 It's a walkie-talkie airport, that's it. Re-compopulation area. Re-compopulation area. It literally says that. That's great. It must come back later, security. Yeah. Check, check, check, one, two. Check, check, check, one, two, check. Check, check, one, two, check, check. Welcome to the First Unitarian Society of Madison. This is a community where curious seekers gather to explore spiritual, ethical, and social issues in an 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. My name is Karen Rose Gredler, and on behalf of the congregation, I want to extend a special welcome to visitors, both here in this room and those joining us on the radio or our live stream. We are a welcoming congregation, so whoever you are and wherever you are on your life's journey, we celebrate your presence among us. This would be a great time now to silence cell phones as we join together in a few moments of silence for contemplation, meditation, prayer, as we become fully present with ourselves and with one another. As we enter this time together, may we renew both our commitment and our covenant. There are those among us who have endured a loss in the past week. May their hope be uplifted again. There are those among us who have struggled with hardship. May they find renewed strength. There are those among us who have wrestled with questions that seem to have no answer in the past week. May they find sanctuary during their search. There are those among us who have cherished an unexpected joy. May their rejoicing be celebrated. As we commit to continue our free and responsible search for the truth, may we covenant to honor the many paths that have led us to this community of faith. And I invite you now to rise in all the ways we do as we light our chalice. And I invite you to join together in the words printed in your program. Love is the doctrine of our community. Our faith in each other is our sacrament. Working for justice and living with compassion is our prayer. Reverently we covenant together to answer the call of love, to heal and not to harm, to share hope with each other and with the world. And I invite you now into our opening hymn which is number 10010 in the Teal hymnal. We will sing through two times. And before you are seated if you will take a moment to turn and greet those around you. On time each month we take the time to share our joys and sorrows together. So if you arrived here today with a sorrow so heavy that you need the help of this community to carry it, or if you arrived with a joy so great that it simply must be shared, now is that time. The sharing of joys and sorrows is our chance to share with one another those special events or circumstances that affect our lives or the lives of those we love. We share our joys with one another today, excuse me, we share our sorrows with one another today, knowing that sorrow comes into each person's life, knowing that together we offer comfort. We also share our joys knowing too that joy comes into all of our lives, knowing that together our voices can rise in a chorus of celebration. So for the next few minutes anyone who wishes is invited to step forward, light a candle, and using the microphone provided by our lay minister and Smiley, briefly share with us your message. You may also come forward to wordlessly light a candle and return it to your seat. If you are unable to come forward to light a candle, please raise your hand and we'll bring the microphone to you so you can share it from your seat and we will light a candle on your behalf. I now open the floor. My name is Mary Randall, my ex-husband passed away a week ago Friday, so September 20th, and he didn't leave a will. So my daughters are having a hard time with it, and my youngest daughter is expecting twins in February. Coming up on November 5th, it's going to be my 16th month being two or three. 11 days ago at 5.05pm, I had to welcome my second daughter into the world, Clara Loot. After a year of paperwork and preparing and waiting for our children, they've denied our home study because our home is unsafe for children due to my bipolar disorder. Despite the fact that we are great parents. My name is Gay. This is a poem I wrote that a lot of people understand. I think it's called Hitched to the Universe, and it is a poem by John Laird, part of it. When I see black walnuts stay in the deck, I just labored to paint. I like to cuss. But overhead is a momma tree that has sheltered us for 30 plus years, and ages of puny humans before. Did they pay their kid a nickel for all? And did the boy fling them over the fence rather than pick a ball? Did they rake in the fall until the bag was too big to haul and had to sit making oil-green soup until they would stoop with a shovel instead of futile rake? What is it going to take to shake me awake and remember John Muir as a wisdom that if I curse this task, I curse my own rigidness and continuity of this earth? A walnut is a seed, after all, and a seed is hope. I like the bold black canopies against the glowering slate skies of near October. Oh, I even like the pull of the rake. And