 Here. Thank you, Linda. Welcome to the First Unitarian Society of Man. This is a community where curious seekers gather to explore spiritual, ethical, and social issues in a safe, 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 Elizabeth Barrett, and on behalf of the congregation, I would like to extend a special welcome to visitors. We are a welcoming congregation. So whoever you are and wherever you are on your life's journey, we celebrate your presence among us. Please silence your cell phones as we gather today out of the routines of our week to give pause, to take a deep breath, to listen to our hearts. We give thanks for this day. Here may our minds stretch, our hearts open and our spirits deepen. We are so very glad that you are here. I invite you to join me now in a few moments of silence for contemplation, meditation, prayer as we settle in and come fully into this time and place together. Please rise in body or spirit for our in-gathering hymn, number 389, gathered here. Good morning. We'll sing this as around. So if you are, let's see. Yes, if you're over here, you're group one. If you're over here, in the middle, anywhere, you're group two. If you're over there-ish, you're group three. If you don't know what group you're in, pick one. No one will know. We'll sing it twice through, all together in unison, and then we'll break up into a round and sing it twice total. One more time together. If you're one, if you're two, one more time, group one. As we remain standing for our opening words and our chalice lighting words, we come together utilizing words attributed to the 8th century Buddhist monk Shantideva. May we become at all times, both now and forever, a protector of those without protection, a guide for those who have lost their way, a ship for those with oceans to cross, a bridge for those with rivers to cross, a sanctuary for those in danger, a lamp for those without light, a place of refuge for those who lack shelter and a servant to all in need, for as long as space endures and for as long as living beings remain alive. And until then, may we too abide to dispel the misery of the world. As Elizabeth lights our chalice, may we join our voices together in our chalice lighting words printed in the order of service. As together we say, we rejoice in the radiance of the turning season. As we kindle our chalice lighting, light is a symbol of creation and of hope, of law and justice, of warmth in unity. It is a symbol of remembrance. And now I invite you to take a moment to greet those folks around you. Hello there. We gather together again with the fullness, the tenderness written on our hearts. The sharing of joys and sorrows is our time in the spirit of acceptance and support to share with one another those things that are written on our hearts. We invite anyone who would like to step to the front of the auditorium, light a candle, using the microphone provided by Ann, our lay minister, briefly share with us your message. If you're unable to come forward for any reason, just raise your hand and Ann will bring the microphone to you. We begin with the lighting of a candle for the three Jewish congregations who meet at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We hold those taken too soon in our prayers, even before we know all of their names. May their legacies of love and the lessons present in the way they lived, bless their children, their spouses, and all the people who loved and cherished them. We also hold the wounded and the living members of the Tree of Life in our hearts embrace. May they be surrounded by the healing power of community, prayer, care, and justice. We hold their wider circle of family and friends who live close and further away, who are wrestling with the fear and the wondering of just how great a personal loss awaits as details are released. We hold all those for whom this terrible act cuts too close to the bone. All who feel and know that their lives, their homes, their houses of worship are threatened by the normalcy of words and deeds perpetuated in the name of bigotry, hatred, fear, and isolationism. As the light of day faded, these were other times emblazoned in memory when love sanctuaries were pierced by weaponized hate. And we also recognize that since Wednesday there is a context in which there has been much hate-filled action in our country, in Kentucky and across the nation by the U.S. Mail. All of this we hold in a spirit of being called not only to offer our care and our prayers and our concerns, but also to act for justice and for love. May that greater power hold us as we share our own personal difficulties and celebrations. I like this candle for our nephew who has become ill with an illness that has cut short his career plans, a life-changing illness, cut short his career plans very possibly permanently, and for my sister who is grieving this. My name is Patty Witte and I light a candle for my nephew down in Austin, Texas who yesterday was admitted to the ICU with liver failure. Last Sunday we sang a hymn that was arranged by Betsy Angerand. Betsy was a very, very dear friend of mine. I had known her for more than 50 years and she passed away several months ago. I had the joy and the honor of singing several of her music. I did a new musical here in 2007 and she invited me to come and do it at the church in Annapolis where she was the music director. I was honored to be able to do that and it is a loss not having not being able to talk to her on the phone or get her newsy letters as the piece Betsy. I would also like to light a candle of joy with all of this sadness. I would like to play with all the many people who called me after the floods in August to find out I was okay. I felt the love of many of the people in this congregation. I have a classmate in seminary who was recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and