 Please join in a moment of centering silence so we can be fully present with each other this morning. And now let's get musically present with each other by turning to the words for our in-gathering hymn, which you'll find inside your order of service. We're free to say good morning and welcome everybody to a wonderful Sunday here at First Unitarian Society, where independent thinkers gather in a safe, nurturing environment to explore issues of social, spiritual, and ethical significance as we try to make a difference in this world. I'm Steve Goldberg, a proud member of this congregation, and I'd like to extend a special welcome to any guests, visitors, and newcomers. If this is your first time at First Unitarian Society, I think you'll find this a special place. And if you're curious about our special buildings, we'll be conducting a guided tour after today's service. Just meet over here by the windows, and we'll take good care of you. Speaking of taking care of each other, this would be the perfect time to silence those pesky electronic devices that you simply will not need for the next hour. And while you're taking care of that, let me remind you that if you're accompanied today by a youngster, and you think that young person would rather experience the service from a more private space, we offer a couple options for you. Starting with our child haven in the back corner of the auditorium, and some comfortable seating just outside the doorway in the commons from which you can hear and see the service. As is the case every Sunday, our service is brought to us by a great group of people whom we call volunteers. I'm about to announce their names and just think, you could hear your name announced from this very microphone someday if you volunteer to join that same group. I'm talking about David Bryles, who's operating the sound system. I'm talking about Tom Boykoff, who is our lay minister this morning. I'm also talking about Gal Bliss, who greeted us as we arrived today. And I'm talking about our ushers, Ann Ostrom and Dan Bradley. I'm talking about Sandy Plish and Roz Woodward, who are providing the hospitality and the coffee after the service. And I'm talking about John Twos, who made sure that the pulpit vegetation is green and vibrant for you. And I'm talking about Mark and Kathleen Hoover, who have generously donated the flowers that you see behind me. And I'm talking about our tour guide, John Powell. I'm talking about one announcement this morning before we continue with the service. Sharon Salzburg, a well-known author and expert on meditation, is going to be here on Sunday next week, August 14, and you can join the Madison Insight Meditation Group at that session. Sharon is a renowned author of two books, Loving Kindness and Real Happiness, and is here to share her wisdom and loving approach to kindness, which is something very relevant and timely these days. The program runs from 6 to 8 p.m. right here in the auditorium, and everybody is welcome. Again, that's one week from today, Sunday, August 14, 6 to 8 p.m. That takes care of the announcements. And now you get to sit back or lean forward to enjoy this morning's service. I know it will touch your heart. Stir your spirit and trigger one or two new thoughts. We're glad you're here. And their struggle, their TDM, and their turmoil, we gather to bring to bear on our days what poets have sung, what philosophers have taught, what biographers have recorded, what dreamers have read, that they may spread their lustre on a full course of our lives and make them brave. And for this purpose, all creation is our vital. The tensions, the great movements of reform, the sacrifices for truth and goodness and freedom, all these are our tests and our chapters. And here we find oracles which elevate our soul with a divine power that would make us know more of ourselves and of our duty and of our destiny. In this place and in this time, let's hear again the highest aspirations of our souls. Anybody who cries in the private of the spirit or the light of the child? We seek honesty to counter with our peace values. We seek to sustain our lives and to guide the self. We seek to test the limits of our religious medications. Toward these habits, we gather and seek, therefore, to worship together. Now, I was fine. I was born and I had a 30-year-old neighbor that came to that home three years ago. We moved to this house on a tiny bridge between the neighborhood reservation and South Dakota. We tried to kind of make a living for ourselves. It was really, really hard because it had a very, very poor part of the country. In fact, the private bridge is the poorest county in the entire United States. Nine towns of people who live there don't have it. And there wasn't a kitchen in it. All there was was a fireplace to keep you warm where you would put these 20 black beds that were recognized by the home. So way back about 45 years ago, 20 black beds began to think about the future of the Indian people on a tiny bridge. And their views on the United States government still get back on the land they thought they deserved. So 20 years ago, we didn't have much education. We started spending this problem. We found in a junkyard an old, manual type of computer just an old typewriter. We began writing letters. We began writing letters to the United States government. We began writing letters to the United Nations. We came back for the justice. Before long, these letters were complaining about what was happening to the Native Americans. They caught the attention of a man from a great print on the way away. And he was really impressed with what Tony Black had described to you. And he sent 20 black by the way to one of his friends, two airplane tickets, to go to the South, to go to the country's school ceremony where his very