 You're making me so happy. It's boring. So, I'm going to make an experience. I might. I might. I might. I might. I might. I might. I might. I might. I might. I might. I might. I might. I might. I might. I might. I might. I might. I might. I might. I might. I might. I might. I might. I might. I might. That musical introduction is our way of saying good morning and welcome to another Sunday here at First Unitarian Society where independent thinkers 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. And speaking of things that are different in this world, I'm Steve Goldberg, a proud extraordinarily talented member of this congregation. And I'd like to extend a nice welcome to any guests, visitors or newcomers. If this is your first time at First Unitarian Society, I think you'll find that it's a special place. And we're glad you're here. We invite you to join us for the coffee hour right after the service. In just a minute, we'll join with each other in a moment of centering silence so that we can be fully present with each other this morning. And after that, we'll rise for our in-gathering hymn, which is number 21. But first, let me tell you that you'll have a chance to sit back or lean forward and enjoy today's service. We're very happy to have Scott Princeton back with us for this morning. And you'll have a chance to hear his message. I heard it at nine o'clock, and I know that it will touch your heart, stir your spirits, and trigger one or two new thoughts. We're glad you're here. Please join in a moment of centering silence. And while you're standing, I invite you to join with me in reading the words in your order of service for the lighting of our chalice. May the shining light of our chalice recall the inspiration and kind deeds that spread in ripples from each of us, making the world more beautiful in ways we may never know. And I invite you to take a moment on this beautiful weekend to turn and greet your neighbors with a warm welcome. Well if we have any young people of any age who would like to come up and join me, we have a special spot for you and a special moment for you. This is for young people of any age. There's so many of you. This is my buddy Fudgie Bear. Maybe you haven't met him before. But he lives in the caves and forests of Bearaboo with his mama bear and his papa bear and grandpa bear and his brother and sister, Erebika and Espresso. So you know what the minister's thinking of on Sunday mornings. Well, unlike this morning, the weekend that I'm thinking of and Fudgie Bear was so bored because he had to stay inside. You know those really rainy days where you can't go out because it's so muddy and wet and yucky. Fudgie Bear was stuck inside and he was bored. He was bored, bored, bored, bored. The good news is that he got to stay in the entire day with grandpa bear. And grandpa bear is Fudgie Bear's very best friend because he knows so many stories and he knows the answer to any question it seems. Well, so they got to spend the day playing cards and telling stories and sitting by the fire. And you know when you have to play indoors, sometimes you forget that you're indoors and you get a little too wild. I do that sometimes. Well Fudgie Bear forgot that he was supposed to play like an indoors bear and he got a little out of hand. He was helping grandpa bear make sandwiches for their lunch and he was up on a chair getting a jar of honey down from the shelf when he heard a loud crack. Grandpa bear came in to see what had happened, the chair that Fudgie Bear was standing on had broken and he got down just in time. Grandpa bear came in and said, are you okay? Fudgie bear said, grandpa bear, I'm sorry, a terrible thing has happened. Grandpa bear was calm like he always is and he said, well Fudgie bear, it might be bad, but it might be good. When you've lived as long as I have, you know that sometimes you just have to wait and see. So they looked at the chair to see if they could fix it and grandpa bear said, Fudgie bear, look at this, the wood in this chair is old and rotten. Someone could have sat on this and really hurt themselves. So maybe this wasn't such a bad thing after all. Well after lunch they began looking around for Fudgie bear's favorite toy because he wanted to show grandpa bear, but Fudgie bear couldn't find it anywhere because he hadn't cleaned his room. He looked and he looked and he looked and he got more and more upset until he was afraid that he might even start to cry. He said, grandpa bear, this is terrible. I can't find my toy anywhere. Grandpa bear, it might be bad, it might be good. When you've lived as long as I have, you know that sometimes you just have to wait and see. Well, grandpa bear is super smart and super fun, but he needs a lot of naps and he needed a nap today. So he went to lie down and Fudgie bear promised that he would be a good little bear while grandpa bear slept, but he kind of forgot his promise and he went outside in the rain to see if he could find his toy. Well, he came back in and as he and grandpa bear played checkers and cards the rest of the afternoon, Fudgie bear realized he wasn't