 Virtually, we are so very pleased that you are with us today as well. I'm Kelly Crocker, one of the ministers here and my colleague, Kelly Asbruth Jackson, and I are joined today by the worship team of Drew Collins, Linda Warren, Stephen Gregorius, and Daniel Carnes. Here in this community, we gather to grow our souls, connect with one another, and embody our UU values in our community and in our lives and in our world. For those of you here in the room with us today, we want to remind you to keep your mask on at all times and to ask that you refrain from singing along with the hymns. Please do, however, feel invited to hum. For those of you who are online, we will be holding a virtual coffee hour at noon on Sunday. That'll make more sense to you, what time it is. The information for joining us will be on your screen again after the postlude and can also be found on our website, fusmatterson.org. I invite you now to take a few deep breaths, to be present here together, to bring ourselves fully into this time we share in a spirit of deep gratitude for the gifts of community. Come in peace, come in hope. We welcome all, the thirsty and searching, the steadfast and stalwart. We welcome you here, one and all. You are not a stranger here. First time visitor or member of many years, this place, this time, is for you. Your precious spirit is a blessing to the world. Your unique gifts, your joys and your sorrows, your strength, your weakness, your worries and your ideas all have a place within these walls. Come into this community. Let the gentle waters of the larger spirit soothe you and heal you, shed your tears and drink your fill. We come together, pausing for a moment from our busy, separate lives. We come to worship. In music, in words, in silence and in ritual. The river flows on with the force of all our yearnings. Come in peace, come in hope. Let your thirst be quenched this day, that we may have the strength to carry the water of life to the wider world. Come in peace, come in hope. And I invite you to join in our words of affirmation as we light our chalice. We light this chalice as a symbol of reunion. We gather together to celebrate our fountains of joy, to hold each other through storms of grief, to guide one another through rapids of transformation, to rest together on ponds of stillness. Together we honor the spirit of water, its many forms and its life-giving essence. Rise up, O flame, by thy light glowing, show to us beauty, vision and joy. Our opening hymn today is number 122, Sound Over All Waters. The chorus of voices, the clasping and singing. The story today is the rhythm of the rain, and for a little while we're going to be inviting you to stay in your seats for our story. So you can just stay right where you are. Isaac was playing in his favorite pool on the side of the mountain where he was collecting water in a little jar. He felt spots of rain on his cheek and he looked up. The clouds above him were turning dark. He emptied his jar of water into the pool as the rain made little streams that ran out of it. When the rain stopped, Isaac raced the streams down the mountainside. He followed them to the river that ran past his home and then plunged down a waterfall. Somewhere in all that tumbling is the water from my little jar, he thought. As the river went on, it got deeper and wider. Waters came out of the woods to drink and to wash and fish leaped high out of the swelling water. On and on the river flowed, winding through the country and winding through the city. And everywhere it went, people and creatures found a use for it. Eventually it joined the great ocean. There is the water from my jar now, Isaac wondered. The ocean is home to many creatures. A great whale opens its huge mouth to feed and swallow some of the water from Isaac's pool. Later by the light of the moon, the whale rises and blows a great fountain into the starry night. The water falls like rain back into the sea. It flows with the currents that run like rivers, deep, deep down where the sun's light never shines. Then it rises to ride a storm all night long. In the calm morning, the sun turns the waves golden. The ocean steams in the heat and some of its water climbs as mist into the sky. The mist cools and gathers into a cloud that floats over a mountain in a country far, far away from Isaac's pool. The clouds release their gift of water. They fill the pool where a little girl is playing. Down the mountain the river runs, elephants and giraffes, flamingos and zebras celebrate the return of the rain on and on the water runs back to the sea. Where a giant squid, surprised by a shark, creates a cloud of ink, sucks in some sea water and jets away to safety. Once more, the sun heats the ocean and some of the sea water rises as steam into the sky where it forms into clouds and then rain falls on the land as it has done for millions of years. When thirsty flowers draw the wandering water into themselves, waving like bright flags around the pool where Isaac plays. Today many of us are here in person, together again after so many months, and it is fitting that we come back to our celebration of water communion. We bring our waters here, waters which have touched all parts of this globe which come from the sky, the surface of the earth, from deep wells and springs within the earth. We bring water that belong to lakes and streams and reservoirs of fresh waters that quench our thirst. We bring water that is part of the great oceans and the seas that circle the globe teeming with life, the source of all life. We bring water to this place made sacred by our presence and our intention. As we learned in our story of Isaac and his little jar of water that went on such a long journey in this water, formed in the atmosphere daily, there's new water, there's old water, water as old as the earth, water from which life has evolved over the eons. And today we remember that our community here is like these waters. We mingle the stories of our lives, we share our celebrations and our struggles, we laugh and we bring forth the water of our tears. The first ever water communion held in the 1980s was called Welcome Home, like