important meetings were being held. They were called the term of faith, they were called the Indigenous Peoples. Indigenous Peoples are people that were here on the United States long before they had lost thousands of years before we had arrived. And so, with his friend, coming to ride, he was hungry. He was looking for the power of a stick. So he and his friend went in and they got two double cheeseburgers. And those two double cheeseburgers cost him 30 Swiss francs, which is equivalent to $10,000 in US money. A lot of money had a factor. Stay is in a strange country. And so he found this place he called the Homeless Peoples Hotel. There was a full hotel in the back of the toilet where he announced it. So he stayed there and he switched over with his friend. Every day he would watch these very, very important meetings. He would represent an equal. One year after Australia, South America and Tony Black were there, there was an amazing white nation standard with indigenous people. He became friends with everybody. So when he talked about all these things, I just thought it was very important, difficult to imagine, to translate this. But he was talking with the janitors and the secretaries. And often he would be found in the Homeless, just talking to people, trying to talk to people, communicating, even though they didn't know each other's language. But if someone had made a deep friend with each other, he was just describing where they were for the people as it was for the people that really had. Now, when he was doing all this work, he was still living by his military attention, which was all of $75 a month. He was never paid for any one he did. And going to Geneva, Switzerland, with the right amount of state-of-the-art money, he was still the only one that ever paid for it. Now, when he was a pretty small child, Tony Blackler was given a name by his grandfather. And the name came from one of the languages, Oyate, where he gave himself so willingly. But that's how deeply he cared about other people. One must think about the cemetery where Tony Blackler was not buried. He was died about a year ago. It's a cemetery he, himself, established. This is the land that he had. Because one day he found out that there was a little baby who with other cemeteries in his prime year would not allow that name because they were all Christian cemeteries. Tony responded to this by saying that he was normal in the cemetery and that's where that little baby was buried. And that's where the life life was buried as well. Since that time, people from the Dakota Sioux community still here have just become a state-of-the-art. He's also very, very humble. He never bragged about what he had accomplished. So this is his song, right? And it's about someone who is exactly the opposite of Tony Blackler. The song is called, I was born about 10,000 years ago. You may need to listen to it. Here's some classic resemblances to one of the candidates for Tony Blackler. I think in the world that I first lived in, I think we got up and got it wrong. It was too bad, it ain't no more. Since my head, no one was to this happy life. And for there are little kids, I'm not all here in peace. All of a sudden, we listened. She got down in the club with me. We were never even a walkie-sie for me. I mentioned her, you go up to the general. The team is now in fantasy. The AAC is one of the sewers from the free. As soon as he and Hobo was in Bowie Rock, he placed down the notorious book, Typoly Merrick, through the streets of Manhattan. Baker had to sit on Merrick all the way to the hospital to keep her from jumping out of the ambulance. In the tenorist of Powell's kitchen, Baker wrote, she climbed stair after stair, knocked on door after door, met drunk after drug, filthy mother after filthy mother, dying baby after dying baby. Now, most of her fellow homeless actors didn't bother to make their rounds at all. They just scored the records and went on their way. But Baker's security recognized her feelings and in 1908 she was put in charge of the health department's new Bureau of Child Hygiene, the first of its kind in the entire United States. And there she changed the way that we all think about public health. Until then, the health department had sought to track down sick children and refer them to physicians, a mostly feudal endeavor as days before antibiotics and modern medicine. Baker decided the new Bureau's mission instead would be prevention. In her first year at the Bureau of Child Hygiene, she sent nurses to the most deadly wards on the lower east side. They were to visit every new mother within a day of delivery, encouraging exclusive breastfeeding in fresh air, regular bathing, and discouraging hazardous practices such as feeding babies with beer or a lot of that to play with guns. This advice was entirely conventional but the results were extraordinary. That summer, 1,200 fewer children died in the district compared to the previous year. Elsewhere in the city, the mortality rate remained a lot higher. Baker's public health animations were numerous. In addition to home visitation programs and community-based clinics, she established the position of school nurse. She developed special capsules for delivering silvery moisture to the eyes of new wards to prevent blindness due to congenital diarrhea. She invented a window board for improving ventilation in the houses. Safe milk and hygiene are the only things that children need to survive, she believed. Baker was the first to prove scientifically that children also need love. At the time, eugenically-minded child health experts believed that the deaths from newborns were due to their inherent subnormality. In order to prevent these babies from growing up and passing their sickly genes on to the next generation, it was thought preferable