feeling very well and by the end of the day, he had caught a cold. So grandpa bear put him to bed and that's where he was when mama bear and papa bear came home all bundled up. They said, oh, Fudgie bear, we're so sorry that you're feeling bad. Fudgie bear blew his red little nose and he said, well, might be bad and it might be good. And you've lived as long as I have. You know that sometimes you just have to wait and see. Well thank you all for being such good listeners. It's so great to get to introduce Fudgie bear to you. And we're going to sing our young people off to summer fun with some music. Him number 108 rise in body or spirit and join in singing my life flows on in endless song. I need to make a note that I always choke up on that hymn. Keep forgetting that. Our first reading this morning is from this month's issue of Vanity Fair entitled, the man who created the World Wide Web has some regrets. British computer scientist and Unitarian Universalist Tim Berners-Lee is best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. And it's no coincidence that his vision of the Internet reflects the openness and freedom of our movement. He spoke to Vanity Fair this month to share his worries about how those values are being exploited and threatened online. For people who want to make sure that the web serves humanity, we have to concern ourselves with what people are building on top of it. Tim Berners-Lee told me one morning. Nearly three decades earlier, Berners-Lee had invented the World Wide Web. On this morning, he had come to Washington as part of his mission to save it. While Silicon Valley started rideshare apps and social media networks without profoundly considering the consequences, Berners-Lee has spent the past three decades thinking about little else. He envisioned that his invention could, in the wrong hands, become a destroyer of worlds. His prophecy came to life most recently when revelations emerged that Russian hackers interfered with the 2016 presidential election. Or when Facebook admitted that it exposed data on more than 80 million users to a political research firm, Cambridge Analytica, which worked for Donald Trump's campaign. I was devastated, Berners-Lee told me. We demonstrated that the web had failed instead of served humanity. The power of the web wasn't taken or stolen. We collectively, by the billions, gave it away with every user agreement and intimate moment shared with technology. Facebook, Google, and Amazon now monopolize almost everything that happens online, from what we buy to the news we read to whom we like. Along with a handful of powerful government agencies, they are able to monitor, manipulate, and spy in once unimaginable ways. The forces that Berners-Lee unleashed nearly three decades ago are accelerating, moving in ways no one can fully predict. Are we headed toward an Orwellian future where a handful of corporations monitor and control our lives? Or are we on the verge of creating a better version of society online, one where the free flow of ideas and information helps cure disease, expose corruption, and reverse injustices? Our second reading is from the memoir The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. In the year following her husband's sudden death and complicated by her daughter's critical illness and eventual death, journalist and novelist Joan Didion reflects on how denial and regret prevented her from grieving those losses. Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. I couldn't give away my husband's shoes. I could give away other things but the shoes. How could he come back if they took his organs? How could he come back if I gave away his shoes? Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, believing that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. As I recall this, I realize how open we are to the persistent message that we can avert death and that if death catches us, we have only ourselves to blame. I did not believe in the resurrection of the body, but I still believed that given the right circumstances, he would come back. There's a joke that ministers make among ourselves that we each have only one sermon in us and we find various ways to dress it up differently and to deliver it each week. Of course, that's not really true, but the kernel of truth is that we each find certain ideas and certain phrases that express the heart of our journey, and it's hard not to use these all the time. I suspect that this morning's sermon is my one sermon. My late colleague, Robbie Walsh, published a collection of writings in 1992. The year I started seminary in Berkeley, and one of his poems has stuck with me ever since. In fact, when I announced my departure from First Unitarian Society in 2007 to pursue my doctorate, my letter to the congregation contained this very poem, titled, Fault Line. Did you ever think there might be a fault line passing underneath your living room, a place in which your life is lived in meeting and separating, wondering and telling, unaware that just beneath you is the unseen seam of great plates that shift through time and that