 Please join me in a few moments of centering silence. And now please join me in our, and remain seated for our in-gathering hymn number 1003. The words appear in your order service, and as you notice, we sing through each line twice. This is a community where curious seekers gather to explore spiritual, ethical, and social issues in an accepting and nurturing environment. Human 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 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's 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 centred doors of this auditorium. In your drinks 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 and our community who would welcome visiting with you. First guides are generally available to give a building tour after each service. So if you would like to learn more about this sustainably designed addition, or our National Landmark Meeting House, please meet near the large glass windows on what is your left side of the auditorium after the service. We welcome children to stay for the duration of the 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 outside the auditorium are excellent places to retire if a child needs to talk or move around. The service can still be seen and heard from those areas. This would be a very, very good time to turn off or modify all devices that might cause a disturbance during the hour, especially cell phone ringers, please. And I'd now like to acknowledge those individuals who are helping our services run smoothly. We do not have a sound operator for this service, so our trustee staff are handling it, and they do a great job. But if anyone would like to be a sound operator, our few Trident True volunteers have been getting an extra workout recently, so please sign up and contact Gene about training in sound operation. Ann Smiley is our lay minister. Our greeter was Joan Heitman. Our ushers are Karen Hill, Doug Hill, Ron Cook, and John Webster. Back in the kitchen making coffee and hot cocoa are Sharon's, Graddish, and Genie Hills, so we thank all those folks and appreciate their effort. Please note the announcements in the red floors insert in your order of service, which describe upcoming events at the society and provide more information about today. I have a couple of special announcements to read. The first is that each year, our seventh grade Compass Point students survey the congregation on their belief about a variety of issues. Today they will be in the commons following the service, down that way to your left at a big long table, beliefs about what happens when we die. So they're taking a bit of a survey on what we think about what happens when we die. Please be sure to get a survey sticker and read the choices and then vote with your sticker for the belief that best reflects your own. They'll have sort of a scattergram at the end of that process. Thank you for helping our kids to better understand our FUS community and the ideas we hold dear. One more special announcement, next Sunday, October 25th, will be Shelter Sunday at FUS. It's getting colder as we notice this morning and it will get a lot colder. And we are reminded that our homeless shelters need our help. FUS shelter ministries need more volunteers of almost any age to help make meals and take shifts helping with the shelters. Next week in the commons after services experienced volunteers will answer all your questions. We will also collect adult size twin size flat sheets and blankets, new or in very good condition. Please wash and dry them before bringing them in and we appreciate very much any help you can give us with that Shelter Sunday. Again, welcome. We hope today's service will stimulate your mind, touch your heart and stir your spirit. Thank you. Possibility. This is Love's Hearth, the home of hope, a refuge for minds in search of truth unfolding ever beautiful and ever strange. Your compassion is our shelter, freedom of our freedom and protection from storms of bigotry and hate. In this abode may we find comfort and courage. Here may our sight become vision to see the unseen, to glimpse the good that yet may be. Welcome to church. And if you would all rise in body and or spirit as Karen Rose lights our chalice light this morning and if you would recite the words of the chalice lighting which can be found in your order of service. This fire is a reminder of the light within us all. The yearning for freedom, the longing for truth, the flame of intuition, the torch of conscience. We dedicate this service to the remembrance of this holy light. And while you're standing it seems like a great time to turn and greet each other this morning. Say hello to your fellow congregants. Children in the congregation today, one, two, three, do you guys want to come up and hear a story? I see a hand over there. Come on. Here's a story. It's the part of the story. Yeah. How are you today? There's lots of you. I love it. You're going to be my buddy and sit up here? Okay. You know where you like to be. That's a good thing in life this young. Sit up here too. Great. Sit up here when people sit up here with me. So have you guys ever heard the word miracle? Do you know what a miracle is? Yeah. What is it? It's like a thing that happens that usually doesn't happen at all. And most of the time is very, very, very exciting and good. I like these definitions. In cartoons it's usually a magic effect or something. I love this. You know yesterday someone said it's something that happens that people get so excited about that they think that it's magic. And I really liked that definition too. So you guys got it. So we don't have a lot of miracle stories in Unitarian Universalism. The one that some people like to tell as if it's a miracle story. So I'm going to tell it to you guys today and you can decide whether you think it's a miracle or whether you think it was just chance or something in between. Because that's what we get to do in our faith, right? We get to decide for ourselves what makes sense for us. You were learning about John Murray earlier. I heard that these classes were hearing about John Murray. So you guys can help me out as I go. So you guys