yes, even the roll of the silly head-beating fruit as they flee before me little cog in this big, unseen, pulley-driven machine. Thank you. This is a thank you to all of you that showed up on the 20th for the interfaith meetings, as well as joining the strike, and may we carry this energy forward, not turning our faces away. And also a special thanks to Tim Corden for his unbelievable efforts on the behalf of all of us. Thank you, Tim. My name is Laura Glaser, and I wanted to honor my father, who passed away a year ago, July 11th, Eroquate, and my mother, who passed away on his 23rd of this year, Jean Eroquate. My father would get a giggle out of being at the Unitarian Church, because he brought up Jewish kindness. But since it's Russia's summer today, I thought it was appropriate, extra special. So happy Russia's summer. So, my name is Cynthia. My daughter, Lainey, wanted to come up here and say this, but apparently I'm doing it now. We're excited to finally get to close on our new house on her birthday. Two days ago, this 70-year-old man became a grandpa to Caleb. I wanted to share a joy. Joy is an hour-long book discussion that I had. I think it's called Google Hangout? Is that right? With my two adult daughters, one lives in upstate New York and one lives in Minneapolis. This happened yesterday, and it was a discussion about a book of short essays by Ross Gay, which explores kind of the intersection of joy and sorrow in life. And it was just lovely being together with my daughters in this way. For our Reverend Doug Watkins, who today is in British Columbia, to give the eulogy at the memorial service of his dear friend and colleague Anne. And so we're sending him our strength and our love today in that difficult yet joyous task ahead. Please light one last candle for all the joys and the sorrows too tender to share that live in the fullness of our hearts. And now as the children leave for the religious education classes, we will be singing hymn number 1012, When I Am Frightened. Our reading today from Mark Neppo. In India, he says, there is a story about a kind, quiet man who would pray in the Ganges River every morning. One day after praying, he saw a poisonous spider struggling in the water and cupped his hands to carry it ashore. As he placed the spider on the ground, it stung him. Unknowingly, his prayers for the world diluted the poison. The next day, the same thing happened. On the third day, the kind man was knee deep in the river and sure enough, there was the spider, legs frantic in the water. As the man went to lift the creature again, the spider said, Why do you keep lifting me? Can't you see I will sting you every time? Because that is what I do. And the kind man cupped his hands about the spider, replying, Because that is what I do. There are many reasons he continues to be kind. But perhaps none is as compelling as the spiritual fact that it is what we do. It is how the inner organ of being keeps pumping. Spiders sting, wolves howl, ants build small hills that no one sees. And human beings lift each other, no matter the consequence, even when other beings sting. Some say this makes us a sorry lot that never learns. But to me it holds the same beauty as berries breaking through ice and snow every spring. It is what quietly feeds the world. After all, the berries do not have any sense of purpose or charity. They are not altruistic or self-sacrificing. They simply grow to be delicious because that is what they do. As for us, if things fall, we will reach for them. If things break, we will try to put them back together. If loved ones cry, we will try to soothe them because that is what we do. I have often reached out and sometimes it feels like a mistake. Sometimes like the quiet man lifting the spider, I have been stung. But it doesn't matter because that is what I do. This is what we do. It is the reaching out that is more important than the sting. In truth, I'd rather be fooled than not believe. While the choir gets situated, I'll explain what our experiment is today with our anthem. You're going to be watching a video while we sing. The video is the brainchild of a composer whose online presence he calls Melody Sheep. His real name is John. But he writes videos and music by taking the words of scientists that in speeches or television specials or whatever, and he turns them into melodies by using a device called an autotune where he can control the pitch. He takes spoken word and turns it into sung word. Then he writes these wonderful accompaniments for it. I contacted him and I said, we're having the climate strike and then I want shortly thereafter to do your video called Our Biggest Challenge. But I want to write some choral parts for it. Can I have your permission? And he said, yes, as long as you send me a recording. So I'll send him a link to today's service. But that's what's going on. So our guest soloists are Isaac Asimov, Bill Nye, and Bill Ailey. We can change the world. We can do this. We change the world. Our music also fuels our energy, as opposed to our music, unlike any scene that has very