she asked that this congregation hold her in our thoughts and prayers. I'd like to light a candle of gratitude this morning for this safe sanctuary, the safe place that we can be together and for that fact that we provided to our sister congregation. And Anne, if you'll light one last candle for all the joys and all the sorrows that are too tender to share that live in our hearts. And we'll now rise in all the ways we do and sing our children and teachers out to classes. Sing this three times together. This morning's reading comes from an excerpt from Jan Richardson's How the Stars Get in Your Bones. See how the sorrow in you slowly makes its own light. How it conjures its own fire. I tell you this blazing in you, it does not come by choosing the most difficult way, the most daunting. It does not come by the sheer force of your will. It comes from the helpless place in you that, despite all, cannot help but hope. The part of you that does not know how to not keep turning toward this world, to keep turning your face toward the sky, to keep turning your heart toward this unendurable earth. Knowing your heart will break, but turning it still. I tell you this is how the stars get in your bones. This is how the brightness makes a home in you. Towards the end, the last summer before I would begin my final year in college, so the mid-80s, zoinks, I was completing a time where I had worked through the entire summer as a peace intern. Peace interns were employed by various peace fellowships within religious traditions or the fellowship of reconciliation. We worked all over the country in various settings to try to do peace and justice work. A few of us were invited to tag on an extra week that we had just completed of urban ministry in San Francisco. We were deeply changed by that week. None of us had known each other until we began in that service, in that place. And so as we finished that week and we're still reeling from the power of it, we tried to decide what to do that felt right to honor our time together. And it seemed natural for us to find a place to worship together, but that was no easy task. We all came from a different tradition. So we decided that we would give Glide Memorial a try in San Francisco. I had never even heard of Glide Memorial at that point, but it was a perfect choice. Glide Memorial began as a conservative Methodist church when it was founded, but when Cecil Williams became its minister in the sixties, it moved into being one of the most distinctive bastions of liberalism. And so that morning, sitting through a service that was had thousands of people in the sanctuary of in as much diversity as I've ever seen in one place of every kind and the energy of the music and the power of his words that seem to both call us to task as well as to comfort us and speak about everything from addiction to poverty to living with life threatening disease, leaving it all into a powerful, powerful time together. And so when the service was over, we all wanted to go and thank Reverend Williams for the gift that he had given us. But the sanctuary was sort of held in a gridlock. Nothing seemed to be moving for minutes upon minutes. And I got worried that I would run out of time before I had to check out of my hotel. So I made my way around the side exit to try to find Reverend Williams. And as I got out into the Narthex, I realized why things were moving so slowly. These thousands and thousands of people were making their way into single lines to make their way up to about five people from the congregation so that they each could receive a hug. It was a sort of receiving line of a hug ministry that was a big thing for them. And at first I thought what a strange thing for such a large congregation to do. And then I watched these people one by one come up to the person to receive that ministry of caring, loving touch. I watched people in suits. I watched people who clearly were homeless. I watched members of the LGBT community. I watched them each come up as if they were standing in line for a communion with great expectation and wonder on their face. And one by one they would sink into the arms of that person and that person would whisper something private and prayerful in their ear. And it was something amazing to behold. I noticed in particular with Reverend Williams that a young man approached him, a man who was tall and agonizingly skinny. And from the appearance of lesions on his skin, I knew that he was suffering from Kaposi sarcoma. And he stepped forward to receive his hug from Reverend Williams. And I found my mind thinking about the week before that. The members of this team, a peace interns, had been invited in the mid 80s to come to one of the places where AIDS was having its most powerful effect. We were invited to work on unit 86, which was the first AIDS unit at the time in the entire world. Not only there, but out in the streets, just observing what was happening in terms of AIDS when most congregations yet had not even spoken about AIDS at all, much less ministered. We were there to do what we could, but most of all to bring back the word about what was happening and what congregations needed to do. And as I watched this young man, I realized that just the day before on the unit, I had been approached by one of the patients living with AIDS, who was incredibly caught and so weak and his body so wracked with those lesions. And he moved forward to hug me. And while I did not refuse the hug, I had to acknowledge that the hug reminded me of the exact kind of hug that I gave my brother the first time as an adult that was really more like the beginning of a wrestling match than a moment of affection. And I felt such incredible shame when I watched this young man lean into Reverend Williams arms so fully and his head rest on his shoulder. And I could see how desperately that