 Please join me for a few moments of centering silence. Now please remain seated as we sing our in-gathering hymn. Number 126 and the words appear in your order of service. Good morning. Welcome to the First Unitarian Society of Madison. This is a community where curious seekers gather to explore spiritual, ethical and social issues in an accepting and nurturing environment. Modern universalism supports the freedom of conscience of each individual as together we seek to be a force for good in the world. My name is Karen Rose Gredler and on behalf of the entire congregation I would like to extend a special welcome to any visitors who are with us this morning. We are a welcoming congregation so whomever you are and wherever you happen to be on your life journey we celebrate your presence among us. Newcomers are encouraged to stay for our fellowship hour after the service and to visit the library which is directly across from the center doors of this auditorium. Bring your beverages and your questions. Members of our staff and lay ministry will be on hand to welcome you. You may also look for persons holding teal colored stoneware coffee mugs. These are FUS members knowledgeable about our faith community who would welcome visiting with you. Experienced guides are often available to give building tours after the service so if you would like to learn more about this sustainably designed addition or our national landmark meeting house across the parking lot please meet on your left up by the large glass window after the service and hopefully a guide will show up. We welcome children to stay for the duration of our service. However because it is difficult for some in attendance to hear in this lively acoustical environment our child haven back in that corner and the commons along the back of the auditorium are great places to go if a child needs to talk, move around, sing, dance, be active. The service can still be seen and heard from those areas. This would also be an excellent time to turn off all noise making devices that might cause a disturbance in the service particularly cell phone ringers please. I'd now like to acknowledge those folks who help our services run smoothly. Our sound operator is Maureen Friend. Our lay minister is Anne Smiley. Min Scoby was your greeter. Our ushers for this service are Dorot, Bergen, Christie Minahan, Samuel Bates and Elizabeth Barrett. Back in the kitchen making coffee we have Jeannie Hills. We also have a lot of other people back there preparing lunch and I'll tell you about that in a minute. I'd now like you to turn your attention to the announcements in the red floors insert to your order of service which describe things that are going on today and in the upcoming future at the society and I need to clarify a couple things with you. Right under the listing about Kelly's talk next weekend on Saturday and Sunday we have a smiling picture of Eric Severson our intern and it shows December 3rd and 4th both Saturday and Sunday. However he will be speaking on Saturday at the 430 service and Sunday will be our winter choral festival so please note that clarification so that you get to the right service or come to both and we'll be happy to see you at both. Another thing is in the middle the Thanksgiving Day potluck occurs on Thanksgiving however apparently it says this gathering will not be just like it was what we've had in the past. So please stop by out in the concourse after the service or contact Jean Sears to find out what exactly is going on there's a table out there where you can sign up to attend. And the final thing after the service today at about 1230 to 2pm here in this atrium auditorium will be a parish forum meeting. Come discuss the future of 2018 ministerial transition and hang out with your friends please and the food haulers are those extra people I mentioned in the kitchen and they're preparing a lunch for everyone which will be served about 12.15 so thank you. And welcome we hope today's service will stimulate your mind touch your heart and stir your spirit. Thank you. These are the words of the poet Denise Leverton but we have only begun to love the earth we have only begun to imagine the fullness of life how could we tire of hope so much is in bud how can desire fail we have only begun to imagine justice and mercy only begun to imagine how it might be to live as siblings with beast and flower not as oppressors surely our river cannot already be hastening into the sea of non being surely it cannot drag in the silt all that is innocent not yet not yet there is too much broken that must be mended too much hurt that we have done to each other that cannot yet be forgiven we have only begun to know the power that is in us if we would join our solitudes in a common struggle so much is unfolding that must complete its gesture so much is in bud please rise in body or in spirit for the lighting of our chalice our words of affirmation this morning are responsive would you please join your voices in reading the bolded sections as we kindle the lamp of our heritage we recall those who have gone before us we dedicate ourselves to be parts of that stream of light we come together to be lifted by the presence of each we light our chalice to symbolize the light in each and now joining our lights together this morning I invite you to exchange a friendly greeting please be seated that was pretty lusty singing and now I would like to invite any children to the front of the auditorium for the message for all ages we will not start without you I promise so a little chilly out there this morning wasn't it yeah a little cold well this is a story that comes from a part of the world that's a lot warmer than it is in Wisconsin right now about halfway around planet earth there is a country called Syria be heard of Syria okay well Syria is very close to where this famous guy named Jesus of Nazareth grew up about 2,000 years ago and this is a story about this woman I know it's a little picture but her name is Mona and she and her husband and their five children were from Syria now there's a problem here because for a lot of years now there's been a war going on in Syria lots of different groups fighting each other to try to control the country and so they've been using guns and tanks and airplanes and bombs and when they've been fighting against