 우리의 일상은 1023호의 퀴즈, 그리고 문화가 제공되어 있습니다. 잘 morning. 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 entire congregation, I would like to extend a special welcome to any visitors who are with us this morning. We are a welcoming congregation, so whomever you are and wherever you happen to be on your life journey, we celebrate your presence among us. Newcomers are encouraged to stay for our fellowship hour after the service and to visit the library, which is directly across from the center doors of this auditorium. Bring your drinks and your questions. Members of our staff and lay ministry will be on hand to welcome you. You may also look for persons holding teal-colored stoneware coffee mugs. These are FUS members knowledgeable about our faith community who would welcome visiting with you. Experienced guides are generally available to give a building tour after each service, and I understand there is one for us after this service. So if you would like to learn more about this sustainably designed addition, or our national landmark meeting house across the parking lot, please meet near these large glass doors on what is your left side of the auditorium following this service. We welcome children to stay for the duration of the service, however, because it is difficult for some in attendance to hear in this lively acoustical environment, our child haven back in that corner, I see some folks back there now, and the commons outside the auditorium are excellent places to retire if your child wants to talk, sing, dance, run around in circles, or whatever children like to do. The service can still be seen and heard from those areas. This would also be an excellent time to turn off any devices that might cause a disturbance during this hour, especially cell phone ringers. And now I'd like to acknowledge those folks who help our services run smoothly. For this service we have Mark Schultz on sound, we have Anne Smiley as our lay minister, our Greeter is Mark Schweitzer, and Ushering are Anne Smiley again, Samuel Bates Elizabeth Barrett and Douglas Hill. Back making some coffee for us and ice water are Chip Quadet and Jeannie Hills. I also would like to mention that Hannah Pinkerton is the person who is taking care of our plants this weekend. Please note the announcements in your red floors insert to the order of service. This describes upcoming events at the meeting house and other things that will be going on in the near future. I would like to read a couple of special announcements. The first one is that the FUS Equity Ministry team invites you to an open conversation about today's reflections on white supremacy. Folks will gather in the Atrium Auditorium that's right here at 12.30 following this 11am service. Refreshments will be available and there will be story time for children who'd like to meet in the library afterward. Another special notice. On Mother's Day weekend, May 13 and 14, peace polls will once again be placed and decorated along the property on University Bay Drive between and after each service. If you would like to participate in this family friendly event, please sign up prior to the event so we are sure to have enough polls. There will be a person with a sign up sheet in the commons after the service. Again, welcome. We trust today's service will stimulate your mind, touch your heart and stir your spirit. I dream a world where man no other man will scorn, where love will bless the earth and peace its paths adorn. I dream a world where all will know sweet freedom's way, where greed no longer saps the soul nor avarice blights the day. I dream a world where black or white or whatever race you be will share the bounties of the earth and everyone is free. Where wretchedness will hang its head and joy like a pearl attend the needs of all humanity, our world. Please rise in body and spirit for the lighting of our chalice. Our chalice lighting words are responsive so if you will please join your voices in the bolded italicized sections. For that which has been done to lift humankind to new levels of social order and health. For that which we can do but have left undone. For that which needs to be done but is as yet beyond our reach. And now on this rather chilly late April day please turn to your neighbor in exchange with them a warm and friendly greeting. Thank you very much. All right. Very good. All right. Take care. Please be seated. And at this time I would like to invite any young people to the front of the auditorium for the message for all ages. You all got your umbrellas. Somebody's got their boots. Got your rain boots on. You don't need rain boots. You just go around in your bare feet, right? No. So this is a story with some really nice pictures about skin. Okay. You know the stuff on the outside of your body. We kind of talk a lot about heart because heart's where love is, right? And head because that's where we think, right? We don't talk a lot about skin though. So we're going to talk about skin today. Hey, look at your skin. The wonderful skin that you live in. The skin you're all day in. The skin that you play in. The skin you snuggle up, cuddle up, lay in. The skin that you beam in. The skin that you scream in. The skin that you dream about eating ice cream in. The skin you have fun in. The skin that you run in. The skin that you hop, skip, and jump in the sun in when it's actually sunny. The skin you laugh in. The skin that you cry in. The skin that you look up into the sky and say, why in? It's baby born new skin and your family too skin and glows when it shows that it knows we love you skin. It's face, the rain, bold skin. And snow, angel, cold skin. And warm again, let it in, sunshine, behold skin. And it's trembling fright skin. And it cringes at night skin. But turn off the