your life, already spilling over the brim, could be invaded, sent off in a new direction, turned aside by forces you were warned about but not prepared for? Shelves could be spilled out, the level floor set at an angle in some seconds shaking. You would have to do, you would have to take your losses, do whatever must be done next. When the great plates slip and the earth shivers and the flaw is seen to lie in what you trusted most, look not to more solidity, to weighty slabs of concrete poured or strength of cantilevered beam to save the fractured order. Trust more. The tensile strands of love that hold you in the web of life that's often torn but always healing. There's your strength. The shifting plates, the rest of earth, your room, your precious life, they all proceed from love, the ground on which we walk together. Becoming a minister marked an enormous shift in my life, away from my training as a scientist, away from my work as a contractor for the space program and into a life that demanded very different values and priorities. This poem encapsulates for me that decision and the many unforeseen consequences that followed, including my five years here as one of your ministers. You could also say that I started preparing this one sermon even earlier in the mid-1980s when I was an undergraduate majoring in physics. I had wanted to be a scientist ever since kindergarten so I could study things, I wrote in crayon, like bugs and dope. Apparently I was a pretty worldly five-year-old. Of all the sciences I loved, I chose physics because it seemed the most likely to lead me to knowing and controlling my world. I was so attracted to the idea of nature as completely lawful and therefore entirely predictable as philosophers had been in the 17th century when they imagined the universe as essentially an enormous clockwork machine. This understanding of our world flourished because it explained so much. Practically anything, it seemed, could be understood as essentially simple collisions on a billiard table, even living organisms, even humans could be understood as essentially biological machines and reduced to the most basic mechanical properties. It wasn't long, however, before the holes began to show in our confidence of perfect knowledge. The natural philosopher Isaac Newton had mapped out the paths of our entire solar system with such precision that he realized that the movement of the planets was not perfect and predictable. The gravitational pull of each planet on its neighbors introduced irregularities, potentially large enough to pull the entire system apart unless some greater force was able to keep it all together. Newton concluded that this force was God's intervention in the clockwork universe to nudge it all back on track when necessary. This god of the gaps sounded like a cop-out even then and Newton's rival, Gottfried Leibniz, ridiculed him for describing God as a craftsman incapable of building a clock that could run on its own. What was becoming clear even then was that the clockwork analogy was not enough, that even the laws of nature produced unexpected complexity and unpredictability. The work of modern physics has largely been about demonstrating that beneath the apparent regularity of our world, reality will always be more complicated than we can fully understand. The fields of quantum theory, chaos theory and complexity theory demonstrated that no matter how closely we look at a complex system, it never smooths out to be the simple game of billiards that we want to expect. One of the most familiar places this unpredictability shows up is in weather forecasts. It's widely acknowledged that even the best computer models and greatest computational power still involve enormous uncertainty looking more than a few days into the future. Even the tiniest variation in wind speed or direction can grow and multiply and significantly change the outcome a week later. Spandrels, in case you're still wondering, are another example of the unexpected consequences of earlier events. The dome is one of the most impressive architectural forms and gives great psychological effect to many religious buildings, as well as in secular cathedrals like our own spectacular state capital building. The architectural problem is that placing a round dome onto a square base is not a perfect fit and creates extra spaces. In the capital rotunda, these extra spaces are trapezoidal, as you see here. A simpler version of the spandrel appears when we place a rounded arch in a rectangular doorway. As you see in this closeup of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, architects and sculptors often fill these extra spaces with decorative elements. Yet another example is of the fan vaulted ceiling, which soars dramatically above each pillar, but looking upward, we see the problem of what to do with the space where the fans meet imperfectly. The point is that these extra spaces are not part of the original intent of the design, but an unavoidable byproduct of combining forms that don't join perfectly. I've been puzzling for many months over how the spandrel illuminates