to just let them die. But Baker decided on a model experiment. She boarded out the sickliest newborns in the city's impersonal hospital wards. She boarded them out to a core of gush of Italian mothers who had been trained in child care about visiting nurses and sure enough, the death rate of these vulnerable babies was cut in half. Baker had no children in the room, but she saw clearly that, quote, even more than he needs butterfly and fresh air and clean diapers, a baby also needs the personal equation that will give him or her reasons to live. By the time they had retired from the Midwest in the Health Department in 1923, she was famous for having saved the lives of 90,000 care-saving children. The public health measures she implemented have saved the lives of millions worldwide. And yet her work is little known today, in part because so much of what she taught us now seems self-evident. But Baker spent his time in this problem of saving more American children's lives than anything else that has ever been attempted. And now I would like to introduce Eric, our new intern minister for the kind of year and Eric will be with us in the barge stand all the way until the end of next month. So Eric, welcome. Good morning. It is a pleasure to be here. Let me share with you a reading from the Deuteral Canonical Book of Ecclesiasticus. Let us now praise the famous, those who ruled kingdoms, men renowned for their power, women wise and eloquent in their instructions, those who were honored in their generations, and were the glory of their time. Let us also praise those who have no great memorial, merciful men and women whose righteousness shall not be forgotten. Their bodies are buried in peace and their glory shall not be blotted out. The people will repeat the wisdom of their ways and the community will show forth their praise. Features Kevin Cline was a highly regarded teacher of classics in an exclusive voice of boarding school. And in the opening scenes of that movie, Mr. Hunter, Kevin Cline, welcomes his new students and asks one of the boys to read an inscription on a stone tablet that is suspended over the entrance to the classroom. So the young man rises from his desk a little nervously, walks back a few pages, turns around, and reads from the text. I am Shukra Malimte, king of Pasan and Susa, son of the land of Ilan. By command of Isshushanah, I destroyed Sepah. I took the school from around the city and brought it back to Ilan, where I erected it as an offering to my God. I completed this pre-disciple, the school returns to the city, and Mr. Hunter queries the rest of the class. Have any of you ever heard of Shukra Malimte? No one had. In fact, he was a short-lived despotic conqueror the king of Elamite Empire, and his reign lasted only 40 years before his land was overrun by a more famous necronizer in 1220 BC. And it's likely that Shukra Malimte would still remain un-known and un-paralleled to a wider world public, had not found Louis, but Emperor's Club invoked his fading back. Now, the Classics teacher introduces Shukra Malimte to underscore a point that is central to the rest of the story. The point is that conquering without concluding means nothing, and that a man's character is his fate. A more recent conqueror, Vince Lombardi, is famous for the point of saying, when it isn't everything, it's the only thing. An ethically vexed proposition to be sure, and one that Shukra Malimte would undoubtedly have seconded. Ironically, that quote did not originate from Vince Lombardi, but from Henry Russell Sanders, who coached the UCLA Bruins in the early 1950s. Unlike Lombardi, how many people today, perhaps apart from Miss L.A. Lombardi, remember who Sanders was? Because fame is the fickle thing, and as I see it, not a very worthy goal for any of us to strive for. And yet, that does not make any of us consider it. The real trap of fame, the author, April 5th, of Venice Congress, is its irresistibility, fame and fortune. Aren't these the two great prizes that so many human beings set their sights upon? Certainly seems to be the case in our own society, but it's made of us, the longings for so many citizens to bask in the spotlight to be able to play in their very own 15 minutes of fame. I think of Coral Willie Long, the washed up salesman that the Arthur Miller's played, the salesman that's not playing, the American players do. At age 63, Willie spends an increasing portion of his time living in his fantasy world. Willie's regretful past, haunted by his past, by the lost opportunities, struggling somehow to maintain some semblance of personal pride. And Willie at 63 still dreams of being somebody. But on the other hand, he also knows that he has missed his chance. He has two wayward sons and very little to show for 35 years of faithful but unmoderated work. And so he sinks every dooper into despair. Willie thinks that well maybe at least I can leave my loved ones something. Perhaps the proceeds from my life insurance policy and so he commits suicide. And he assumes that his family will accept this sacrifice as their own. But of course they don't. And the play is close to seeing that the cemeteries leave. Only members of his immediate family had attended the celebrities. Where were they all? Where were all the friends, the buyers, the associates blended up his life on that? She shakes her hand. Willie. Willie Long has died not only anonymously but ignominiously. A vapor perhaps of his own ignored desire to be a winner. An object of admiration and a maker of the indelible. Now the psychologist, philosopher Paul Fletcher suggests that a person's mental, emotional, and spiritual health is contingent on a number of different factors. One of which he calls witness significance. Witness significance. At some level, each of us needs others. Others who