 I invite you to join me for a moment or two of centering silence And now I would invite you to join your voices with those of our choir in our in gathering him number 224 Place be seated and so good morning on this snowy December morning. Welcome to the warm confines of the first Unitarian Society of Madison This is a community where curious seekers gather to explore spiritual ethical and social issues in and accepting and nurturing environment Unitarian Universalism supports the freedom of conscience of each individual as together We seek to be a force for good in the world as you know, my name is Michael Shuler I am the senior minister of the congregation and on behalf of the congregation I would like to extend a special welcome to everyone and particularly to any visitors in our midst today We are a welcoming congregation So whoever you are and wherever you happen to be on your life's journey. We celebrate your presence among us today Newcomers are encouraged to stay for our fellowship hour after the service and perhaps to visit the library directly across from the center doors of the Auditorium bring 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 stoneware coffee mugs during the fellowship hour People holding those mugs are you are f us members who are knowledgeable about our faith community What goes on here and they would love to visit with you? Experience guides are generally available to give a building tour after our services So if you would like to learn more about this sustainably designed addition to our national landmark meeting house Please meet near the large glass window off to my right immediately after the service And I do believe that John Powell is signed up today to give tours So we expect if the snow did not deter him that he will be on hand We welcome children to stay for the duration of our service and there are lots of children in our midst today But if you happen to have a child that needs to talk a little or to move around or if you yourself needs to move around Then our child haven or our commons are good places to see and to hear the service and Speaking of any ambient noise This would be a perfect time for you to turn off any electronic devices that you have with you that might cause a Disturbance during the hour and now I'd like to share the names of those individuals who volunteered to help our service run smoothly today Sound operator is David Brails Our lay minister is Tom Boykhoff and smiley greeted people as they came in to the atrium auditorium Our ushers are Dan Bradley, Gail Henslin, Marty Hollis, Rick DeVita, and Biss Nietzsche are serving hot cocoa and coffee for your pleasure after the service And please note the announcements that are in the red floor is insert of your order of service Including the schedule for holiday services coming up later in the month And so again, we do not have any specific announcements that we need to make other than those that are included in the insert So we hope that today's choral festival will stimulate your mind with some of the lyrics touch your heart and stir your spirit Welcome at the composer of that spirited opening number is with us today. So Elizabeth Very wonderful. Just wonderful Joyful anticipation fills our hearts as we enter upon the festivities of this glad season a season of Expectancy and of wonder a season of giving and of forgiving a season of thoughtfulness and tenderness a season for friendship and for Fellowship let it be with music that we celebrate the holidays and let it be in harmony that we dwell in these glad some days May love enter our hearts may love rule our lives as we seek to support and to serve one another and to forge a stronger bond With all that is I invite you to rise in body or in spirit for the lighting of our chalice And if you will join me in reading the words of affirmation that are Printed in your order of service. It says responsive, but however, there are no bolded sections. So we're going to do this in unison folks May the light of joy we kindle this morning brighten our lives and the light of truth lead us to new insight May the light of morality teach us the right and the right of courage Enable us to do the right May the light of freedom burn more purely in our hearts and the light of faith increase our strength May the light of hope give us high vision and the light of love fill our days with meaning and Purpose may the light of Hanukkah and the holiday season Never be extinguished from our lives and in the spirit of the holiday season, please turn and exchange a warm greeting with your neighbor Please be seated the three selections that I have chosen for your Entertainment and edification this morning all come from my Unitarian Universalist clergy colleagues The first one from the Reverend Mitchell G. Howard and so now December is upon us with its usual breathless pace Inside me there is something that yearns passionately to savor this season to take it with sacramental slowness Drinking in the flow of each day between Thanksgiving and New Year's as if it were the rarest transcendental wine But the world of commerce that has other plans for me and these intrusions of rhythm may be Made me feel hecticly driven even before the Advent season Now I never really paid much attention to Advent growing up in as a secular Manhattan boy in the 1950s and 60s and in the vicinity of Fifth Avenue in New York the visible signs of the coming of the eschaton