each other and eventually all this fighting came really close to where this woman and her family the Alamoors where they lived and that was the city called Daria and so the Alamoors were really worried because they could get harmed with all of this fighting going on so they decided that they were going to have to leave and so they were seven people out of millions of people in Syria that had to leave their homes because of all of this fighting they were caught in the middle of it and they just wanted to find a safe place to live and so the family left on foot they didn't have a car with as much food as they could carry and they began to walk and walk and walk toward the border with another country called Jordan where they thought that they could be see it safe and they'd be really careful how much they ate as they were walking because their food had to last all the way until they got to the country of Jordan well eventually they were able to get to Jordan and they joined hundreds of thousands of other people from Syria in this huge refugee camp and you can see a picture of that camp and back of me everybody was living in these tents and you know how long the Alamoor family had to live in those tents three years in those tents but they couldn't become citizens of Jordan they couldn't stay there permanently they didn't know what was going to happen to them and the kids really couldn't go to a good school and they couldn't get jobs they wouldn't allow Syrian refugees to get jobs to earn money and so they lived because other people gave donations that allowed them to have food and shelter during this three year time well they desperately wanted to get to a place where life would be better than that and so they applied to come here to the United States and after three years our country allowed the Alamoor family the five kids and the mom and the dad to come to the United States and here of course they could go to a good school like the schools that you all go to and they could have an apartment or a house that actually had a toilet and a sink inside rather than a hundred yards down a dusty road and so they were pretty lucky because not a lot of Syrian refugees were able to actually come to this country but their problems didn't all just go away because they were in the United States they needed all kinds of assistance for this new life that they were going to lead it was so different from the life that they led in Syria and so they needed some help in order to learn how to speak English and to get jobs in this country so that mom and dad could actually earn a living and just medical care basic information about what it means to live in the United States of America now fortunately they got some help from an organization called the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee and the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee provided many of the things that they needed along with its partners and they've been doing this for 70 years our Unitarian Universalist Service Committee helping refugees to lead these new lives but they can only continue providing this kind of help if all of us pitch in if all of us contribute to their good work and so that's why today we are asking everyone to pick up one of these boxes which is called a guest at your table box and take it home with you now just like the name implies this will be a guest at your table this box will sit on your table where you eat your meals and we hope that every time that you all eat a meal that you or your mom or your dad will put some money in that box and maybe if you're really being generous a $10 bill every meal but whatever it is anything you can put in the box would really really be helpful and about four weeks from now we will ask you to bring these boxes back with money in them if their coins they'll be really really heavy or they could have dollar bills or even just a big check at the end and then we're going to send all of that money to the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee and those contributions are going to help more families like the Alamoors to lead a new life here in the United States so you can find these boxes and information about the work that the Service Committee is doing out in the commons after you get out of your classes today so please take a few minutes when you get your hot chocolate and your coffee folks and pick up a box and a brochure take it home and bring it back in four weeks so thank you so much for listening and and taking seriously my little pitch this morning for the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee and we're going to sing you out and okay yes you could okay all right we're going to sing you out with our next him now please enjoy your classes today it's going to be nice and warm in your classrooms I guarantee please be seated our first reading is a sampling from eastern wisdom it's brought to us from Jack cornfield and it's called after the ecstasy the laundry in the inevitable rising and falling the cycles of expansion and contraction that come as you give birth to yourself there may be moments to push to strive toward a spiritual goal but more frequently the task is one of letting go of finding a gracious heart that honors the changes of life Suzuki Roshi once summed up all of Buddhist teachings in three simple words not always so conditions always change we come down from the summit Mara returns honoring the truth of transience allows our experience of darkness and falling to be part of the greater whole in all practices and traditions of freedom we find the heart's task to be quite simple life offers us just what it offers and our task is to bow to it to meet it with understanding and compassion there are no laurels to acquire charismatic teachers and spiritual attainments can become traps of striving in which we lose sight of our own Buddha nature here and now Tibetan practices teach us that we each benefit by honoring and feeding the demons when demons arrive we must recognize that they are part of the dance of life itself when they threaten it is only our illusions that are in danger the deeper our bow to the awesome changing powers of life the wiser we will be only to the extent that we let go into change can we live in harmony with those around us and with our own true nature no matter what the