rivers to the sea. And after so many months, physically apart from one another, that is what we joyously say to you today. Welcome home everybody. Welcome home. And now in honor of our new times as well, we're going to send you to your classes a little differently than we used to. We're going to do it by section. So we're going to start with all of our kids and teachers in this section. You guys can head up and head to class, right? And then this section here, you can go. And I invite you now into this time of giving and receiving where we give freely and generously to our offering, which sustains and strengthens our community here. And also that of our outreach offering partner, who this week is the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee's Emergency Relief Fund, who are working in partnership with rural Louisiana's Lowlander Center, who supports community-led adaptation and mitigation in the face of hurricanes like Laura and most recently, Ida. So with your help, we will support their community-led Justice Center disaster preparedness and recovery efforts in Louisiana. So for those of you here at the service, another change. I'm sure you're seeing multiple changes today. A change here in the room is that offering baskets are now located at all the doors. And so we ask you to put your gifts there on the way out. You'll also see on your screen that you can donate directly from our website at FUSMadison.org, and you'll see our text to give information there as well. And we thank you for your generosity and your faith in this life we create together. The place was defined by the shore of Lake Ontario, the Genesee River that cascaded down into it, and the path of the Erie Canal that cuts from Albany to Buffalo, a great watery highway to the west. When I lived in California, the place was defined by the contours of San Francisco Bay and by Lake Merritt, the human-made lake in the heart of Oakland's downtown. Most recently for me, it was Salem Sound and the unthinkable vastness of the Atlantic beyond. And now it is the city of four lakes, with a couple of extra lakes for good measure. Every place and every community is different. And yet, every place and every community is also the same. People all over the world, of many times and many faiths, have held the waters that they lived beside as sacred. The ancient Egyptians revered the Nile. They depended on its floods for their livelihood, and they believed that those who died left the living world behind by crossing its waters from east to west. In the Hebrew Bible, the prophet Elisha healed a desperately sick man by washing him in the river Jordan. In the Gospel of Mark, it is that same river in which Jesus travels in order to be baptized by John. In Islam, the well of Zamzam in the holy city of Mecca is the place where Hagar, lost and alone in the desert, with her thirsty infant child, found water to sustain them both. In the lore of Great Britain, the hero Arthur is given the sword Excalibur by the lady of the lake, symbol that he is to become king of the Britons. Now, intellectually, I think that most of us will agree with Michael Palin that strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Emotionally and spiritually, however, stories like this plug into something which is common, maybe even almost universal in human culture. It is the idea of holy waters, of rivers and lakes and seas which are particularly meaningful and spiritually important. The Hindu tradition has many sacred waters and one of these is the Ganges, the great river that rolls from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean. It is understood as the earthly extension of the Milky Way. In one story, the Ganges enters the world with such force and such power that it would shatter the earth into pieces except that it first must pass through the hair of the God Shiva, such a great strong knotted mass that the water is slowed and softened and the world is spared. Before it reaches the sea, the Ganges meets the river Yamuna and at that place again, according to Hindu thought, there is actually a third river that joins them, Sarasvati, the invisible river of wisdom and abundance. At this meeting place of rivers is a city, Allahabad, a place where pilgrims come to wash away their misdeeds, where the ashes of the honored dead are spread on the water. During the struggle for Indian independence, Allahabad was a center of resistance to British rule which required cooperation and dialogue between Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs and Indians of other religions. The ritual that we gather to share this morning, the communion of the waters, is today a relatively well established, at least somewhat beloved practice of this and many other Unitarian Universalist congregations with certain local variations in its exact name and practice. The ceremony, as Kelly alluded to earlier, traces its origins to the first women and religion continental convocation of Unitarian Universalists. At that historic meeting 41 years ago, women gathered to discuss, explore, lament and transform their place within Unitarian Universalism, to reimagine the faith itself so that it might live up to its ideals of equity and justice and be the religion that they needed it to be. As part of that gathering, participants shared in what organizers called the water ritual, a mixing together of water brought by attendees from many different sources, representing the coming together of many different women at that convocation. Reflecting on the water ritual years later, its architects, Caroline McDade and Lucille Shuck Longview, spoke of a need for religion to reimagine itself in order to be life-giving and worthy of devotion. They wrote, we must question every box, every definition, every assignment from an authority outside our own beings so that we can create and recreate for ourselves the rituals and symbols that give meaning to us. So we come together to question, to hear, to share, to speak, to inspire, and to celebrate through new rituals, knowing that our energy and our love are transforming. Now here is a paradox. Knowing that all of the best religions