have heard of John Murray. But have you guys heard of Thomas Potter? Not Harry Potter. Thomas Potter. He wished it was Harry Potter. He's magical and miracle too. I'm going to try to get through this story. Can we get through this story and then we can talk? Cool. Thank you so much. So Thomas Potter believed that God loved everyone. He lived in a place called New Jersey. Maybe some of you have heard of it. You've heard of it. Great. And he lived in this place called New Jersey. And in New Jersey, he built a chapel. And he said one day a minister, a preacher is going to come who says that God loves everyone. Because at that time there was this weird idea in religion that there were some people that God loved more than others. And Thomas Potter didn't think that made much sense. Yeah, yeah, that's not good. So John Murray, he thought that God did love everyone. And he was a preacher and he preached about this. But he lived way over in England. One day John Murray found himself in the horrible predicament of having lost everything that he cared about. He lost all of his money and he lost his family. And he thought I'm going to go give up this preaching thing because I've also lost my faith. And I'm going to go to New York in the New World and figure out how to make a way for myself. That has nothing to do with church or preaching because all of that stuff isn't true because I don't believe in God anymore. So he went to sail across the Atlantic Ocean. But the winds changed and the coordinates got funny. And his ship called the Hand in Hand, isn't that sweet, actually ended up in New Jersey instead of New York. And who do you think he met in New Jersey? Thomas Potter. Oh, you guys are so good. You heard the story, okay, all right. So Thomas Potter said to him, I have been waiting for a universalist minister to come preach in this chapel. And John Murray said, I am no longer a universalist preacher. And Thomas Potter said, well, will you preach just this Sunday? And John Murray said, you know, I really want to get going, but the winds are down. So if the winds stay down, if there's no wind, I will stay and preach. But if the winds pick up, I'm going to go. So what do you think happened that Sunday? The winds stayed down, right? And so John Murray preached. And then what do you think happened the next Sunday? The winds stayed down. And then what do you think happened the next Sunday? There was no wind for weeks and weeks. And John Murray began to preach in this chapel again. And he began to feel the love of God and remember the message that God loves everyone. And Thomas Potter said to him one day, I have built this chapel waiting for someone. If there isn't God in that, you have shown up here. I don't know where there is God. And John Murray's faith was restored. And he preached the lesson of universalism. You guys have heard that word, right? He preached the message of universalism, which means God loves everyone. And a whole lot of people thought that that made sense. And they decided to start a whole religion. And here we are today. So I'm glad you're hearing about it in your classes. And I hope you go and hear more awesome things in your classes and know that you are very, very loved. We're going to sing as you leave, okay? Revelations to mankind. And particularly of the last and most perfect revelation of his will by Jesus Christ. Whatever doctrines seem to us to be clearly taught in the scriptures, we receive without reserve or exception. This authority which we give the scriptures is a reason we conceive for studying them with particular care and for inquiring anxiously into the principles of interpretation by which their true meaning may be ascertained. The principles adopted by this class of Christians in whose name I speak, Unitarians, needs to be explained because they are so often misunderstood. We are particularly accused of making unwarranted use of reason in the interpretation of scripture. We are said to exalt reason above revelation to prefer our own wisdom to God's. Loose and undefined charges of this kind are circulated so freely that we think it do ourselves and to the course of truth to express our views here in some particularity. Our leading principle in interpreting the scripture is this, that the Bible is a book written for men in the language of men and that its meaning is to be sought in the same manner as other books. We believe that God, when he speaks to the human race, conforms, if we may say so, to be established rules of speaking and writing. How else would the scriptures avail us more than if communicated in an unknown tongue? Were the Bible written in a language and style of its own and did it consist of words which admit but a single sense and sentences wholly detached from each other? There would be no place for the principles of reason now laid down. We could not reason about it as in other writings, but such a book would be a very little worth and perhaps of all books, the scriptures correspond least to this description of little worth. We profess not to know a book which demands a more frequent exercise of reason than the Bible. In addition to the remarks now made on its infinite connections, we may observe that its style nowhere affects the precision of science or the accuracy of definition. Its language is singularly glowing, bold, and figurative, demanding more frequent departures from the literal sense than in our own age and country, and consequently demanding a more continual exercise of judgment. We find too that different portions of the book, instead of being confined to general truths, refer perpetually to the times which they were written, to the states of society, to the modes of thinking, to the controversies of the church, to feelings and usages which have passed away, and without the knowledge of which we are in consistent danger of extending to all times and places, that which was for a temporary and local application. We find too that some of these books are strongly marked by the genius and character of their respective writers, that the Holy Spirit did not so guide the apostles as to suspend the peculiarities of their mind, and that