 Welcome to the First Unitarian Society of Madison. My name is Kelly Crocker, and I'm one of the ministers here. Today I'm joined by my colleague, the Reverend Kelly Aspreuth Jackson, and the worship team of Drew Collins, Linda Warren, Stephen Gregorius, and Daniel Carnes. The vision of First Unitarian Society is growing souls, connecting with one another, and embodying our Unitarian Universalist values in our lives, our community, and our world. If you are visiting us today, welcome. We are so very glad that you are with us. If you would like more information about First Unitarian Society, our activities, and our programs, please stop by the welcome table out in the commons. After service, it's directly across from the center doors. And for those of you connecting with us virtually today, we are glad you are with us as well. And we hope you will be able to join us for our virtual coffee hour immediately following the service. The information for joining can be found on the homepage of our website, fussMadison.org, as well as on the slide that will be seen again after today's postlude. Our announcement slides will also be shown briefly after the service, and we encourage you to take a moment and watch those slides and learn more about our upcoming programs and activities. And now, I invite you to join me in a moment of silence as we center ourselves and bring ourselves fully into this time as we join together once again in community. We have gathered here in search of answers to hard questions. We have come in search of understanding, in search of community. We have come in search of hope and healing. Let this be a place not only of searching, but of discovery. Let this be a place not only of learning, but of wisdom. Let this be a place not only of meeting, but of connection. And let this be a place where healing fosters giving and hope fosters service. This is our prayer that we may create here a circle of love ever expanding, ever growing. As we seek to know the source of our being, amen and blessed be. And now, I will invite you to rise in body and or spirit and join me in reading the words for the kindling of our chalice flame. As frozen earth holds the determined seed, this sacred space holds our weariness, our worry, our laughter, and our celebration. Let us bring seed and soul into the light of thought, the warmth of community and the hope of love. Let us see together, hear together, love together. Let us worship. Will you sing with me? It's described as being a Japanese story. But I am given to understand, I think it's a good story. That's why I'm going to tell it to you. The story is called The Stone Cutter, and I chose for the illustration a stone cutter device from the Minecraft video game. If you're not familiar, please consult the eight to ten year old in your life. But of course, it's not that sort of stone cutter this story is about. In the days before Minecraft and still today, the stone cutter was a person who cut stone in order to build things out of it, often with a hammer and a chisel. And so it was that one day, there was a stone cutter who was working on building the gateway to a rich man's estate. And he was looking through the gateway as he worked, and he saw a wealthy merchant sitting in the rich man's garden, and he thought to himself, that merchant looks much more comfortable, and he has a much more easy life than I do. I wish that I was that merchant. And just like that, he was. Now the merchant did have a lot more money than the stone cutter and had some very well to do friends. But the stone cutter didn't think about how in order to make that money, the merchant had to go all over the place, carrying all of his wares, traveling here and there, selling whatever he could, wherever he could. He didn't get to spend a lot of time in that nice house that he had. And so one day, when the stone cutter, who is now a merchant, was schlepping his stuff all here and there and everywhere, he saw one of the king's officials who was riding on a litter, you know, one of those platforms where people carry you around so you don't even have to walk because you're that important. He saw the king's official riding on the litter. He thought to himself, well, that's the life. I wish I was the king's official, and there he was riding on that litter. Now it was pretty nice to not have to walk. I'm not going to lie to you about that. But the sun was high in the sky by that time of day, and the king's official had to wear all these heavy clothes, you know, so that people knew that he was important. And so even though he didn't have to walk at all, he was getting so hot and uncomfortable lying there in the sun. He thought, well, the sun, the sun's way up in the sky, gets to see everything that happens down here on earth. It just, it just blasts us all with light and heat and seems to be basically in charge. I wish I was the sun. And so he was, the sun hanging high up in the sky, looking down at the earth below, watching people going about their lives. But as he hung there, a dark cloud came and passed between the sun and the earth. And the stone cutter, who now again was the sun, thought, well, what's the point of this then? The cloud's going to get in my way. I wish I was that cloud, and so he was that cloud. But he didn't think about the fact that clouds don't get to choose where they go. They float around on the wind, basically anywhere that they get pushed by it. And he really didn't like that, not being able to make his own choices about where to go. And so he thought to himself, I wish I was the wind. And so he was. Now, the wind can do a lot of things. It does go pretty much wherever it wants to go. And it can push over trees. It can throw sand in people's faces. It can do all kinds of obnoxious things, just to show how strong and powerful it is until it runs into a mountain. And then it basically just has to stop. And so the stone cutter, who is now the wind, was very unhappy about having to stop for this mountain. I thought, well, the mountain is obviously stronger than the wind. I wish that I was the mountain. And so he was the mountain. Just still and unmovable, unchangeable, immune to influence from anything else around or outside of him, just being the mountain. But then he felt something. Way down, far at the bottom of the left side of his great stone body, he looked down and he saw