something about the larger world around us and only recently found that I wasn't the first person to make this connection. Biologist Stephen Jay Gould beat me to it in his use of the spandrel to explain the side effects of evolutionary adaptation. The amazing success of evolutionary thought has tempted us to assume that every feature exists because it evolved for some specific purpose. However, our own bodies help us recognize how the side effects of evolution can sometimes be less than optimally successful. The human appendix, for example, is a part of the large intestine that seems to have shrunk as it became less important to digestion, but it poses a potential health risk in the form of appendicitis or cancerous tumors. The eye is an even more famous example because the earliest vertebrates developed an eye with the optic fibers passing through the retina. All vertebrates today have a small blind spot there. However, cephalopods have their optic fibers exiting the eye behind the retina, and so an octopus eye has no such blind spot. Gould recognized that features like an appendix or a blind spot didn't evolve to serve a particular purpose but are simply the byproduct of some other adaptation. Choices made long ago leave us with unforeseeable consequences today. I thought you might like that. Another situation where I'm so aware of these surprising outcomes is the introduction of new technologies into our lives. In our first reading, computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee regrets the way the internet has made it possible for destructive values and behaviors to find new expression. I was also reading this week about the legacy of the first sustained nuclear reaction and the dismay of the scientists at the later consequences of their discovery. Volney Wilson, one physicist working on the experiment, later reflected sadly, I would have thought that the development of this horrible weapon would have been more of a force to bring the world together. The unpredictable nature of our lives interests us not only in the ways of science but also in the concerns of spirituality. And so the minister in me is also intrigued by this question. Two common responses to this reality of unforeseen consequences that worry me are hypervigilance and pathological regret. Hypervigilance is an anxiety response out of proportion to the actual risk of a situation. And the belief that extreme levels of care and control can eliminate danger entirely. One place in particular where hypervigilance is tempting is in parenting where the daunting task of raising another human being creates unreasonable expectations. The New York Times this week featured an article about the destructive effects of hypervigilance on mothering in particular. Writer Kim Brooks reflected on not her own cautiousness but that of her neighbors when she was reported to the police for letting her son wait in the car while she went in the store. Brooks laments, statistically speaking, a child is far more likely to be killed in a car on the way to a store than waiting in one that is parked. But we've decided that such reasoning is beside the point. We've decided to do whatever we have to do to feel safe from such horrors no matter how rare they might be. And so now children do not walk to school or play in a park on their own. They do not wait in cars. They do not take long walks through the woods or ride bikes along paths or build secret forts while we are inside working or cooking or leading our lives. Not all spandrels are beautiful. When I hear someone explain their actions as being for safety's sake or just to be sure, I listen further for the possibility that they are in the trap of hypervigilance. When I was still working here at First Unitarian, a parent of an adult daughter asked me, how are you going to guarantee that something you say from the pulpit won't trigger her post-traumatic stress disorder? I couldn't promise him that, of course. I couldn't promise that nothing I said would ever distress her and that everything would be all right because how could I possibly guarantee that? Instead, I explained how we would respond as best we could when we needed to. But I understood our temptation to pursue the appearance of safety at any cost. Joan Didion's reflections in our second reading trace her evolving grief over the year that followed her husband's sudden death and her daughter's lingering decline. Realizing that she could not possibly keep her family safe from all dangers, Didion regularly found herself being pulled into what she called the vortex, a cycle of debilitating confusion and regret that she had not been able to foresee her husband's heart attack or her daughter's hemorrhages. She wrote, I did not believe in the resurrection of the body, but I still believed that given the right circumstances, he would come back. Obsessively, she relived every memory for signs of their impending deaths. What if I had said something then? What if I had done something then? All in the desperate desire to maintain the illusion that her world was fully knowable and