lights to make birthday cake bright skin. It's whatever you do skin, be happy it's you skin. You can't live without it. I'm glad it's me too skin. And look at all the shades it comes in. The shades of your colorful skin. Your coffee, your cream skin. Your warm cocoa dream skin. Your chocolate chip double dip Sunday supreme skin. Sounds pretty delicious doesn't it? Your marshmallow treat skin. Your spun sugar sweet skin. Your cherry top candy drop frosting complete skin. Your pumpkin pie slice skin. Your caramel corn nice skin. Your toffee wrap ginger snap cinnamon spice skin. And your butterscotch gold skin. Your lemon tart bold skin. Your mountain high apple skin. Your cookie dough rolled skin. Now look once again at your skin and the skin that all people live in. It's not tall skin or short skin or best in the sport skin or fat skin or thin skin or you lose an eye wind skin. It's not sad skin or mad skin or you're naturally bad skin. I'm rich and you're poor and you'll never have more skin. It's not dumb skin. It's not smart skin or keep us apart skin or weak skin or strong skin I'm right and you're wrong skin. It's none of those things is it? It's not she skin or he skin. You are better than me skin or lesser than you skin or it's me against you skin. It's not any of this because you are more than you see. You are all that you think and all that you hope and all that you dream. You're a gifted creation with imagination. You're a new day desire to reach even higher. You're the feelings that start from deep down in your heart. You're the pride and the joy inside each girl and boy. So whenever you look at your beautiful skin from your wiggling toes to your giggling grin, think how lucky you are that the skin you live in so beautifully holds all of you within. And like flowers in the fields that make wonderful views when we stand side by side in our wonderful hues we all make beauty so wonderfully true. We are special, we are different and we're just the same too. So that's the story about your skin. You didn't know a skin was so complicated, did you? But we're going to sing you out now with our next Tim, number 120, which has the same tune as the him we sang at the very beginning. So it should be easy to pick up. Enjoy your classes, folks. Please be seated. So one month ago on March the 30th, The President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, Peter Morales, tendered his resignation. In so doing, he was but the second president of the UUA not to have completed his full term of office, the other person being Paul Karnes, who died of cancer after just more than a year of service in that capacity. Morales, whose tenure would have officially ended in June, jolted the denomination with his precipitous departure. Now, the UUA presidency is a hard position to fill. And I know from conversations with colleagues and with Peter Morales himself that he has been no stranger to controversy. Nevertheless, he was elected to a second four-year term in 2013 and he subsequently presided over the relocation of our denomination's national offices to newer and more serviceable facilities. But clearly, he was not able to weather the storm that was unleashed by a recent executive decision made at the UUA's headquarters. And so in a letter to the Board of Trustees, he conceded, I have obviously lost the trust of many people and it's clear to me that I am not the right person to lead the association as we work together to address our shortcomings. We need the space for healing and the space for listening. Morales emphasized that the decision to step down was entirely his own, that no one even mentioned to him that he should resign. He simply felt that new developments had convinced him that it was in fact time for someone else to assume the presidential mantle. Now the proximate cause for this leadership realignment was this. A denominational search committee headed up by Scott Taylor the director of congregational life, that search committee selected a white male to replace another retiring white male as leader of the UUA's southern region. This is a judicatory that stretches from Virginia in the east to Texas in the west. The Unitarian Universalist Association is made up of five regions. We belong here to the mid-America region. And at present, every one of the five is served either by a white man or a white woman. Although minority hires, four positions in the UUA have increased in the last decade. The decision to engage yet another white person for an upper level administrative position, this did not sit very well with people of color in our movement. To make matters worse, another leading candidate to fill the vacancy was an accomplished woman of color. A Latina member of the UUA's Board of Trustees, the director of administration and finance for one of the southern region's more noteworthy congregations. She was passed over. In any case, reaction to the hire was swift and in short order, the director of congregational life and the UUA's chief operating officer had also submitted their resignations. Presently three individuals, each with a different set of responsibilities are fulfilling the duties of the outgoing president of our association. Now the issue at hand is not going to be resolved by a simple change of personnel or a revision of the association's hiring practices. Because this controversy has led persons of color and their white allies to call for some very serious soul searching, not just among the folks at headquarters in Boston, but throughout the movement as a whole. In effect, we are all being asked to confront directly a very challenging, a very disconcerting question. As a religious movement, are we consciously or unconsciously helping to perpetuate a culture of white supremacy? Now over the