civilization. And current acts that we have to share are sent inside. So we're going to cross the field and we're going to take turns to get to the process and change all the efforts in the process. Many thanks to our Meeting House course for that. I agree with Eleni. That was awesome. In a work called The Power of Kindness, Piero Frerucci writes, there's an Afghan story that tells of a ruthless king who commands and harasses his subjects, showing no care for them, regarding them as pawns without faces. One day while out hunting, he chases a gazelle on and on into unknown places until finally the gazelle disappears. Disappointed, the king, unsure exactly where he is, decides to return home. As he sets out, a dust storm blows up and lasts for three days. The king wanders in the terrible, blinding dust. When the storm passes, he is lost, alone in the desert, his clothes torn to shreds, his face unrecognizable, distorted by fear and fatigue. Along his journey, he meets some nomads. When he tells them he is the king, they laugh. Yet they help him, give him food and tell him the way home. He returns to his palace, but the guards do not recognize him and won't let him in. From behind the gate, the king sees a substitute king, ruling as he did, arrogant and mean-spirited. Bit by bit, the king learns to live in poverty. One day someone offers him water to drink, another offers food or shelter or work. And the king too helps others. He saves the life of a child in a house fire. He offers food to someone hungrier than he. He manages, but never without the help of others. He comes to see that in life, people must care for each other. He returns eventually to his palace and reigns wisely and kindly. He learned an essential lesson of life. I am not the only one. Other people exist and are like me. We need one another to survive. Now we do not need to spend days in a blinding desert dust storm to know that this interdependence is the reality of our lives. We know this to be true. As we heard in our reading from Mark Nepo, as for us, if things fall, we will reach for them. If things break, we will try to put them together. If loved ones cry, we will try to soothe them because this is what we do. In a recent book titled, The War for Kindness, Building Empathy in a Fractured World, author Jamil Zaki says that the greatest evolutionary leap that we humans have ever taken is in our development of empathy, that the kindness that is born within us from empathy, this being able to understand the emotions, thoughts and worries of another and the desire to ease their pain is one of the animal kingdom's most vital survival skills. In humans, he writes, empathy took an evolutionary quantum leap. At the dawn of our species, we huddled together in groups of few families. We were not a very impressive lot. We had neither sharp teeth nor wings nor the strength of our ape cousins. But over millennia, we sapiens changed to make connecting easier. Our testosterone levels dropped. Our faces softened and we became less aggressive. We developed larger eye whites than the other primates so we could easily track one another's gaze and intricate facial muscles that allowed us to better express emotion. Our brains developed to give us a more precise understanding of each other's thoughts and feelings. Yet the researchers are telling us that over the past four decades something is happening in the world of empathy and the news is not good. Empathy, they say, is dwindling steadily with the average person now 75% less empathic than the people of 1979. So it is no surprise then that civic leaders, poets, pastors are all calling for a return to empathy. There is a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit Senator Barack Obama said in a 2006 commencement speech but I think we need to talk more about our empathy deficit. Obama went on to lament that we live in a culture that discourages empathy, a culture that too often tells us our principal goal in life is to be rich, thin, young, famous, safe and entertained. A culture where those in power too often encourage these selfish impulses. According to him, recovering empathy is critical to healing our nation. Modern society is built on human connection and our house is teetering. The philosopher Jeremy Rifkin put it in stark terms saying the most important question facing humanity is this, can we reach global empathy in time to avoid the collapse of civilization and save the planet? Empathy, Zaki tells us is not a superpower. It is not something that's bestowed upon some of us and not others. It is a regular old power like being strong, agile or good at puzzles. Some people may be predisposed to be stronger at it than others but it is up to each of us to work that empathy muscle. The more we practice, the stronger we will be. It is in communities such as this in which we can practice, in which those empathy muscles strengthen with each act of reaching out, remembering that we are in this together, that we need one another to survive. James Villa Blake, a Unitarian minister in Chicago in the early 1800s, wrote words