situation awakening requires trust trust in the greater cycles of life trust that something new eventually will be born trust that whatever is is perfect wise letting go is not detached removal from life it is the heart's embrace of life itself a willing opening to the full reality of the present is from the noted historian Howard Zinn who is best known for his work of people's history of the united states in this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power in such a world how do I manage to stay involved how do I manage to be happy I am totally confident not that the world will get better but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played the metaphor is deliberate life is a gamble not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning to play to act is to create at least the possibility of changing the world there is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue indefinitely and we forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible looking at this catalog of huge surprises it's clear that the struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns who have the money who seem invincible in their determination to hold on to these things this apparent power has again and again and again proven vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars qualities such as fervor determination unity organization sacrifice wit ingenuity patience courage whether by blacks in alabama or south africa or workers and intellectuals in poland and hungary no cold calculation of the balance of power need deter people who are persuaded that their cause is just revolutionary change does not come on as one cataclysmic moment beware of such moments but as an endless succession of surprises moving zigzag toward a more decent society and we do not have to engage in grand heroic actions to participate in this process of change small acts when multiplied by millions of people this is what transforms our world and even if we don't win there is fun and there is fulfillment in the fact that we have been involved with other good people in something ultimately worthwhile to be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic it is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty it's a history of compassion sacrifice courage and kindness what we choose to emphasize in this complex history is what will determine our lives i didn't think he'd be able to do that anthem but hey you did it two interesting characters recently caught my attention both of whose stories were featured in recent issues of the new yorker magazine and the first of those individuals was evan chalanard co-founder of the outdoor clothing and equipment company patagonia chalanard is now 77 years old and he was described by one of his close associates as just about the most pessimistic person i've ever known he likes to regale his traveling companions with stories of species extinctions and dire threats to the world's ecosystems but although he may be a pessimist chalanard is by no means a defeatist having remarked that as a species were screwed he then will break into this bemused laugh now under his guidance patagonia has arguably become the world's most socially and ecologically conscious clothing company and chalanard himself in retirement continues to throw himself into the causes close to his heart he is remarkably free of illusions of personal ambition and he stresses the value of effort regardless of the outcome sometimes chalanard is pleasantly surprised as when he and an independent filmmaker collaborated on a documentary about the susitna river in alaska an important spawning ground for wild salmon now the alaskan government had already approved a dam for that wild untamed river but then the conservative republican governor saw the documentary and he immediately killed the dam project because of its effect on the salmon population you don't get many clear-cut victories like this chalanard set afterwards but sometimes all it takes is one or two people the second individual to pique my interest was russell moore a former professor of theology and currently president of the ethics and religious liberty commission of the southern baptist convention this commission is perhaps the most influential body in that 14 million member denomination the role of the commission is to determine where southern baptists should stand in relationship to the great issues of our time now the southern baptist church traces its origins back to the 1840s when its adherence in the deep south broke away from the national baptist movement over the slavery question and for most of its history the sbc was an exclusively white church fiercely resistant to integration both internally and within southern society more generally it now welcomes people of color and yet the southern baptist convention remains a bastion of conservative christian values women cannot serve as ministers same sex relationships are anathema non-christians are regarded as lost souls abortion is considered to be murdered and russell moore is in many respects a standard issue southern baptist but what makes him interesting what makes him a unique leader are certain positions that he has taken that do stand at odds with the vast majority of the members of his denomination now 81 percent of evangelical christians cast their ballots for donald trump in the last election but moore was outspoken in his criticism of the candidate a stance that certainly did not endear him to other powerful figures within the sbc and moore has insisted that it is a christian's duty to exercise compassion toward immigrants including syrian refugees and he has expressed concern over the police shootings of alton sterling and flando castile for african americans moore told his followers such incidents reverberate with the history of state sanctioned violence in a way that many white americans including white evangelicals often just don't understand moore describes himself as a little guy who looks like a cricket he brushes off criticism from the rank and file because he is determined to use whatever moral leverage he has while acknowledging that in the short term it is unlikely that the southern baptist convention is going to be moving very far in his direction on these issues but he knows where he stands and he knows why he stands there he says