past several years and in our own congregation, we have forthrightly addressed such topics as these. The mass incarceration of African Americans in the state of Wisconsin. Our nation's sordid history of discrimination which continues to handicap people of color. The problem of unacknowledged white privilege. The phenomena of implicit bias and how it affects white's perceptions of people of color. And the importance of engaging with communities of color on their terms rather than our own. We've talked about all these things at some length and in several different venues over the past three or four years. And at the same time, First Unitarian Society has established ongoing working relationships with predominantly African American congregations most notably Christ the Solid Rock on the east side of town. With Latino organizations like Centro Hispano and Vosace De La Frontera, with Young Gifted in Black. We have hosted community forums on Dane County's appalling equity gap. We have offered adult education classes on white privilege, sessions for parents on talking to children about race. There's another one of those scheduled yet for this afternoon. We have established vibrant ministry teams devoted to these very issues but after all is said and done, can we? Can we, one of Dane County's most progressive and socially active faith communities? Can we be justly accused of maintaining a culture of white supremacy? Kind of depends on how you define white supremacy. When this phrase was used to describe the UUA and its hiring practices, Peter Morales himself, the son of Mexican immigrants said, if you call us that, what do you call the Aryan nation? It's a loaded term and it's one that sits uneasily on our tongues. But it's being invoked for a couple of reasons. First I think because of its shock value and with the hope that it might help us to open our eyes to deeply entrenched and unrecognized realities. And second so that we perhaps can begin to appreciate that supremacy manifests itself in a wide variety of ways. It's hardly restricted to hate mongers. So 25 years ago, Jake Lamar who is a black Harvard graduate and a journalist who has worked for Time Magazine among other national publications, Jake Lamar called out an important liberal office holder in the state of New York, an individual who had exposed his racism with a subtle comment that was made to Lamar during a political gathering. And Lamar later wrote about this encounter. I know what you're probably thinking. Liberals like us aren't racists. But this allows you to make easy calls against the David Dukes of the world while rarely questioning anything racial in your own enlightened sphere. You suffer from cognitive dissonance, he said. You consider yourself astute on race issues yet you cannot acknowledge presumptions that you still make solely on the basis of race. You steadfastly refuse to confront the mystery of your own manners. The mystery of your own manners. That's what our brothers and sisters of color are alluding to when they use the expression of white supremacy. As the current moderator of the UUA, Jim Key recently explained, it refers to a culture or a social narrative that places the needs, the desires, the stories, the well-being, the very lives of white people over and above those of people of color. And it's the very water that we all swim in. We will return to this definition and its relevance to Unitarian Universalism and to FUS in Part 3 of today's Reflections. Thanks to the Society Choir, that's gorgeous, gorgeous anthem. It may or may not surprise you that over the centuries Unitarianism and Universalism has accumulated a fair amount of race-related baggage. And so if we are now being challenged to examine some of our racially conditioned cultural assumptions, it's least in part because we have not come fully to terms with our own past. We remember with pride, of course, Notables such as Senator Charles Sumner, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Charles Fallon, Samuel May, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Lydia Maria Child, Mary Livermore. These early 19th century figures fought long and hard and sometimes at considerable personal risk for the abolition of slavery. Both Theodore Parker and Samuel May harbored fugitive slaves. They used a variety of means to prevent them from being returned to their southern masters. While serving in Congress, John Quincy Adams defended the mutineers that had taken over the slave ship Amistad and he won their freedom. For their part, the Universalists adopted a strong anti-slavery platform at their very first national convention in 1790. And those Universalists who already held slaves were urged to free them and to seek education for their children. Dr. Benjamin Rush, founding father and a Universalist, he assisted Richard Allen in organizing the first black congregation in America, which grew into the African Methodist Episcopal or AME denomination. After the Civil War, Laura Matilda Town a Philadelphia Unitarian carried her ideals and her skills to South Carolina where she established the first school for freed slaves at Penn Center in St. Helena Island. Early in the 20th century, the Reverend John Haynes Holmes, Minister of the New York City's Church of the Messiah, he co-founded the NAACP. He was a tireless foe of Jim Crow and racial inequality. He wrote, the erection of a foolish prejudice into a condition of social organization is bound to reduce the Negro to a level of inferiority where he does not belong, this in 1923. Unitarian Universalists were among some of the most fervent supporters of immigration and civil rights during the turbulent 1960s. Hundreds of ministers and lay people marched with Dr. King at Selma in Washington D.C. and in