They were threefold the toys at the FAO Schwartz window The Rockefeller Center Christmas trees illumination and the surging sales on the street of hot pretzels and roasted chestnuts We carried on quite well with these and I was genuinely ignorant of the Liturgical twist in the calendar going on inside New York's churches a few weeks before Christmas Now later my theological training gave me an intellectual fix on the season But no more reason to pay any lively attention to it What Christianity I could buy into was of the ethical or perhaps the prophetic type but Advent seemed to me to fit only the Virgin birth of the only begotten son variety and I could no sooner adopt that than I could sacrifice to Wotan or Astarty But it was in the home of a unitary Universalist religious educator in Rochester, New York in the late 1970s that I first got The excitement about Advent you see she and her family kept a charming Advent calendar in their home Which had become a crucial part of their pre-Christmas lifestyle even though they did not embrace the orthodox understanding of Advent Now I have not Embraced Advent in my own home, but these days I do enjoy the exciting sense that at Advent Whatever we believe about the particularities of Jesus's biography We can all of us feel something important something vast something wonderful coming down the pike At this time I find myself remembering a story about the 20th century Jewish sage Martin Boober It is told that Boober was once at an interfaith conference in Europe when a polite but bemused Christian clergyman engaged him in a dialogue Dr. Boober he asked Your people are awaiting the coming of the Messiah We on the other hand believe that he came once and he is coming again. How do you resolve this difficulty? Boober thought silently on this puzzle and then brightening Genially he replied it's quite simple my Christian friend We are both hopeful that the Messiah will come so when he does come let us be sure to ask him Have you been here before? Now this is the sort of genial Uncertainty with which I must live and move via V the meaning of the Advent season And I suspect that this is true too for the most honest among those who claim the identity of Christian in a more Traditional sense than I can We all inherit the wonderfully affirmative Scatological hopes that were sketched out by Jesus and by his prophetic predecessors and by his inheritors And that means a world at peace and with gentle harmony in tune with itself and with the source of its creation And then of course at Advent we all need to confess the painful truth of how far we as a species have fallen short of living out these visions And so Advent then reminds us that the hope embodied in the Christmas story will not be fulfilled on December 26th nor will it simply evaporate with the party haze of December 31st Advent dares us to take seriously the prophetic hope that is at the core of the messianic tradition and to look within ourselves For the guts and the sinew of its eventual fulfillment and as a compliment to that lovely anthem these words from the Reverend Max Coots Who served our church in Canton, New York the upper reaches of New York for many years And was also an adjunct adjunct professor of literature at st. Lawrence University after so much color in our eyes After this we haven't much to say of autumn's last days. It just is and We let it go a sort of dull bear waiting after doing and Autumn's tiredness settles on us. We who have seen them so often before spring summer autumn And so we retired to wait and Then one night the waiting ends a white ending Sometimes it is in thick tangled blobs that melt on whatever little summer sun the ground has stored Sometimes it is in sharp fast pieces Hissing from the heavens sometimes it is a slow dogged laying down of layer upon layer But however it comes it always finds us unprepared The leaves are liars Bright gaudy things catching our eyes with their little clown suits then falling down into the mire to make us think This is the end. No the leaves are liars Snow is just as much beginning as it is end as much prologue as it is epilogue The farmer used to know things about the snow that we ought to know The farmer used to call snow the poor man's fertilizer It is next year's water next year's grain falls end and springs beginning So when was it that we learned that the earth would end in autumn? never When did we ever learn that life was always summertime and spring and harvest time? What sort of quake mistaken almanac said that spring could come without December that may and August go on forever Even winter in ourselves May be the poor soul's fertilizer The spring within can come only if the winter has come first Can come if something like a seed is kept alive through the wintering to sprout and to grow to sprout and grow? because of the winter and the wintering like earth we too have our seasons Now that we think of it We knew this even then back when in summer we grew complacent in the sun Or when in fall we reap the earth as though all life was caught and wrapped and stuffed in a pumpkin shell We knew better even then But snow makes for forgetting so it seems This election is from my colleague Dennis Hamilton who has served our churches in the state of Texas for quite a number of years It seems to happen overnight One day I give a final Thanksgiving. I say goodbye to the turkey carcass and set it out on the curb to feed