i want southern baptist to grow better even if we're not growing bigger and he claims that he would be quite satisfied to be the leader of a moral minority now you know it's it's one thing to take the lead on some of these issues as a unitarian universalist it's quite another thing when your constituency is overwhelmingly comprised of staunch conservative evangelicals imagine as wrestle moore has maintaining your poise maintaining your hope maintaining your good humor in the midst of that particular struggle but perhaps as a conservative scripturally oriented christian wrestle moore is better prepared for that struggle than some of the rest of us after all when the almighty banished our putative first parents from paradise we were banished into a world of toil and travail and hardship human existence once free from care henceforth would be defined by struggle so from a christian perspective this is what we were born for so better to accept it with a measure of grace now although he was far from being a christian and was in fact a secular jew sigman freud interestingly reached a similar conclusion in his book beyond the pleasure principle this father of psychoanalysis proposed that from the first moment of our birth two powerful instincts were contending with each other one instinct freud identified with arrows which he defined broadly as the life force the impulse that lifts up that binds together that vitalizes raw matter in its perpetual struggle with fanatose the death instinct the goal of fanatose is quiescence a return to an earlier state of things characterized by the complete absence of tension so in other words according to freud to be alive is to experience tension attention born of our struggles and we can retreat from it we can seek to escape its claim upon us but to do so is in a way to court death to surrender to fanatose in telling the story of his years as a prisoner in a nazi concentration camp primo levy offers firsthand testimony of how these opposing forces played out in the lives of his fellow inmates he says that as prisoners we could all be placed in just one of two categories the saved and the drowned life in these camps was rigorously controlled identical for all inadequate to all needs and the conditions levy recalls were more rigorous than any experimenter could have set up to establish what is essential to the conduct of the human animal in the struggle for existence and in such an environment he says to sink was the easiest of matters and the vast majority drowned within three months of entering those camps they just followed this downward slope to the bottom like streams running to the sea these were non men he says who march and labor in silence the divine spark dead within them already too empty to suffer one hesitates to call them living one hesitates to call their death death in the face of which they have no fear for they are just too tired to understand when i read that grim account i was reminded of those tales that survivors tell of being lost in the winter wilderness as the cold intensifies as fatigue begins to overtake them a person wants nothing so much as to simply give up the struggle to just lie down and let sleep and hypothermia carry up one away we struggle first and foremost in order to live but the impulse to let go to give up manifests itself in other less severe ways because when we are world weary when we feel overwhelmed by the challenges that the future holds in store for us it is oh so tempting to cease and desist we lose confidence in ourselves along with faith in the world and so we begin to be lethargic indifferent the canadian novelist robertson davies once said there's only one kind of failure that really breaks the spirit it's the failure that manifests itself in a loss of interest in really important things and indeed there are some really really important things that are at stake in our world right now climate change threats to civil liberties reproductive freedom medicare and social security economic insecurity consumer rights universal suffrage race relations religious freedom to mention just a few this is a daunting though incomplete list and the necessity of defending each item on it will become all that much greater in the years ahead as time passes many of us will look at that list and we will be tempted to retreat and to find some kind of solace by simply tending to our own gardens in the most recent issue of the unitarian universalist world former uua president bill sinkford issued a challenge he threw down the gauntlet in the past he said too many you use too many white you use in particular have opted for a vision of love rather than struggle we cling to what might be described as a kumbaya outlook imagining that by being passively open and affirming this multi-racial multicultural paradise would somehow come into being and so the prophetic invitation to witness and to action extended by martin luther king and sazer chavez and others that went largely unheeded as a black american bill sinkford knows something about struggle and tanahisi coats he writes in a similar vein when he reminds his young son that to be black in this country is to accept the necessity of struggle he tells us on you have been cast into a race in which the wind is always in your face and the hounds are always nipping at your heels to varying degrees he says this is true of all of life the difference my son is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact and perhaps this is now true for all of us who cling to our progressive values we too can no longer ignore the essential fact that we are locked in a struggle if that was not clear before it ought to be clear to us by now coats reminds his son that success is by no means assured that victories if any will be small progress will be incremental the potential for disappointment will be significant but he says you are called to struggle not because it assures you of victory but because it assures you of an honorable and a sane life struggle is what keeps us vital connected engaged as arrows it is what makes our love efficacious now i need to interject an important note of caution here with all of the enumerated concerns that we now have for our country and for the world it's easy to lose focus as individuals we all know we've only got so much time so much energy so