Cicero, Illinois. Two white UU civil rights activists, James Reeve and Viola Liuzzo, joined dozens of African Americans as martyrs to that cause. These are a few of the highlights we are proudly, we are proud to point to as proof of our progressive credentials, the good karma as it were. But the other side of the ledger has to be considered as well. A few brave abolitionists aside, the American Unitarian Association as a whole refused to take a stand on the issue of slavery right up to the Civil War. This was at least in part because some of Unitarianism's wealthiest and most influential members were mill owners, exporters, bankers who had a financial stake in the slave-produced cotton from the Deep South. When the Notorious Fugitive Slave Act was passed by Congress in 1850, a Unitarian president, Miller Fillmore, signed it into law. The Unitarian Senator from Massachusetts, Daniel Webster, defended its enforcement. South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun was one of the leading apologists for the institution of slavery. He was a member of the Unitarian Church of Charleston. In Boston, the Reverend Ezra Stiles Gannett, who served the prestigious Federal Street Church, Gannett urged his parishioners to comply with the Fugitive Slave Act, which caused Theodore Parker to remark, Gannett is urging members of his congregation to kidnap members of mine. Because Parker's Church was one of the few that were integrated at the time. Despite his own dismay over slavery, even Theodore Parker held deeply racist views. No doubt, he said, that the African race is greatly inferior to the Caucasian in general intellectual power and also in the instinct for liberty that is so strong among members of the Teutonic family. And this kind of prejudice continued to inform Unitarian and Universalist culture once slavery had ended. Black aspirants to our Unitarian ministry were treated very badly, were never given the chance to serve established Unitarian congregations. In assessing the capabilities of one such minister, the Jamaican born Ethelred Brown, AUA President Lewis Cornish had this to say in 1932. I am told that this man shows the emotional temperament of his race and perhaps a weakness of judgment. I have lived much among Negroes and I am inclined to be very sympathetic to their temperamental peculiarities. They are very lovable people and often very childlike. It would be at once unjust and misleading to judge Mr. Brown the way you would an Anglo-Saxon. Finally, in the year 1961, the same year the Unitarians and the Universalists merged to become one denomination. Finally, a black man, Lewis McGee, was called to serve as the lead minister for a predominantly white Unitarian Universalist congregation. Now the minority presence in our movement grew significantly during the 1960s. Only then to collapse in the face of the black empowerment controversy that erupted in the last two years of that decade. You see, many blacks in 1968, 1969 they wished to establish a separate standalone organization for people of color within the greater UU community. But the integrationists in our midst, well they had other ideas and they pushed back hard against this separatism. And a clumsy and inconsistent response by the UUA led to a confusion over priorities, a sense of betrayal on the part of those who wished to create this separate black caucus and subsequently amass exodus from our movement of people of color. Much has been written about this turbulent era and its lasting impact on our efforts to foster greater diversity in Unitarian Universalism. Today we do have more ministers of color serving our congregation. More people of color serving as administrators in leadership positions. Anti-oppression and anti-racism trainings are conducted at all levels and throughout our denomination. Defending black lives, protecting undocumented immigrants, these have become national denominational priorities. And yet, as Leslie Mack, a black activist recently lamented, just when I think the UU faith has made some strides, I feel the pull of white supremacy in the faith snapping the back of my neck. It feels like whiplash. I would now invite you to turn to today's offering and as you can read, a portion of your gifts today will be shared with Wisdom's Expo Project and we hope you will read about the good work that they're doing. So in responding to these recent complaints that the UUA has not done enough to address and to reform its inbred culture of white supremacy, in response to those complaints, the Executive Director of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association, the Reverend Don Southworth, he wrote, Since I am a white man in a privileged and powerful position, I realize that for some, anything that I have to say must be filtered through the identities and the culture that I embody. So Don Southworth's comment holds equally true for me and perhaps for all of those who operate out of what Joel Fegan calls the white racial frame that is our culture's long-standing default position. Honest self-scrutiny, very hard to achieve. And that's what makes it all the more important as Southworth acknowledges, to seek counsel on wisdom from those who occupy a space outside of the prevailing frame. That perhaps for another day. But for now let's try to bring the discussion home. First Unitarian Society of Madison is a substantial congregation, one of the three or four largest in the denomination. The notoriety of our building and our active involvement in the greater Madison community, this means that we attract a whole lot of attention. And because of the distinctiveness of our non-doctrinal inclusive message, membership here has remained stable even as most of the conventional churches surrounding us have suffered significant