in bitter sweet truth. Truly even our own front door is a great threshold no matter how familiar the world's within and without may be. Given our lives' reality of constant change, every day we open the same old door again only to step out into a world that is new since the day before. In this way, there is a new world behind every door awaiting our discovery if we only encounter it as such. I invite you into this time of giving and receiving which strengthens and sustains First Unitarian Society and the community beyond our walls. This week's offering will be shared with Centro Hispano of Dane County. Centro's mission is to empower youth and strengthen families and engage the community so that Latino families reach their personal goals and feel engaged and strengthened with the tools for success. You'll see instructions on your screen of how to give through our website and our text to give program. Thank you for your generosity and for your faith in this life that we create together. I love that message for all ages and the image of what lies beyond the doors that we travel through in life. In many cases, what lies beyond those doors is love. All sorts and kinds of love sometimes expected, sometimes unexpected, at least in the form that it appears. For Lucy Pevensey, it was adventure that lies on the other side of that wardrobe door. And the adventure she gets is full of so many things, violence and fear and awe and even the chance to become a queen. But more than anything, what lies beyond that door in the wardrobe is love. The love of Mr. Tomnes, the fawn, the love of the beaver couple, the fierce all-encompassing love of Aslan, the lion. She also finds renewed and deep in love for her siblings, even for the kind of hard to love brother Edmund. It is a magical door in every way. Well, we all encounter such doorways even if they aren't quite as dramatic or magical. I can think of some doors I've ventured through which had love on the other side. I picture the door of Becky Chopp's mid-century modern apartment near the University of Chicago. I was just beginning my graduate school adventure. Professor Chopp was the director of the ministry program and every year at the start of the year, she'd host a party for the returning and the new students. Well, as I walked up to that door, I had no indication, like Lucy had no indication, that my life was about to change. When I walked through that door, one of the first people I met was Amy, a third-year student. She was sitting on a couch. I sat next to her. She later told me that she was there to scout out the new students to see if anyone intrigued her. We talked for at least an hour and, well, she intrigued me. She was a sassy Christian feminist. I really don't remember anything else about the party. So Amy and I became good friends over the next six months. Then we dated. Three years later, we were married. Like any marriage, we've had our moments of challenge, but we're going strong, maybe stronger than ever, 33 years in. So it was amazing love that lay beyond that door at Becky Chopp's house. I picture the glass main door at the old Moose Lodge in Appleton. That's the building that the Fox Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship had when I first encountered that congregation in 1990. The ministerial search committee took me to check out their building. Constructed a hundred years earlier, it had been first a German Methodist Church, then the American Legion Hall, then the Moose Lodge, and then nine years before I first traveled in that doorway. It had been bought by this small 50-member Unitarian Universalist congregation. So I stepped out of that minivan and looked toward that building ugly, really ugly, and shabby. That was most glaringly evident in the fact that it had this kind of metal siding that was all the vogue in the 1890s that had like completely rusted. Oh my God, I thought, I can't be a minister in that building. So we walked through that glass door into the small entryway, the smell of the men's urinal in the basement, wafting up. We walked through another set of doors into the combined fellowship hall, sanctuary space, and ugly, shabby, too. That looked like a really good place for the Moose Lodge to have poker games and fish fries, but not a good place for worship services. Honestly, I never grew to like that building. Its ugliness was only surpassed by how poorly it functioned as a church. But alas, a congregation is not a building, whether it meets an old rundown Moose Lodge or just off the top of my head a Frank Lloyd Wright landmark. And the people through that door, starting with the search committee, well those people had a lot of love in their hearts. Love was what was waiting behind that ugly door. I picture the sliding rear door of a Chrysler minivan at a retreat center in Santa Barbara, California. So the congregation I served in Appleton grew until it was a large church, and for the first time I was invited to join the annual retreat of the senior ministers of large UU churches. Well, when I was there I seized on an invitation on the second day to join some colleagues on an outing to the Santa Barbara County wineries. So I slid open that door and climbed in that van with five other colleagues who I had never met, and they mostly didn't know each other either. We spent the next nine hours together. By the dessert course at dinner, we decided to form a peer review group, a group where together we would support and critique each other's ministries. It turned out that my best friends in the UU ministry, some of my best friends in the world, were in that van. Love was what was waiting behind that minivan door. The last door I picture is a different sort of door. This wasn't a door I ventured through, rather love came through this door toward me. This door was my daughter's body. So the plan was that my wife would be with our daughter and our son-in-law as a secondary coach when it was time for her to have her baby. Well, her labor began a little before New Year's Day, and well, it happens that I was there because I was off work, and so there I was. And unbeknownst to me, my daughter had seen a video in her birth preparation class about a father who was the coach of his daughter through delivery, and at the end of that, evidently my daughter kind of teared up and looked at her husband and said, maybe