have. This ritual is not new anymore. I personally have been observing it the whole of my life. Its originators wanted to create something different, to set a new course and serve a need too long neglected. Now it is a tradition. And according to the high standards of those who created it, I believe that tradition is worth practicing but only so long as we allow it to serve the radical purposes for which it was intended. To make our religion one which truly includes and reflects the people who are already in it and those who have not yet arrived. This must include the full equality of women in law, in spirit, and in practice. Anything less would be a betrayal of our foremothers. But their determination to challenge old orthodoxies in order to create new meaning with and for those on the margins of our tradition and our world requires us to go even further than that. Which means we have a great deal more work to do, friends. To transform ourselves and dismantle structures of injustice based on race, on gender and gender expression, on sexuality, on differences in our minds and in our bodies. There are so many ways for our hearts as individuals and our collective heart as a congregation to be opened wider. Some of those ways I know, some of those ways you know, and some of those ways none of us have imagined yet, which is why it is so good to have this ritual to share in today. Linda Pinty, one of the participants in that first water ritual, said this as she added her water from a stream near to where the convocation was being held. Each of us, each of our beings is like a well. If you dig down deep enough into the well of our beings you will hit the ground water that we all share. Ground water which flows between and among us connects us to each other and to all that is. This is an unusual year for the water community, the second year of the pandemic. Shortly, Reverend Kelly and I will bless the intermingled waters of our community, but we are still gathering that water now. Now if you entered physically this morning or this afternoon, whatever time it is for you as you're hearing my words. If you entered physically you might have seen that there are urns outside of the room for you to deposit your water in and if you saw them but you didn't make use of them on the way in you're welcome to do so on the way out. There's even a pitcher on each of those tables because you might have come with the intention of bringing some water this morning but didn't literally pick it up and take it with you and that's no reason for you not to be able to add some of your water to the common font. Throughout this week I'm going to have one of those in the vestibule of the landmark over there so that you all who are watching at home can still come to the facility and leave your water for us if you would like to contribute it physically. At the end of all that we're going to distill the water that we have collected and you'll be able, we'll save some of it for ritual purposes of course for child dedications and the like but you'll be able to get a little vial of that water the common water made sacred by our bringing it together to take home with you as a symbol of your connection to this community to which we all contribute and from which we all receive. Basic evolutionary biology tells us that life first began in the water. Then eventually after millions of years some of that life ventured up onto land but not all of it stayed here forever. The life that became the whales for instance once had legs so far as seems most likely their last terrestrial ancestor was some sort of artyodactyl the order to which deer and buffalo belong. They sojourned on grasslands or marshlands or some such and then they returned to the water from which they had come long ago changing their shapes once again over countless generations and many more millions of years until they had new forms so graceful in the ocean so perfectly seeming to fit there and nowhere else today. After too long of a sojourn apart we come together to return to the water we come home to each other some of us like myself for the very first time some of us still walking the dry land of the internet. We return not because we are the same as we once were or ever can be again but because we would discover the ways in which we are different now and the new possibilities those differences offer to us. Every place and every community is different and yet every community and every place is also the same. The people and the details of their challenges vary across time and space. The broad strokes go unchanged to dig deep enough to reach the groundwater of all being and to share that sustenance widely and freely enough that no one should go away thirsty so that the well can never run dry. Each year in the communion of the waters we gather together bringing with us the simplest and yet the most essential of all possible earthly offerings water. By this ritual we reaffirm our connection to each other and to the sacred whole of which we are all manifestations. Manifestations both wondrous and temporary spiraling eddies in the ever-flowing river of time. Water is our common origin and our shared necessity. Though they move across above and below the earth constantly taking on any number of forms the waters of our planet are united by that constant cycle of flow. And our lives like all life have a cycle, a flow, a constant motion of a sort. Even when we appear to be still there remains the ever-present coursing of feeling and thought just like the pumping of blood through the veins. Though we are fueled and fed and cleaned and nurtured by many different streams we join ourselves into community to draw upon the ground water of all being which sustains and connects us. We bring water we depended on over the last year and a half as we scrub longer and harder than many of us ever had before. Singing happy birthday to ourselves at bathroom sinks and kitchen sinks in so many different apartments and houses including one particular one in Darlington. Water that carried the unseen passengers of our hands down the drain and sometimes a bit of our bubbling anxiety with it. Water