it. There was a stone cutter there. And I invite you now into a time of giving and receiving, where we give freely and generously to this offering, which sustains our community here and also supports the work of our outreach offering recipient. This week's offering will support the Array It Forward Fund, a project that First Unitarian Society initiated with our partners at Renew Wisconsin. Array It Forward provides advice on financing and energy efficiency, as well as seed money for solar energy projects for nonprofit organizations. With your help, this program will continue to provide the gift of green energy for years to come. You'll see on the screen that you can donate directly from our website, fussmedicine.org. You'll see our text to give information there as well. And there are also baskets at the exits of the auditorium. We thank you, as always, for your generosity and for your faith in this life we create together. The physical headquarters of the Unitarian Universalist Association, the association of congregations to which this congregation belongs, is located in Boston, Massachusetts. And there is a story that I have heard more than one person attest actually happened to them there. It goes something like this. A Unitarian Universalist from somewhere else in the country or the world visits Boston for the first time. Their local host takes them to visit headquarters. They arrive via the subway at the Park Street Station and come up out of the underground at the edge of Boston Common. Their guide turns and gestures in the direction of their destination. And the guests' eyes alight on a beautiful gold dome. Through the trees, they can see marble steps and an ornate wrought iron fence, awestruck by this massive and magnificent edifice that seems to command the entire visible area around it. This Unitarian Universalist from out of town realizes for the first time that the stories they've heard must all be true. Our relatively small, often misunderstood religion truly is a big deal in New England. And Boston must be our Rome. Some of you already know what the misunderstanding is here. The guide was pointing in that direction, yes, but not at that building. The golden dome, the marble steps, the many statues that would have come into view as they approached the top of the hill, that's all the Massachusetts State Capitol building. And for most of its history, up until about eight years ago, the UUA was headquartered in a building immediately next to the Capitol. It was a very nice building in its own right, well-appointed brick and stone complex with lots of beautiful woodwork on the inside, but not exactly the Vatican for free thinkers that it was sometimes mistaken for. Still, there were many who cherished that place, and all of the memory and history woven into its walls and windows, which is why when our association sold that building and moved to a new, more modern facility in a different part of town, there was a great commotion. Unitarian Universalists from every part of the country who had passed through the old, beloved Beacon Street building wailed and cried. It didn't come to blows, but it did get heated. And it was fascinating to me how the anger of some ministers and laypeople over this was impossible for me to predict based on anything or everything else that I knew about them. Close friends disagreed. People who had been on opposite sides of previous disputes within our movement found themselves suddenly shoulder to shoulder, pledging to save 25 Beacon Street. Among the strongest opponents to the change were people that I had heard with my own ears and read with my own eyes, championing the idea that congregations are communities with a mission to do good in the world, not real estate trusts. Yet in this matter, clearly their feelings were much more complicated. The arguments for the move, which I confess, I found persuasive once they were explained to me, weren't likely to mobilize a faction, but they were very hard to escape from. That building just wasn't a very suitable workspace for the people who were expected to work in it. Large on the outside, the individual offices and rooms were mostly quite small on the inside. The wiring was old enough to be a serious issue for modern office needs, and the way that it was stacked into several floors on top of each other with a satellite building a few blocks away meant that the staff weren't so much working together as they were working in little parallel parcels. The ultimate issue in the debate about whether or not to move the headquarters of our movement was actually, it seems to me, a very deep question. What makes something sacred? And how much can we or should we be willing to sacrifice in order to protect and preserve a sacred thing? I know I said that I favored the move for the practical reasons of the practical needs of the people most directly affected by it, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a hard loss. A building that I'd explored for the first time as a teenager when I visited Boston on a coming-of-age trip, and I was that out-of-town Unitarian Universalist. A building I'd worked in briefly and visited an uncountable number of times for meetings and interviews and chapel services. We Unitarian Universalists sometimes like to think that we are unsentimental creatures. Following the dictates of reason wherever they may lead, not worrying over much about our history, looking always to the future. But one of the surest ways to discover how precious a thing is may be found in the fear that we feel at its loss. There are things that are sacred to us as individuals and as a faith. And so I wanna reflect with you on what makes them so, what makes anything sacred in our tradition. One of the most obvious signs of sanctity comes through language. A Jew lights the candles on Friday night and says a blessing to acknowledge the holiness of the moment. A priest lifts the host above her head and breaks it, lifts the cup, pronounces the words which for believers make God present in the flower and the fruit. Five times each day, the observant Muslim intones the spoken formulas of prayer, some loudly, some quietly, some to the right, some to the left, some straight ahead. When I was an intern minister, one of my supervisors told me that whenever she drew water for a child dedication, she first said the meta over it, the