that are familiar to many of us. Love is the spirit of this church and service is its law. This is our great covenant to dwell together in peace, to seek the truth in love and to help each other. As Doug mentioned last week, covenants such as this hold our free thinking communities together. Our congregations descending from New England Puritans of the 1600s. Puritans like John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts, who addressed a group of Puritans in 1630 who were sailing to New England by saying the only way to avoid shipwreck and to provide for our posterity is to delight in each other, to make others conditions our own. Rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together. Always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work as members of the same body. Our congregations are anchored in this free faith tradition of showing up and moving forward arm in arm in a stronger faith than we could ever have alone. The Puritans said we covenant to be in this together. Across our differences, across our disagreements, we will hold each other up. They were covenanting to practicing empathy in their life together knowing it was key to their very survival. The great American poet Gwendolyn Brooke said it perfectly when she wrote we are each other's business. We are each other's harvest. We are each other's magnitude and bond. The development of empathy has been an ongoing discussion in our home recently. As Dan is in his first year of a new job, being a school bus driver, there are many joys in being a bus driver. Being the first and the last person to greet and say goodbye to kids each day to help them start their day well and help them be ready to transition back home in the afternoon and there are difficulties as well. In his training on the first day, his supervisor said you aren't just a driver, you know. You have to remember you are part teacher, part police officer, and part therapist as well. Now one thing he's been trying to do is to learn something about each child who rides on his bus. It's been particularly important in developing relationships with kids who struggle with following those pesky behavioral norms. Telling kids to stay in their seat a hundred times over or reminding them of what language isn't appropriate for the bus again and again. Remembering them of rules and expectations, it just wasn't working. So he decided that he wanted to learn something about each child to try to see a little of what makes them tick on the inside, find out something they're interested in, something they love, then he can make some headway. If he knows a child loves to sing and even works at home at night to write song lyrics, when that child is struggling, he can ask them to come to the front of the bus and to sing or to share lyrics of a song he wrote. He can see a little bit of who they are on the inside. Then he can figure out ways to support them and help them succeed to remind them that they are interesting and complex, that someone cares about them, that they are more than a behavior plan on a piece of paper. My colleague, the Reverend Amanda Pape, writes, I had no idea what to expect from my first trip to Disney World this summer, but I left with lots of impressions, discomfort with the total commercialism, awe at the detailed work they put into that park, delight in the way that people visiting Disney World are all in. None of the visitors are too cool or too world weary to put on a pair of Mickey ears and sing along as loud as they can to it's a small world after all. And wow, they were all in on the t-shirts too. It seemed every other person had a custom t-shirt declaring who they were. Disney Mom celebrating Jaden's sixth birthday. He's my Mickey, I'm his Minnie. I felt I could look deep into someone's soul just by reading what they had printed on their shirt. And isn't that what we all want? Well, not to have our innermost thoughts always printed on our shirts, but to be seen for who we are. I know how painful the opposite experience is, she says. The hardest times in my life have been when I felt misunderstood, when someone has experienced me in a dramatically different way than I experienced myself. Sometimes there's important learning for me there. When I realize that impact is more important than my intention. When that learning has happened, when through a relationship, through a conversation, through the trust of someone else, I was able to make the me on the outside match more closely how I feel on the inside. Each time it's been an opportunity to be known more deeply, more truly. The truth is we can't be summed up by a t-shirt, even a really cute one with Mickey ears. But it is indeed an impulse of the human self to be known fully by those we love. And that's almost never possible unless we're willing to risk the conversations that help us see past those initial impressions. We are so beautiful inside, so full of dichotomies and complexities and yearning. When we risk telling the world who we are, and when we risk truly learning about each other, we offer a great gift. This is