many resources at our disposal and if we spread ourselves too thin we are not going to be as productive as if we committed ourselves to the service of a single cause for which we feel this really deep passion and so if our greatest concern today is for refugees Muslims of Middle Eastern extraction undocumented aliens we can put our energy to good use in the emerging sanctuary movement or helping to resettle these these new arrivals in our country and if we fear that the administration is going to renegan climate change we can enlist in 350.org or the sierra club plan parenthood they've been struggling mightily for years to protect women's reproductive rights today they need more help than ever to serve their low income clients and to create a wall of resistance to restrictive state and federal legislation let your passion guide you and trust that others will contribute as their passion dictates in their own chosen ways there is an important risk in trying to attend to too many issues in her book the rhythm of compassion gail strauby recalls how as a younger woman she threw herself into just about every progressive cause imaginable until eventually she succumbed to burnout and she just broke down completely i lost the original joy that had inspired my work she conceded she had been pushing herself so hard relentlessly but then through the kind ministrations of a perceptive friend she was able to get get in touch with the underlying source of all of this drivenness turns out it was a secret desire for status the need to be admired a belief that she knew better than anybody else how to solve the world's problems and these underlying feelings are what kept gail strauby at the center of this whirlwind as she sought to convince herself and others of her exceptional virtue and worthiness in the end it cost her her passion this kind of shadow she writes leads eventually to apathy and indifference and so she knew that she had to back off and she developed a healthy rhythm of care for others and care for herself and she was able to become much more focused in her efforts now like her we all know that none of us as an individual has the capacity to solve the world's problems so better to be guided by the wise and appropriately humble doctor who in one episode of this perennially popular british program his adversary says to who do you really think your puny efforts can change the course of destiny no doctor who replies with a canny wink but i might just tamper with it a little bit you know the scientific community can also help us to keep things in perspective several years ago the renowned harvard entomologist e o wilson summed up 60 years of research and teaching experience in a small book entitled letters to a young scientist wilson too emphasizes passion because only a deep enduring passion for one's field in the scientific enterprise can carry one through 60 years in the same career and wilson events of skepticism in his book about the role that iq plays in the scientific enterprise admitting that he himself topped out at 123 far below genius level extreme brightness he says may be a detriment it could be that iq geniuses have it too easy in their early training they don't have to sweat the the courses that they take in college they find little reward in the necessarily tedious chores of data gathering and analysis so no there must be the ability he says to pass long hours in study and in research with pleasure even though some of the effort will inevitably result in a dead end but that's the price of admission to the first rank of research scientists like the causes of social reform environmental protection the pursuit of scientific truth is always a struggle but it makes all the difference in the world if we can see it and accept it as a joyful struggle there are no laurels to be acquired jack cornfield wrote so our task must just be to bow to what life has to offer and to meet it with understanding and compassion struggle we must so let us embrace that struggle and understand that it is nothing more or less than love turned to action and even if you don't win howards in said there's fun and there is fulfillment in the fact that we have been involved with all these other good people in something that is ultimately worthwhile may this be true for all of us in the months and the years ahead blessed be and amen we are sharing our offering this weekend with the river food pantry and there's actually a table out there I think that still has information about it so please be generous in the spirit of thanksgiving and gratitude we gather each week as a community of memory and of hope and to this time and place we bring our whole and sometimes our broken selves we carry with us the joys and sorrows of the recent past seeking here a place where they might be received and celebrated and shared there were two entries in the cares of congregation book this morning one jody welden asks us to send healing and love to her friend sherry and her family as she recovers and men's and then tim conroy and jennifer conroy asked for our thoughts and love to be with anabelle kennedy who was born with a condition called trisomy 18 so our thoughts to her family today and in addition to those mentioned we would acknowledge any other unexpressed joys or sorrows that remain among us and that we hold with equal compassion in our hearts let us sit silently for just a moment or two in the spirit of empathy and hope and so by virtue of our brief time together this morning may our burdens be lightened and our joys expanded please rise once more in body or in spirit as we sing together him number 146 please be seated for the benediction and the postlude to the blessings of this season may our senses be alert and our hearts take heed for in a busy sometimes tragic world beauty is often the comfort most sure to the blessings of warm accepting human relationships may our hearts be open may our minds take heed for in a lonely sometimes frightening world friendship is often the support that upholds us to the blessings of high ideals and noble aspirations may our minds be open and our hands take heed for in a troubled and sometimes dangerous world justice is the hope that can sustain us blessed be the life that comforts upholds and sustains us and blessed be we who are awakened by its grace blessed be and amen