controllable. Ultimately, Didion found herself unable to grieve because she was so consumed with trying to rewrite the past. My one sermon has taught me this. The point of the spiritual life is not to prevent the unexpected from ever happening to us. It is to help us respond in life-giving ways when the unforeseeable inevitably happens to us. It is to help us respond in life-giving ways, but so many of us are haunted, as Didion was, by the reality that spandrels appear everywhere in our lives, the consequences of millions of tiny factors, but not always something we can foresee or control. Our own religious movement is itself the product of unintended consequences. The wheel set in motion 501 years ago by the German priest Martin Luther, urging seekers to take control of their own faith, have produced communities today that he would scarcely recognize. And as much as Unitarian Universalists love the idea of being a religion that evolves, it has been a rocky road becoming something different from who we were. Our spoken ideal of racial equality, for example, has been a real struggle in practice as the people of color in our congregations demand that we walk the walk on issues like systemic racism and white supremacy. We can never truly know where our choices will take us, but we must deal with the consequences as best we can, and it is possible to prepare ourselves for that work. Many of you know that one of the jobs I'm working while I finish my dissertation is at the Department of Transportation just west of here. The Hill Farms Building, which was older than I am, is now being demolished as we watch from our new building next door. It's an amazing sight to see the wrecking ball carefully breaking away pieces, interrupted every so often by an avalanche of debris. I was struck this week by how exactly a building comes down. The rigid concrete crumbles easily under the wrecking ball, but the building persists thanks to a tangled spaghetti of flexible steel rebar holding it all together long after we would have expected it to fall. Look not to more solidity, my colleague Robbie Walsh writes, to weighty slabs of concrete poured to save the fractured order. Trust more the tensile strands of love that bend and stretch to hold you in the web of life that's often torn but always healing. There's your strength. I keep coming back to this sermon and this poem not because I've mastered it, but because I have to keep relearning it. Sharing the world with the unexpected means making peace with the reality that we always have to make choices with too little information and with incomplete control over the outcome. When our path swerves in an unexpected way either because of a major crisis such as death, illness or injury or the less dramatic everyday changes that pull the rug out from under us, may you find your strength in flexibility, suppleness and softness rather than in brittle rigidity. The spandrels that appear in our lives are blank spaces waiting for our response. May we seek together for ways to fill them that are life-giving and beautiful. May it be so. Now our ushers will pass the basket for the giving and the receiving of our offering. All that happens here and outside our walls on behalf of this community happens because of your generosity. We are so grateful at the difference you have made to this community. Thank you. Another way in which members and friends give to the work of this community is by volunteering. And so we always take a moment each weekend to appreciate the gifts of the people who have helped with our service this morning. Our greeters were Margie Marion and Gail Bliss. Our ushers were Sam Bates, Elizabeth Barrett and Anne Smiley. On sound was Marine Friend. Hospitality was Jean Hills. Our lay minister is Anne Smiley. And if you would like a tour of this spectacular building after the service, we invite you to gather at the ramp after we're done and we'll see if we have a guide for the 11 o'clock service. We also join together each week to hold with special care those among us who are in need. We are a community who gathers with joys and sorrows written on our hearts. In this place, we love and are loved. We give and we receive in return. We come together to find strength and common purpose, turning our minds and hearts toward one another, seeking to bring into our circle of concern all who need our love and support. And we hold with special care this weekend, Terry Pepper and Rachel Avery, as they head down to Indiana to mourn the loss and celebrate the life of Terry's grandmother who passed away on Friday. Now I would like to invite you to rise and body our spirit for our closing hymn, number six in your gray hymn book, just as long as I have breath. The dancer, the willow, the calming breath, the gentle hand. All of these find their strength in flexibility rather than rigidity. May your journey to be such a dance, that your power comes in being able to respond heartfully when life throws you for a loop. Most of all, may we live at peace with our world and at peace with ourselves. Blessed be, and amen. Would you please be seated for the postlude.