I want my dad here, too. So there I was in the delivery room, not prepared in the least, the third-string labor coach with the sole task of getting fresh cold washcloths between contractions. This time, unlike a lot of doorways, I knew love was on the other side, but I had no idea what this love was going to be like or how a grandparent's love is different from other kinds of love. There was a whole lot of mystery. And then beautiful holiday emerged into the world, the first baby born in the New Year in her county, love was what was waiting behind that door. So every story of love waiting beyond a door is different. I don't share these four stories as instructive in any way, other than they show the variety of the types of love that we can find. I also share these to invite you to get in touch with the stories of your own life where you found love beyond a doorway. Can you picture some of those doorways in your life? Maybe one for you as the doorway into the landmark building or the atrium, new addition here at First Unitarian Society. Love comes in many, many forms. It makes me think about the old story of the there being like 50 words for snow in the Inuit language. Polysynthesis is a linguistic idea that's characteristic of the Inuit language and other Eskimo-alute languages where there's a base word like snow and then it can be added on to with a variety of endings that really have different meanings. Well, when you think about it, here in Wisconsin, we have a lot of different expressions for snow. Now, they may not have like a root word, but it's a similar idea. So picture in your mind for a minute, flurries, blizzard, a fine snow that you can barely see, slush, frost, fresh snow, wet snow, yellow snow. Sorry about that last one. These are very different pictures, right? They give you a different feeling. Well, it's the same with love. So the ancient Greeks were wise enough to have this wide assortment of words for love. Here's some of them. There's eros, romantic, passionate, embodied love. There's philia, which is affectionate love, the love of deep friends. There's Storge, which is like philia, but within the context of family connections. Agape, selfless, universal, godly love. Lutus, playful love. Pragma, the enduring, mature love that's built on commitment and work. Philotia, which is self-love and comes in a couple different forms. One is compassion for oneself, words and all. The other is narcissism, not so good. And then there's mania, also not so good. That's obsessive love. Well, when I opened that door to Professor Chopp's house and met Amy, I encountered philia with a strong presence of eros in the air. There was also a dose of Lutus. Over time, it grew into pragma, with philia, eros, Storge, and Lutus mixed in. Love that lasts a while, cycles through different forms and seasons. The door into Appleton's old moose lodge turned UU congregation was a doorway to agape. At its best, that congregation I served was a vessel for agape. Philia lay beyond that minivan door in Southern California, and Storge lay beyond the door of my daughter's body in the form of our granddaughter. So it's challenging in English that we use love for such a wide variety, different kinds of love. And all too often, we've sort of settled into what I think of as sort of a lowest common denominator. Hallmark, one size fits all understanding of love that's sentimental, schlocky, shallow, and unembodied. And when we do think about love in its more complicated variants, we often put agape at the top. There's a hierarchy. In the ancient Greeks knew better than this, all forms of love, except narcissism and mania, are important and valuable in their own way. White northern hemisphere culture has too often neglected and even assaulted eros. This is translated into a devaluing of the human body, and anything that we somehow associate particularly with the body, like the earth. Women, black people, indigenous people, people of color, the wide varieties of human sexuality, to name a few. Yes, we need to have more true agape in our world, but we also need to have wider and deeper Philia and more life-giving eros. What would it be like if we had an embodied, passionate, even romantic relationship with the earth? What would it be like if we fiercely loved and valued female, black, brown, and indigenous bodies? What if we valued them so much that there was no more violence against these bodies? I have to say that I hesitated to do a sermon on love today on Valentine's Day. Our culture's simultaneous devaluing and fetishizing of romantic sexual love has really commandeered this holiday, and love is a lot more than that narrow understanding. So let's instead make this day truly about the wide varieties of love. Let's make this a day in which we celebrate all the times we've traveled through doorways and found love, whatever its form is. Let's celebrate that love in one form or another may be beyond the very next door we walk through. And so in this spirit, I wish you a very happy Valentine's Day. Oh father, sister, and brother, if it feels nice, don't think twice. Just shower them. Show them the way that you feel. They're gonna work out much better if you want, but you cannot This is why with your foolish pride that you fit into each week in our services, we pay attention to the joys, the sorrows, and the concerns within our first Unitarian society community. Today, we light two candles for strength and healing. We light a first candle for Helena Mugevna, who had and is recovering from a surgery earlier this week. We send love to both Helena and John as they begin this journey of healing and recovery. And we light a second candle for Peggy Larson. Peggy is also healing from surgery. Her surgery came after a fall on the ice. May those bones mend well and get stronger every day. And then finally, we'll light a candle representing all the unspoken joys and sorrows and concerns that we hold in our hearts today. Our words of benediction come from Andrew Pakula. As you prepare to leave the sacred space, pack away a piece of this congregation in your heart. Wrap it carefully like a precious gem. Carry it with you through the joys and sorrows of your days. Let it let its gentle glow strengthen you, warm you, remind you of all that is good and true until we gather again in this community of love. May you go in peace.