Buddhist recitation expressing universal benevolence and the wish that all beings should be free from suffering and the causes of suffering. It felt like a moment that called for powerful words and those were the most powerful ones that she had. Language, all language has power to curse and to bless, a power that we neglect or ignore only at a great cost to ourselves or to others. So in 1066, a dispute arose over who should wear the crown of England? With the death of Edward the Confessor, his brother-in-law, Harold Godwinson, took the throne. But Harold Hardrada, the king of Norway, thought that he should be king of England too and crossed the North Sea with an army to press his claim. Godwinson won that battle, but only just in time for the Duke of Normandy to arrive from France with an army and a claim of his own. The Duke won out, which is why we call him William the Conqueror and the successful invasion of Anglo-Saxon Britain by Norman forces initiated a transformation in the English language. Old English, what they spoke in England in 1066, is a Germanic language, not the same as modern German by any means, but an ancestral relative of it. And the Normans spoke their own ancestral relative of modern French. For a long time afterwards, throughout most of England, the victory of William the Conqueror meant that the peasantry, the common folk, spoke one language and the elite, the nobility, spoke a different language. The result was Middle English, a more recent ancestor to the language that I'm speaking right now. One of the quirks of this intermingling is that many Germanic words associated with the common folk remained in popular use, but some others associated with the nobility were replaced with words of French origin and before that Latin, obviously. In agrarian feudalism, the peasants raised the farm animals, but most of the time it was the lords and the ladies who ate them, which is why the animal is called a cow when it is alive and beef when it's on a plate. The same thing for pig and pork, sheep and mutton, chicken and poultry, but this bifurcation is not limited to animals and eating because the established religion of the day was also controlled by the elite. Many English words associated with religious concepts now share a French line of descent. Sanctuary, sacrament and sacred, benediction, prayer and even theology. At the same time, the realm of the vulgar and profane remained largely with the peasantry. The great comedian George Carlin was famous for his routine about the seven words you can't say on television. Also all words I will not use from the pulpits, by the way, but you might be able to call one or two of them to mind from context, just not out loud, please. The majority of them have some sort of Germanic root. All of this is to make a point about how arbitrary language is. William the Conqueror won the battle of Hastings and for no more meaningful reason than this, it might be said somewhat tongue in cheek that in English we curse in German and we bless in French. I love words, if you hadn't noticed. But it takes something more than just words to make something sacred. So if not words alone, then maybe it is action that is most important in what makes a thing sacred. Whether it's as simple as the sign of the cross or a turn towards Mecca or as vast and far reaching as a collective effort over days or years or centuries. A little over a week ago for Good Friday, we had a service in the landmark auditorium. It was a big deal for me. It was my first time getting to be a part of a service in that sacred space, at least one where there was a congregation present. It is a very beautiful space, but the meaning of it goes much deeper than just its beauty. Being in the landmark, I inevitably think about the congregation that built it. This congregation as it was then, not an especially large or extraordinarily wealthy group who nonetheless had the collective courage to leave their old religious home behind, to haul stone and build pews with their own hands, to weave the curtain that once hung between the hearth room and the larger auditorium, to raise all that money for not every cost can be paid in sweat, and just to take the risk of attempting something profoundly and intentionally new. And layer to top the foundation of that generation's vision and pluck are all the ceremonies and services held there since. All the reflections delivered, all the tears shed, souls stirred, and votes taken. We make our spiritual homes more holy by doing holy work in them. After a day spent wandering the streets of Jerusalem some years ago, in which I had gotten lost in the Armenian quarter for a while and then found myself hungry and exhausted on the Via Dolorosa, only to be saved by the timely discovery of one of the finest falafel shops in all the world. They had a relish there with mint and grapefruit that I still think about on a regular basis. After that day, I sat down and I wrote this. Once, someone whose name you do not know and will never get to know walked these streets, winding their way between market stalls and masjids, churches and fountains, synagogues and bathhouses. Their feet, bare or shod, scraped over these old stones when they were fresh and new cut, joined by the wheels of carts and the hooves of animals. All of this happened once and then a thousand, thousand, thousand times afterward. In an uncountable parade of unnameable pilgrims and workers, poppers and occupiers, merchants and mendicants, and mendicants, each one scuffing these stones just a bit as they passed over them. Until they were worn so smooth that you have to walk carefully on them now, watch your step or you might fall. Like rain from the sky or dust in the wind, strangers made these streets as they are, crafted slowly over long centuries, made wholly not by the places they connect, but by the people who polished them with their oblations of oblation, the prayers of their feet. Whether you walk now here in anger or in awe, in piety, in fear, or simply in the mundane course of life, your steps join with theirs. You are a part of the procession that has hallowed these stones by hollowing them. And long after you have left this place or this life, those stones will still be smoother than they would have been without your feet. But even this is not quite enough to explain sacredness for me. For just as there is a