for cleansing in an uncertain time. We bring water from places of parting whether slowly or all at once. From lava hot springs Idaho and the spring harbor shore of Lake Mendota. Places where we practiced letting go began to say goodbye or marks the final resting places of people we love the oceans of our loss. We bring with us water from places of refuge holy connection and abiding hope from the Jordan River and Lake Michigan from Provincetown Harbor and from the springs and the creek at Pheasant Branch. We bring water from places of healing that offer comfort when it is sorely needed places of solace that replenish our strength in the midst of hardship and the places of rest that serve as a soothing balm to weary souls. The oases of our renewal. We bring with us water from places of wonder from the great smoky mountains and picnic point from the river Nile and the birthing center tub. We bring water from places that stir us to amazement and rekindle our spirits. Places where we are overcome by the majesty of nature by its vastness by its beauty and by its power the fountains of our awe. We bring water with us from places of struggle resistance and pain from Gettysburg and Elmina Castle on the coast of Ghana from the Alabama River that flows under the Edmund Pettus Bridge and from the Shell River in Minnesota. We bring water from battlefields and graveyards melting glaciers and the great Pacific garbage patch and from the kitchen sink again. From any place where there is battle against wrong or the memory of things we cannot get back the wellsprings of our anger. We bring with us water from places of joy from Door County and Sinisipi Lake from Lake Wabisa and the Yahr River and from this very building. We bring water from weddings water from child dedications and from every other place that fills us with gladness that lifts our spirits lightens our hearts and brings a smile to our faces and the faces of those we love the reservoirs of our happiness. We bring with us water from places of meeting where souls touch each other from the Seneca Falls New York the Mississippi River and a pontoon boat ride on Lake Mendota places of encounter and friendship where we glimpse the impossible or begin to imagine what is possible places that move us to gratitude and to the openness to life which allows us to trust in others and ourselves the rivers of our faith. We bring with us water from places of home from the taps of houses and apartment buildings backyard ponds and neighborhood creeks garden hoses and dehumidifiers from the dwellings of people we love places where we know and are known where when we have to go there they have to take us in the streams of our belonging. Now as we begin another year together we bless the waters of our common font may the richness and abundance of our many mingled streams lend to us hope and awe strength and joy and healing enough to do with the world and our faith demand that we do. Together let us practice a religion that brings comfort and witness and help to all who need it. Hear from the spiritual well of our congregation may every thirsty soul find good water to drink. Each week we return to this spiritual well bringing our joys and our losses to the stream of belonging this river of faith. We share all these knowing we are held in love. Today we light a candle of sorrow and gratitude for echo who may be known to many of you in this room. Leah Sinclair's service dog and our FUS Saturday service dog. Echo was fifteen and a half when he died and this Saturday service outing was his favorite trip of the week. We miss him. Charlotte Wolfe asks us to light a candle for Beverly the mother of Ann Marie Riggler who was an interim organist here at FUS for many years. We send our love to Ann Marie and to her family and we light a candle now for this 20th anniversary of the events of September 11th. This day is simply one more day on the calendar the 11th day of September. Another beautiful sunny day on the cusp between summer and fall and yet this day September 11th will never be just another day on the calendar as we remember that beautiful sunny day in September 20 years ago. A day that began like so many others with people going about their ordinary day-to-day lives and then in the brief span of a few hours ended in shock and disbelief. A day that is painful to remember and impossible to forget and so we pause to remember. We remember with gratitude all the heroes and heroines of that day the firefighters the emergency responders those who demonstrated such courage in the midst of crisis. We remember in sorrow the innocence who perished the stockbrokers and the janitors the office workers and the passengers the bystanders firefighters and police officers who were victims of such calculated and senseless violence. We remember with hope the voices that called and still call for peace in the face of division and hatred and urged peace even as our nation prepared for war. We remember in bewilderment the ways that the events of that day changed who we are as a nation and continue to haunt us and remembering the terror and violence of that day we rededicate ourselves to raising our voices against violence and terror and hatred in all of its forms and doing whatever we can to create a future in which all people can live in freedom community and peace and without fear. May it be so because we remember and because we commit to making it so. Blessed be and amen. Making our way by the lights of the. It starts with a drop then a trickle a burble a rush of water bubbling toward its destination and finally a wide endless sea all rivers run to the sea. Today you brought water poured it into a common bowl though our experiences have differed these waters mingle signifying our common humanity. Today you came and shared in the sacred community may you depart this sacred space hearts filled with hope for new beginnings a fresh start. Go forth but return to this community where rivers of tears may be shed where dry souls are watered where your joy bubbles where your life cup overflows where deep in your spirit you have found in this place a home for all rivers run to the sea.