ministry was of touch was needed in that moment. And I knew somewhere deep inside me that that moment was calling me to do the work that I needed to do in myself, to be more okay within my own skin, to confront my fear about disease. And while I knew from the people on the unit that there was no way that I would get HIV from touching people who had AIDS, it was really more about the fear of my own mortality that kept me from really opening myself. And I knew that that moment was asking me to do better. As we come full circle in this time where we explore what it means to be a people who are doing their best to create spaces of sanctuary. I am reminded how we are all called each in our own way to do powerful work to really be able to be the people that offer a radical welcome that are able in whatever way they are called to to be a presence of love and grounding when it is often needed most desperately. We all have powerful work that we are called to do in pursuit of that. And much of it calls us into the very ancient craft and spiritual practice of hospitality. Over and over again hospitality throughout the ages has asked people to do the work of understanding what it means to be truly loving and welcoming to friend and stranger alike. And how if you really do it well it asks you each of you each of us to face powerful questions again and again. What we believe to be true about ourselves. How we feel that we are connected especially to people that seem very different from ourselves. What we do when we are called to greet someone that we might even consider to be an enemy. All of those things and so much more are part of what it means to try to create a space of hospitality. The members of Glide Memorial have been very intentional in thinking about how to do that in that urban setting and they had decided that one of the ways was to thoughtfully offer the gift of touch. And to this day I understand how important it is for our congregations to think about the ways that we offer and embodied in loving greeting that also respects that people bring very distinctive boundaries about their bodies and what feels good. We are called to continue to do the work of knowing each other well enough knowing ourselves deeply enough so that we're able to soften into places of deep connection and let them do their work. This is one part of what it means to be a people of sanctuary. Doing the hard work of life showing up here week after week with our deepest selves intact and as Jan Richardson's invited us in the reading a few moments ago it comes from the helpless place in you that despite all cannot help but hope. The part of you that does not know how to not keep turning toward this world. To keep turning your face toward this sky. To keep turning your heart toward this unendurable earth knowing that your heart will break but turning it still. Being a congregation of sanctuary asks for that sort of courage and bravery and it reminds you that you don't do it alone. That you come here to be open together and on those days where you carry more than you can bear you can rest in the fact that someone else will step forward and someone else will step towards you if we do the work to see each other as we really are. What does it mean to be a people of sanctuary? It means to continue that work to continue that vulnerability. It means sometimes being willing to delve into difficult questions and to see things sometimes that are easier sometimes to ignore. Sometimes things that really are just a part of our culture and yet do powerful damage. Over the last years as we've been thinking about our own legacy in terms of race over and over again I have found myself thinking about Teima Okan's ideas around dominant culture or white supremacist culture and her words that remind us that culture in and of itself is powerful because while it is present often it is difficult to name or identify the way that it is present. It's so much the sea in which we swim but the characteristics that in a moment I will invite you to look at on a slide are damaging to our culture because they are norms and standards that we act upon without proactively being named and often we do not even intentionally choose them and yet we embody them and they are powerful. They are damaging because they promote white supremacy thinking. They are damaging because we live in a white supremacy culture and these characteristics show up in the attitudes and behaviors of all of us. People of color and white people alike. So take a look at the characteristics of that culture. As I have worked with them over and over again I've realized how widespread the power of this cultural bias is in our congregations. How essential they it is that we bring intention and work to the fact of how often we act from these biases without even knowing how powerful they are to us. How when we begin to ask why can't we attract and keep people of color in our congregations until we are willing to face that this culture says to them you are not welcome here we will never really create space that is brave enough for people of color to actually feel welcome. But even more I think basic to our humanity is that until we intentionally look at the power of these biases we are not living up to our full potential as unitarian universalists either. All of these things are essential and we could spend weeks exploring them but let me just give you a few examples. Over and over again we find ourselves in not just this congregation but every unitarian universalist congregation I've experienced. We often find ourselves being very defensive. When in some way someone raises a critique of something that we have always done as a congregation. One of the first things that we tend to do is find either or thinking and if someone makes that critique we assume that we must be bad or that what is happening is