the nether world I changed the guest room bedsheets and I recall fondly the guests the family Gone back to wherever I put away the harvest platter and I go for a walk in the autumn streets surprised at how early the dusk comes to silhouette the skyline of trees And the hungry night eats away at the deep autumn day And I walk quickly back to my unlit home in the hushed shadows and the vortex of darkness Swirls around and swallows the last of the holiday past and the night rains and I am filled with emptiness And then Then it happens The very next night I turn the corner for home and the neighbors have strung lights in their trees and The once dark and lonely street is transformed into this winter wonderland It's like the way that the swallows know when to go back to Capistrano where the whooping cranes to Paris Island It is like we have been waiting all year for this excuse the barren darkness the Apprehension of emptiness to give permission for this this display of winter gaiety and As suddenly as it was dark now it's light as empty as it once was now It is filled and it fills and it fills through the drifting nights that fall toward the solstice And all those familiar things come out of closets and find their accustomed place on mantles and window ledges Hanukkah candles Christmas reeds porcelain villages open-mouthed carolers pine cones holly red lacquered apples favorite angels and five different renderings of old father Christmas And the smells of the season the cider the cinnamon Bayberry ginger that wonderful pine from the sacred tree that we improbably invite into our home and Then out come the ornaments the generations of ornaments each bearing a story And the remembered joys and heartaches of each Christmas past the tinsel the garlands the colored glass balls The crooked star that the children made could it be 25 years ago. Oh It is filled Overflowing with all that has been All the December's come out of the tabernacle of boxes and bags that have hibernated all year long in the dark just waiting and waiting for this day and The wind carries the sounds of Christmas songs of the season the carols the old standards Silver bells jolly old st. Nick songs of herald angels and shepherds at watch Melodies woven into the aromas and vibrating with the twinkling lights and The buffet under the tree The crash with its cow and shepherd its gift-bearing wise men and the Eurocentric holy family pale skinned and blonde It is the season of gathered traditions colors fragrances music brought to fill the void Brought to lay before the child who waits as always every year for our hearts to soften and our nights to glow Come then Let us begin our watch Let us chase the darkness to the corners of the room and light our chalice for the days That come invite you to join me now for a period of meditation whatever its attractions and Whatever benefits it does bestow Winter is still indisputably a difficult time The ground turns hard as do the placid lakes and ponds And bereft of leaves and blossoms the trees themselves look hard Their naked branches swaying stiffly in the knife cold breeze Hard too is the dry winter light glancing off surfaces aching for warmth The winter world is hard on the eyes the lungs any skin that lacks protection and For many the season suggests hard ship as well as hardness The higher heating bills the hard to start cars the hard task of clearing snow and ice from slippery surfaces And because light is less the winter is hard on the psyche Cabin fever is often accompanied by bodily chills and the fevers of cold and flu and then hard heartedness affects the luckless souls languishing in homeless shelters and warming huts trying to cope with a culture that blames the poor for their poverty ignores the disgrace of hunger and homelessness So yes winter is indisputably the hardest of seasons The time when the Sun belt beckons to migrating snowbirds while the rest of us make do with hot toddies and heavy comforters Because it is often hard That's all the more reason to embrace winter putting aside the indifference of summer and putting on a more compassionate countenance And as an antidote to the cold seeking warmth in the midst of friends and family and The supportive faith community like this one to make the holidays ahead truly meaningful Let us hope and strive For a softening of the human heart And a rejuvenation of the holy human spirit May it be so for us all I invite you to continue on in a moment or two of silent meditation Let's it be and I'm at And now I would invite you to participate in the giving and the receiving of the offering and your gifts today Will be dedicated in their entirety to our wonderful music program here at First Unitarian Society Please be generous please rise in body or in spirit for our closing Carol number 235 Please be seated if only for a season Let us banish cynicism and welcome wonder If only for a season Let us downplay our differences and discover the bonds of common origin and continuing cause If only for a season let us set aside worry and smile and laugh and sing if only for a season Let us deny apathy and indifference and truly live by loving if only for a season let us subvert covetousness and envy and be both good gift-givers and getters If only for a season this brief season of light and life and love Let us be wise enough to be just a little foolish about candlelight and children and matters of the heart if only for a season