a knowledge of their feelings and of the influences under which they were placed is one of the preparations for understanding their writing. With these views of the Bible, we feel it our burden and duty to exercise reason upon it perpetually, to compare, to infer, to look beyond the letter and into the spirit, to seek the nature of the subject, the aim of the writer, his true meaning, and in general to make use of what is known for explaining what is difficult and for discovering new truths. Say what we may, God has given us a rational nature and will call us to account for it. We may let it slip, we may let it sleep, but we do so at our own peril. Revelation is addressed to us as rational beings. We may wish in our sloth that God had given us a system demanded of compromising, limiting, and inferring, but such a system would be at variance with the whole character of our present existence. And it is part of our wisdom to take revelation as it is given to us and to interpret it by the help of the faculties which it everywhere supposes and on which it was founded. So one of my favorite things to do is to go people-watching. And I have a place that I have found that is my favorite place to people-watch of all the places in the world I have yet done it. And there's a little cafe called Brood Awakening on Euclid Street in Berkeley, California. Brood Awakening is a particularly good people-watching spot for many reasons. One, it is located in Berkeley, California, and it is equidistant from the Bay Area Rapid Transit Stop and all of the wonderful personalities that come with public transportation and the UC Berkeley College of Engineering, which is a totally different kind of group of people. And right in the middle of the Graduate Theological Union, which is a consortium of nine different seminaries, so people of all different religions and walks of life walk by Brood Awakening in Berkeley, California. And my friends and I would sit on this little cafe table on this little street and watch the people that walked by, and we would actually make up games based on people-watching. And my favorite one was called Patron Saint Ordeity. We would look at people walking by and assign them a Patron Saint Ordeity just based totally off our first impression of them. So if they were a vaguely Scandinavian-looking person that maybe looked like they were going to go to crew practice in the bay, we might assign them something from the Norse Pantheon. Or more often times, we would assign them an actual Patron Saint, a person. So if it were a young woman who was looking very self-assured and also quite fashionable, we might say her Patron Saint is Gloria Steinem. And I was often playing this game with people from religions that actually had Patron Saints and deities. And one day, they said to me, Julie, what is the Patron Saint or Deity of Unitarian Universalism? And I had actually just been sitting through an intensive history class where we went through all of the machinations and changes of theology throughout Unitarian Universalist and Unitarian Universalist history in one week. So I was quite tired and had a perspective of the evolving, changing ideas of the church at the time. And the only thing that came to me was a character from a beloved book and movie, The Princess Bride. And I said, Unitarian Universalism's Patron Saint is an Igomantoya. And my friends said, your entire religion wants to get revenge for the death of their father? Well, as you probably know from the reactions I'm getting in the audience, the Igomantoya was a very quotable character. And one of his lines that he said over and over again was about getting revenge for the death of his father. But he had many other things that he said that were well worth repeating. There was a character in the book named Vassini who kept coming up with these ridiculous plots to overthrow the government and start war. And he would tell an ego of these plots in great detail. And when they didn't work out, Vassini would say, inconceivable! And at one point, Anigo said, you keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. And I was sitting in history class. I was sitting in history class and seeing the evolution of our theology. And it seems like at every point in history, our theology took a big change. It was when our religious forebearers looked at the thoughts and ideas and theologies of the day that were widely accepted about Scripture, or Jesus, or God, and said, you know what? I don't think that means what you think it means. In the words of Anigo, let me explain. No, no, there is too much. Spiritual reformation, religious reformation, is often thought of as a stirring of the spirit and a new understanding of the soul. But it cannot be fully understood unless it is placed in its historical context and reason is applied to it as well. The Protestant Reformation didn't happen because people stopped believing in the Catholic Church. The Protestant Reformation happened because the Catholic Church structures stopped making sense to people. The Catholic Church said that if you devote your money, your resources, and all of your devotion and obedience to us, we will guarantee you certain things in life. For instance, if you're sick, you can travel to an icon and make an offering, and it will cure your disease. And this worked okay as a theory until the plague hit, and then people looked around and they realized that a third of the people, a third of the devoted Catholic people were losing their lives when they were promised miracles, and it didn't make sense to them. And there were some people for hundreds of years because the plague really, really hit in the 1300s, and for hundreds of years, people tried to sort of talk about this and how it didn't make sense to them, and they were persecuted. And then the printing press was invented, and in 1519, a German monk named Martin Luther printed out 95 reasons that he disagreed with the Church, and it was so pervasively spread, these ideas that the Church couldn't persecute him in the way that they did the other people, and his protests, his protests created an entire group of people that took a