will gift us with their attention, who will affirm our personhood, who will express appreciation for who we are and what we have given to the world. We all need that. So why do we not universally share human need? And when it is not that, we will feel unworthy and insignificant. Witness significance. That should be every human being's birthright, as our own first principle attests. We are obliged as military inversals to honor each person's inherent birth and dignity. But the desire for personal fame, that's something else to tire of. Witness significance implies reciprocity. Attention, affirmation, appreciation are used to be shared with one another by terms and for the purpose of strengthening our relational ties. Fame, on the other hand, is an ego-driven need self-serving and largely exclusive amongst rewards or admiration. Deference from others who are obliged to acknowledge our superiority. And so, feigning by definition creates some gulf between those who have acquired it and those who have missed the boat. And yet, even for those who have acquired it, the price of admission may not be worth the cost. That is, the talent that we're close to Natalie Higginsen suggested in one of her West End ematic poems. She writes, I'm nobody. To tell one's name a lifelong dream so there might be a place that's afraid about fame. I think perhaps it has something to do with an inability to find satisfaction in the relational arena. If a person feels fulfilled in their role as a marriage partner, a parent, a colleague or a caregiver, then maybe fame won't seem all that tempting. The late P.C. and perhaps the 20th century's West Home Poem Center and the Unitarian Universalist, P.C. articulated numerous awards and accolades. He experienced fame firsthand, but when he was asked very late in life to identify his greatest accomplishment, he said, marrying the best woman I've ever met, staying married to her for seven years, having three kids and six grandkids. P.C. their game of fame as a musician is not a compromise of that name. And it's rare for someone to become famous by virtue of their people skills, the love and the loyalty that they engender in others. Jesus of Nazareth, perhaps the most revered figure in all of human history, he could be said to have preached a gospel of witness significance because he drew attention to the poor, to the different and able, to the ritually unplayed, to the ethically inferior, saying that all of these people deserve to be treated as children of God. And Jesus attracted a loyal following because of the unusually compelling and urgent way in which he was able to deliver his message. Now in spreading this gospel, Jesus was probably indifferent to the prospect of gaining fame. Many others have promoted similar conveying values that they did not achieve the legendary stats, why should he have done so? And that Jesus is, in fact, is largely an accident of history and attributable not to the room that Jesus did, but to a man named Paul of Parsons because it was he who recaps this simple teacher from Galilee as a cosmic savior. And it's under this aspect that Jesus is so white that history is not an equal opportunity to provide. Sarah just would be faith. You heard her story already. Jesus thinker who did far more to promote the cause of public health than the sacred mother Teresa. And yet her story is scarcely essential and is known to a very select view. Well, however, we've heard contributions were more wide to celebrate today with the fear of the Zika virus and the virulent pathogens spreading because nature's teachings today are largely ignored as the public health specialist Andy Sparrow wrote recently. Pandemics are micro-offensives. Public health measures are human defenses. Water purification, sanitation, to our living longer than our lives. But these measures on mass salvation are not sexy. While we know prevention is better, considerably cheaper than cure, there is little financial reward or glory in it. Philanthropists these days prefer to build hospitals rather than pay for community health workers. Yes, people crave pay and they are all able to achieve it. It is not through improving public health. It is not through maintaining a loving family. Now increasingly, very well we are paying a big box value of speaking to purchase main rights on local public buildings. The New York Public Library, the New York State Theater, and the UCLA Medical School. Such charitable donations very short supply have less to do with philanthropy than making it more timely. Then today he says it seems that the notable accomplishments are not necessary. Just the dollars, millions and millions of dollars are only a tiny fraction of their fortunes. Rich people can have public buildings renamed for them and the one-tenth of our percent now sees the intent on making sure that we remember them long after they no longer back. Shades of sugar don't work that way. At the same time, they seem to have eluded many number of individuals on note who on heralded have left an indelible stand upon our civilization. Today which is the day after the first atomic bomb was detonated on the best supply to get a city of erosion of 61 years ago. Today you remember Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was just this kind of spearheaded development of this unthinkable weapon. Robert was also remembering his expressions of regret for his complicity in producing this agent of destructive power. We remember Robert Oppenheimer but who remembers his brother, Frank Oppenheimer? Also worked on the Manhattan Project albeit in a minor capacity. Frank Oppenheimer was a family of physicists in his own right specialized in the study of cosmic rays. At Los Alamos, Frank worked as a safety inspector studying the winds to see which way the falloff would drift