something that is either good or evil or some sort of absolutist thought rather than understanding that it is only through critique that we are able to see the damage that we are doing and to begin the process of healing. Critique even though it is hard to receive sometimes is the beginning of that essential work. Or how often we believe in a paternalistic way that we are able to make decisions that people in power we are able to make decisions for those folks who struggle without power and rather than asking them to understand what their world is like we believe that we understand enough to make decisions that will speak to their reality. Instead of finding ways to include all people in our community in important decision making processes and let those be places of telling the stories of our lives. Over and over again I've seen us have fear of the power of open conflict running scared from conflict as if it was something that would break us apart. But in truth conflict is always the place the starting place of powerful growth and of deep change. And so if we can find ways to practice leaning into the gift of conflict and to do it better with each other and more kindly and more openly we will be embodying great power. Now all of these things are not meant to say that unitarian Universalist congregations are bad or that we should change them all but that we should be aware of the power of these biases in our midst and be very intentional about how we engage this bias and continue to do the hard work of change together. Sanctuary invites us again and again to live into those things that create sustain and strengthen the spirit of life in our midst. And there is something for each of us to do in that living into. If you are an extrovert you can take your turn to reach out one Sunday and if you are an introvert you are the perfect person to greet another introvert. If you struggle with people all together there are always tons of tasks that help us be a more welcoming and empowered place that allow you to crunch numbers and work on computers for days. There is something for us all to do to help create a space of real and radical welcome here. We go to sanctuaries to remember the things we hold most dear. The things we cherish and love. And then the great challenge is to return home seeking to enact this wisdom as best we can in our daily lives. Returning to those last moments when I was at Glide Memorial as I was observing those people in line I realized that I was just being an observer and that in life really you need to step into line and enact and so I took my place in that long line and as I made my way forward I thought about the week that I had just had not anymore with shame but with deep regard for the power of the people that I had met in that week and how they were still working in me and how significant that work was and as I got to the front of the line and I found that my hug partner was this young Latina woman who on her name tag named her as a member of the board of trustees I stood before her and she said with disarming candor come on big boy come in for your hug and when I stepped forward and over and down so that I could reach around her and her arms reached around me she whispered gently in my ear you are held by the arms of love and I felt it so powerfully in that moment and facing the real truth of who I was in that moment of dropping all pretense of being anything other than someone who desperately needed that connection in that moment of connecting human to human I found that brightness that called me home how can we do that work together how can we create that space how can we call each other home to spiritual wholeness again and again let's do that work together I'm in and blessed be and we continue to do that work as we move into the time of receiving our offering I remind you that today our 5050 outreach offering will go to our recipient YWCA of Madison you can find out more about their work in the order of service as we give and receive may we connect to that power of gratitude and love thank you for all the ways that you give to this community each worship service is a collaborative effort and we appreciate those who helped our service today including our greeters Patty wit and Claire box our ushers Marty Hollis and Jane Warrell hospitality today is provided by Nancy Kossoff and Sandra fit flitch our lay minister today is Anne Smiley and our welcome table is being welcoming with Pamela McMullen I'm not sure if there's a tour after service but if there is you can join us up here at the ramp there are two other opportunities we want to highlight for you today one is directly after this service from 10 to 11 in room C we will be learning about the road homes work to end family homelessness here in Madison you'll learn how you can get involved this December family volunteer opportunities are available all ages are welcome and coffee is served the second opportunity happens tonight at 7 p.m. the Madison Jewish community and the Wisconsin faith voices for justice are having an interfaith vigil to mourn the victims of yesterday's shooting in Pittsburgh it will be happening here at First Unitarian Society at 7 p.m. I invite you to join in singing our closing hymn number 10 20 boy yeah and you will notice that on the second page there are repeats or the fourth page or something maybe Drew will help there are four pages to the hymn and the repeat happens between pages 4 and 3 and now as you leave this sanctuary may your hearts remain open may your voices remain strong may your hands and arms remain outstretched we extinguish this light but not the light wisdom not the warmth of love and community not the fire of justice these remain in our lives until we gather in this place again before we rush into our day let's take another moment together and enjoy the gift of our postlude