religious turn. The Protestants were created. He looked at church structure and miracles, and he said, I don't think that means what you think it means. So I am going to take the people who agree with me and we're going to do something different. And this idea that you could break with the Catholic Church, it spread from the continent across the channel to England, and this idea was really tumultuous there because in England there was a tie between religion and the monarchy, and what it meant to be a pious religious person started to change based on who was in charge, and pretty soon it eventually started to change based on which wife of Henry VIII the current monarch had been born to. And people looked at this idea of religious piety. There were a group of people that said, wait a minute, this doesn't make sense to me. This doesn't make sense to me that depending on who your mom was, it depends on what's true about God. They looked at religious piety and they said, I don't think that means what you think it means. And they took a pilgrimage across an ocean and founded a country, they founded a nation based on the ideas of freedom of religion and separation of church and state. They founded churches based on the idea that the church is the primary source of authority, that no church structure can decide what is right for an individual congregation. And this was working really, really well until this idea of God became so primary, this idea that God was all perfect and all knowing became so pervasive that people began to think that God knew if you were saved or not before you were even born, that you were predestined to a fate that nothing that you did in this life actually mattered. There was a man named John Edwards who preached a sermon called Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. And he evoked this image of God holding us all above the pit fires of hell, dangling by golden strings. And it was up to God whether or not he was going to snip those strings. And there was nothing you could do dangling on the end to change God's mind. None of your actions mattered, but you had to believe in God to even have a chance. And you heard the John Edwards story. John Edwards was the guy that wrote the Hands of the Angry God, not him. John Murray. John Murray had had an experience of loss. He had had an experience of complete deprivation of the soul and had been found by a divine experience. He knew the love of an all-pervading God. He looked at that idea of the people dangling from the golden strings, and he thought of salvation, and he said, I don't think that means what you think it means. And elsewhere, a little later, a man named Hosea Baloo started looking at this idea of sin and atonement. And he said, sin is a finite thing. Humans are finite. How is it possible that in a finite reality we could do something that could cause us to have repercussions forever, which is a concept we can't even get our heads around forever? This doesn't make sense. Also, the idea of theology is that Jesus died for our sins, so God needed Jesus' life, which means God isn't whole, all in God's own. God needed something to substitute for what humans weren't doing right because God isn't whole. And he looked at this idea of sin and atonement, and he said, I don't think that means what you think it means. And he wrote a book called, For Teeth on Atonement, which said, actually, that God loves everyone, and we would eventually all be saved. And at a very similar time in history, in a very different kind of church, William Ellery Channing was reading a whole lot of the Bible. And does it shock you to know that our religious forebearers were very well-educated people? William Ellery Channing, New Greek. And he was reading the King James version of the Bible in English, and there's this one line that talks about the Trinity that really people latch onto as proof of the Trinity in the Bible, and it's Mark 5 through 10, and it says, And there are three that bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and these are three in one. I'm going to read in the King James version. William Ellery Channing went back and read that in the original Greek, and his translation of it was, There are three who watch over heaven, the Word, the Water, and the Father, and those three agree. And he looked at his translation, and he looked at the translation of the King James version of the Bible, and he said, I don't think that means what you think it means. It is scriptural basis for this idea of the Trinity. He used his reason and his intellect to say, I don't understand, and I am going to question. And then we took it way, way further. A man named Ralph Waldo Emerson. I'm sure that's a, maybe Wolfe is a name that's new to you, but Ralph Waldo Emerson is probably not a name that is new to you. In 1838, he delivered a Divinity School address. And at the time, Divinity School addresses were really ways to really delve into Biblical analysis, because the people that you were addressing it to usually had a better concept of Scripture. So Ralph Waldo Emerson was known as this great mind at the time, and people were really excited to hear what he had to say. And he got up, and he started talking about the weather. And people were like, what is going on? And he just kept going on and on about what a beautiful day it was and how he felt the sun on his skin and the wind in his face, and that because of that lived experience, he didn't need a book to tell him about the nature of God. It was the time in history when talking about the weather was most controversial. And then we took it even further. Not that long of a time later, in 1841, a man named Theodore Parker wrote this sermon called The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity, and he said, there are some things that are permanent and necessary about our faith, our belief in God, and our values that we learn to live through Jesus Christ. And there are some things about the faith that are transient, that are passing with the age and our human understanding, like our theology. I guess I agree with him. And then he took us on a crazy thought experiment. He