feeling before and beyond words, there are also moments of profundity not fully dependent on any human action, and even those that seem entirely aloof to the same. In the hymn that was written for the dedication of the landmark meeting house, which we will sing in just a little bit together. We find these lines. The wind upon the lakes and hills performs its native rituals. The worship of our human toil brings sacrament from sun and soil. With words and music, we the earth in nature's wonder seek our worth. The motions of the universe of which we are each apart contain so many things that I cannot find a better word for than sacred. My list, I am sure, is different from each of yours, but I suspect that somewhere there is some overlap in the sorts of places and moments where we have felt moved by a wordless awe. In quiet contemplation at daybreak, in the lush embrace of a forest in late spring, in the singing of birds after a storm, in the birth of each of my children. In each of these places and times, I have found and experienced no less sacred or stirring than in any service or ceremony of my life to date. If a poem, a good poem, a worthy poem, is just a combination of words that mean more taken together than they could possibly have meant apart, then I would call such sacred experiences poetic, a combination of seconds, instance, atoms that mean more than they could possibly have meant apart. Now if that seems to beg the question, well then, who is the poet? I take refuge in one of the unique insights of our tradition that wonder can be enough by itself without need for further explanation. There doesn't necessarily need to be an omnipotent source or a grand design for us to make meaning out of our fragmentary experience of the world as it is. The astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson has observed that the molecules that make up our bodies are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars, that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life so that we are all connected to each other biologically to the earth chemically and to the universe atomically. Now although worded in slightly florid terms, these are just facts, at least as far as contemporary science can tell us, but the next part of his statement is a choice to find or make meaning out of those facts. He continues. That's kind of cool. That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It's not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us. Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed the landmark for this congregation said that every great architect is necessarily a great poet and that they must be a great original interpreter of their time, their day and their age. I think that he rightly described the work not only of the architect, but of anyone seeking to live a life of meaning upon this wounded and yet wondrous world. The spaces we build and the rituals we craft, the words we say and the songs we sing, all the stuff of religion is our attempt to embellish and illuminate the flashes of awe that pass through our lives. That makes such things sacred and precious indeed. Now ultimately, the Unitarian Universalist Association did move its headquarters building. I've been to the new one many times, there's a lot more space for folks to work together and it has a technical infrastructure that was letting them do hybrid meetings and events well before COVID made that a universal expectation. The loss of the old home remains, but the heirlooms of the past endure as well. The plaques and the portraits, the memorial to the Selma martyrs, Jimmy Lee Jackson, James Reeb and Viola Liuso all get their pride of place in the new location. I'm sure that some would argue that we live in a world in which nearly everything is mundane and only a precious few things are sacred and therefore must be guarded zealously. My view is that the world we live in is a sacred world and that, to be sure, that world is worth protecting. But sacred is not the same as permanent and so with each new change, something precious will always be lost even as something glorious may begin. Our place therefore is to honor that grief, to feel it deeply and not to shrink from it and to hold it together with those new flashes of awe, the memory of the past, the possibility of the present, side by side. Each week we bring ourselves to this time and space carrying with us the concerns and joys of recent days. We share these here in a spirit of acceptance and support knowing they are held in love. A newcomer to Madison asks us to light a candle of support as they search for new employment and a new place to live. May they find all they need here in this new home. And we light a candle in solidarity with the people of Ukraine, both in their suffering and their struggle. Together we yearn for peace for them and for all people and an end to all wars of conquest anywhere and everywhere on earth. And if you'll join me now in a moment of prayer with these words from Vanessa Rush Southern. Oh, name for that which holds us and will not let us go. Oh, force of vision in our lives. Source of dreams that hold us captive and give us reasons to wake. Help us to find the strength to persist. When despair comes knocking or the road seems too dry and dusty. When circumstance conspires against greatness or the honest telling of truths. Help us to find the power and inspiration to endure. Or at the very least help us find our way back to the simple rituals of love and justice that can resuscitate our dreams. In this life may we love deeply. Act in humble but determined ways and never waver. May we persist until the sun sets and wake again to persist once more. Until the world of our boldest aspirations is made real by passion and by endurance, stubborn faithfulness and persistence. The trademarks and engine of a noble and visionary life. For the sake of all we cherish, oh holy one, please keep us faithful. Blessed be, and amen. Let's rise in all the ways that we do to sing him number 308, the blessings of the earth and sky. Let us go forth from this time together with the resolve to stop trying to reduce the incomprehensible to our own petty expectations. So that wonder, that sense of what is sacred can find space to open up our minds and illumine our lives. So charged may you go forth in peace, but first please be at rest for the post-loop.