from the experiment of last class. Now after the war, Frank joined the physics faculty of the University of Minnesota but then in a major surface that linked him to the Communist Party which in fact he had joined during his graduate school days at Catat in the 1930s. Although he soon had left the Communist Party in disillusionment, the accusation 10 years later was enough to cut short his university teaching and research career. And so Frank and his wife slumped on to the Colorado Mountain East where for the next 10 years or so they raised livestock. Of this experience, Frank later wrote, I think that he could be beat up by a nation where political beliefs and he built that atomic bomb and seen it used on 200,000 civilians. And after a career of cosmic ray research he found himself shoveling porcelain ore up in the mountains of Colorado. I think that's a really good way to find out what support they left. What else became of the story eventually Frank occupied his teaching certificate and he landed the job at the Gosa Springs High School of Science. Frank was a good teacher, innovative, creative and he developed all these unique hands-on projects and experiments that brought his subject to life. And he later gave the name Exploratorium to this growing library of experiments that he had done. Well, in the late 1960s he and his wife left Colorado to move to San Francisco where he had this vision a museum with as few rules as possible where children were free to run around and if they broke something Frank says so was. The purpose of the Exploratorium was to make it possible for people to feel that they could understand the world around them. Frank raised most of the initial funding for this project single-handedly in San Francisco Exploratorium and first of this time it was a hit. Today 200 people it entertains more than a half a million visitors every year. The similar Exploratoriums have now been found throughout the world. And Adam Freeman, director of the New York Hall of Science he calls the Exploratorium the most influential museum in the history of the world. That made it a bit my hurdle but it ought to give us pause. Considering Frank occupying his living legacy perhaps society has bestowed its fame all these many years on the wrong road. Or as the Civil War senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner once said no true and permanent thing can be found except in the labors which promote the happiness of the country. I come to the conclusion that in the absence of the fur unshakable fate in the afterlife and out of a fear and out of a brief passage through this life will soon go on in our art and on the memory. Because of this, some of perhaps many of us do see something that will carry our name forward. It could be a publication it could be a name on a facade of building it could be an Olympic gold medal it could be a footnote in the Guinness Book of World Records People sometimes engage in high-risk government activities for much the same reason and inordinate desire for fame has even motivated some Boston guests of souls to commit hate crimes. So here we need to remember that fame is like a morning mist on a summer day evanescent. And if it does look the record of the conscience is likely to be restored over the course of time. And also it's not an easy-to-goat it's just a name, a name the record of context, a name is dropped into a void. And this being the case perhaps we should not write fame as high as we sometimes do on our list of priorities. And my second concern is when our groups in our dreams are firmly fixed on the future a person is likely to miss out on a transit that still precious treasures to be able to any of us on the present moment. The willy-longs of the world they chafe against a quotient thing and in the process they discount the relational rewards that are right here in our fingertips. Near the end of death they sail on the willy's estranged son, Biff, falls into his father's heart to cry. The willy looks at astounding amazement his wife, Linda just may not have been open to notice and to accept this son's love. I was afraid that we would not make the same mistake, that we are almost awake enough to take notice and in noticing to understand. Now I would invite you to participate in one of the offering where gifts will be used to support the life of music and program to represent the entire society. We carry this joy as it starts in the recent past, seeking here a place where they might be received and so we would now say would be here or did not. It means welcome back welcome back to all of our travelers who have made it and enjoyed the return from their travels last weekend. I know I sometimes helps in here who went to enjoy it. Anything else here? The trip? All right, very good. So we look forward to hearing all your great stories. And then another joy, Lauri and Kate Crestwell are delighted to have supported the Grand Award for Honor at the end of July 15th. Paris, Cali and Bessie and people in the Grand are all doing well. The glory extending the year in the Indianapolis, helping out with the little ones. And so in addition to those joy suspensions, we would welcome any other travelers who might love us and that as a community we hold the people concerned about us. Let's sit just a little bit or two in silence and the spirit and the burdens. I'd like to rise one by one in the light of the spirit as we seem to have it came up. Some of the words come to us today from Nobel Prize winning Swedish author, Par Lagerkvist. One day you will be one of those who lived long and will remember you just as it remembers the grass and the woods, the rotting leaves, just as the soil remembers and just as the mountains remember the winds, your peace shall be as unending as the sea. Please be seated for the poster.