said, what if we woke up tomorrow in a world where archeologists had disproven the existence of the man Jesus? Would our religion still be a religion? Would there be anything worthy in our religion if we knew that Jesus was a myth and not a man? And he said, Jesus actually isn't foundational for Christianity. Jesus taught us how to live through some specific values, and would those values be any less noble to try to attain if the man had not lived? Would our faith in God and our love for caring for each other be any less worthy if Jesus had been no more real than Zeus? He thought, yes. And so for years, our religion moved away from the idea of doctrine and Scripture being primary and started dealing with the lived experience of human beings and the values with which we can live to take care of one another until one day in the 20s, a group of people said, you know, I can see the majesty of the sunset captured in a photograph and I have seen the life of a child saved by modern medicine and I give worth and praise to the photographer and I give worth and praise to the doctor. I look at your idea of the very divine itself and I say, I don't think that means what you think it means. And the humanist movement was born. And so for years, for decades, for centuries, well, about a century, we've been held, we have been held in this idea of an open theology, of a reasoned theology, of things that are based in rationality and sensicalness and value and lived experience. And I think our challenge today is to balance the idea of this reasonableness being something that is freeing and something that is limiting because there is a difference between something not making rational sense and something not being possible because our human minds haven't conceived of it. I don't think it makes rational sense to me that there is a male deity figure in the sky somewhere who cares about the outcome of a sports game depending on how many fans petition him that particular day. It also doesn't make rational sense to me that there is a vengeful God, a sentient being that is rationally deciding who will have joy and who will suffer based on arbitrary actions in this world or which faith culture we were born into. But it also doesn't make sense to me that my limited experience of the world that I can understand through the lens of my human consciousness is all that could possibly be real. I worked in a hospital a while ago. I was a chaplain in a hospital. And one night there was a terrible accident and these two young boys, cousins and best friends were really, really hurt. It was clear at one point that one of the boys wasn't going to make it. And this boy hadn't grown up in a family but had a faith structure. So they called me in to talk to me to the other boy about ideas of death and to help him say goodbye. And we did that when we watched his cousin go and all of us wondered whether that boy would make it or not. And the next day I came in and at rounds the doctors told me that the boy, the other boy, the boy that lived had made a miraculous recovery that he was going to make it. So I went into his room and I said, hey, it seems like you're going to be okay. And he said, yeah, I'm going to be okay and my cousin's going to be okay too. And I said, oh sweetie, I'm so sorry, do you remember what we talked about last night that your cousin died, that he's gone? And the boy said, oh yeah, I know but he came and talked to me this morning and he said that I have to stay here but he has to go and I actually think we're both going to be okay. The child was seven. He didn't have a language of ghosts or angels or death or heaven or hell. His family hadn't given that to him. So what was that? Was it a dream? Was it a spirit incarnate? Was it the imagination of a young boy? Does it matter? Does it matter? For centuries, we have been the faith that has stripped away everything God could not possibly be. Everything that was harsh and mean, everything that didn't make sense in our souls and in our minds. What would it be like if after having done all of that hard work, we were the faith that stopped talking about what God was definitely not and started considering the possibilities of what the divine could be? What if we concentrated on our connections to that which is larger than ourselves, be that our community or the environment or that thing that we talk about in our first source, the encounter with mystery and wonder that isn't affirmed in all cultures and felt by all people. Could you imagine if we took up the mantle of being the constantly reforming faith and said the most radical thing we could do would be to hold firm to our limitations of reason and yet to embrace possibility at the same time? I hope we do. I think it's exciting. I applaud you too because you are here thinking about it and learning about it and doing it and putting your actual resources into building a better world which we will do right now as the offering is taken. The situation which would have nothing to do with dictatorship of the proletariat or the Manhattan Project, the inadequacy though of her concepts would have nothing to do with the reality of the situation. That's a drastic way of putting it and it's not a very precise one. I don't wish to suggest a reality that is simply an enlarged or extrapolated version of this reality but if you think of how different a thing we call a stone is from a thing we call a dream, the degree of unlikeliness within the reality we know is very extreme and I wish to suggest a degree that is even more absolutely unlikely within which we exist. Through our human circumstances we create for ourselves something that is a radically limited and peculiar notion of existence. I wish blessings on your reason that you may continue to discern and ascertain what makes sense for you in your search for truth and meaning. I wish blessings on your imagination that you may know that what you can see and feel is not the sum total of what is possible in the universe and I wish blessings on your seeking spirit that you will have the fortitude to continue to search and struggle in your human capacity. Go in peace. Start right now.