the beauty of communities such as ours. We can think of them as training centers. We're training ourselves in all those things that make us who we are, who we want to be. Training in empathy, kindness, vulnerability, connection, risk, caring, compassion. And what I like to think of as one of our largest training centers is within our lay ministry program. Our lay ministers foster a sustaining sense of community within our congregation through a ministry of care. They reach out to our members who are experiencing change, loss, illness, oftentimes offering practical assistance. They share in moments of celebration and happiness. They reach out to those who are new. They reach out to those whom we miss. Mostly they listen. They listen to the stories of your lives. They discuss the complexities of the life we share. They share in any situation that requires a little human kindness and an open heart. It is one way that they're bringing more empathy into the world, remembering our connections, holding on to what binds us, strengthening one another, and reminding us that we are not alone. So if you are interested in learning more about lay ministry, either speaking with a lay minister or seeing how you could get involved, I know that several of them will be at the welcome table after service and they would love to talk with you. I'll leave you today with these words from the Reverend Teresa Soto. There are a lot of ways to stay alive. You can wear soft clothes and focus on brushing your teeth and staying hydrated. You can ask yourself what you need and not be mad when you don't have an answer, only a shrug. You can breathe in and then with great care, you can breathe out, taking this thing one single breath at a time. You can give yourself a chance. Remember not only your mistakes, but also all the ways that you matter. From eyelash to shoelace, you matter. You matter when you are sad, when the world is heavy, like wet laundry dragging from your arms. You matter when you are angry and you use your teeth like welded prison bars to keep the words that might cause harm from escaping your lips. There are many ways to stay alive. You can come heart-wrapped in several layers of foil mashed into a plastic box with an ill-fitting lid to a place where people say your name like it is good news. You can always fight your way toward freedom. I recommend that you decline the option of struggling by yourself. There was this wise ruler who said once that by ourselves we are each unprotected, but two people together can face the worst, the failure, the heartbreak, the upending of the world we hold in our hearts. And with three people, you being one of them, you may find that eventually all will be well. Every week we take an offering during our worship service to make a community expression of thanks for the blessing of abundance, to visibly bring in the harvest of our lives. Our offering says that the act of giving is as essential to our spiritual well-being as anything else we do here. Our outreach recipient this week is Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin. You can find out more about their good work in the red floors. Our offering will now be given and received in the spirit of grateful fellowship. In addition to your generous financial gifts, we are grateful for the gifts of those volunteers who helped to make our services run smoothly. This morning, Daily is on sound and Smiley is our lay minister. Our greeters are Claire Box and Leslie Bartlett. Our ushers are Marty Hollis, Nancy Daily, and Teresa Rademacher. Our hospitality folks making coffee for us are Nancy Kossiff, Keely Denzi, and Katie Silvera. Our welcome table is where you'll find Mary Bergen and some other lay ministers. Our tour guide is John Powell, so if anyone would like a tour of our campus, please meet John up near that beautiful orchid on that side of the auditorium. Your left, right after the service. Our him leader is Jennifer Yancey. I'd also like to announce that you have one more chance. Well, actually you have many, but hopefully if you're interested in the composting project, which we are carrying on from beloved Bob Bradford, who is on his way to his new home in Oregon, as we speak, please join Eleni back in the library after the service and she will tell you all about it and she would love to have some more help. Now today we have a parish meeting at about 12.30 after the second service with a lunch served before the service. Thank you. And now please rise in all the ways we do for our community. Just as long as you're blessed by our connections to one another, to the spirit of life. Walk lightly that you see the life below your feet. Spread your arms as if you had wings and could dance through the air. Feel the joy of the breath in your lungs and the fire in your heart. Live to love and be a blessing on this earth. We extinguish our chalice keeping its light and message of love and justice in our hearts. Taking it outside these walls to the world we live in until we are together again. Blessed be, go in peace and please be seated for the postlude.