attrition. These attributes that we possess have proven attractive to a wide assortment of people, young and old, gay and straight, mystics and scientists, poets and philosophers. But when it comes to race and class, ours like most UU congregations throughout the country is pretty darn homogenous. Blue and pink-collar folk are poorly represented in our community as are people of color. Mark Morrison Reed, who's an African American minister who was raised UU in Chicago, he says that these two categories of race and class tend to intersect because many blacks and Latinos and even Asian Americans are working class and they would not find our approach to church all that attractive or in the long run practical in terms of their own needs and aspirations. They might say, you do a lot of thinking around here. Where does all this thinking lead? What do you do with all of that? Well, it's not that we don't care about such things. UUs in Madison, we have been meaningfully engaged in the struggle for racial and economic justice for three quarters of a century now. So for instance, in defiance of fraternization or restrictions that were imposed by the armed services in World War II, in defiance of those federal restrictions, Unitarians here in Madison held racially integrated USO parties in their facilities. After the war, the society fought against restrictive real estate covenants by opening a house on campus that was open to people of all races. A few years later, FUS members helped secure passage of Madison's first fair housing ordinance. During the 1960s, our congregants enthusiastically supported the civil rights movement both locally and in the deep south. Max Gabler writes, We established a close relationship with the civil rights effort in Sunflower County, Mississippi. A truck left Madison almost monthly with supplies for those active in that movement. And that remarkable lady, Fannie Lou Hammer, visited us twice in Madison and several of our young people from this congregation participated in Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. This is a distinguished track record. We are not allowed to rest on our historic laurels. White supremacy is again the brew that we are all steeped in. And so we need to understand how it might affect us. And it's not a matter of being guilty or not guilty of white supremacy. It exists on a continuum with hate groups like the KK at one far end of the spectrum and others like the Sierra Club or the Credit Union or First Unitarian Society located somewhere else in between the extremes. And as we complainly see, FUS suffers from a dearth of racial and ethnic diversity. This is true of our staff, it's true of the congregation at large. People are always asking me, why is that? I say, well, you know, we have this homogenous near west side location where the only faith community in the village of Shorewood Hills. We have this remarkable facility that fairly shouts elitism. We have a Eurocentric style of worship. We have this departure from Christian norms and nomenclature. We're not recognized as being part of the larger Christian universe. Even our long standing support for marriage equality and LGBTQ rights puts us to some extent at a disadvantage. And a lot of the foregoing does reflect white upper class norms. And so there are plenty of persons of color in Dane County who are more than willing to partner with us, but they don't necessarily want to be a part of us. I can understand that, but what might we want to do to change that? Well, it's been suggested that we could change our worship. Make it less programatic and more spontaneous. Change the tone and the tenor of the sermons. Add music that gets the congregation moving. Pray more often. Because nothing requires us to maintain the liturgical traditions that have served us for 140 years. As Hassan, the Indian chef featured in the film The Hundred Foot Journey, as Hassan said to his boss after he had altered a venerable French recipe, he said, perhaps 200 years is long enough to prepare a dish in the same way. In any event, we are moving into a time of transition. It's a conversation that is worth having between and among us. But a faith community is more than its worship practices. And students of this subject of white supremacy say that many of the practices associated with it are less obvious. They're more covert. And thus they say when an institution values quantifiable results over process values, when it's defensive about its norms and seeks to avoid controversy. When it opts for linear logical problem solving while discounting other ways of thinking and knowing. When it fosters competition rather than community building and collaboration, then it is manifesting clear signs of a white supremacy culture. So again, I'm a white guy. And I'm still in the early stages of unpacking all this stuff. And I haven't gotten far enough along in my own discernment process to assess the validity of all of these critiques that I'm just recently reading about. But I think that the questions that are being raised are important ones. I think they're legitimate questions. And I think we need to wrestle with them. In her reflections of last week, my colleague Kelly Crocker spoke of the importance of belonging. And the need for us to widen our welcome, our sense of who belongs here in order to make this a more hospitable place for a wider variety of people. Open discussions of white supremacy culture I think can help us to do that. And Kelly also noted that people will feel more at home here if we resolve some of the inconsistencies between our walk and our talk. That means living with greater integrity, striving to live with a greater sense of wholeness. And ultimately this is really about the kind of faith community that we want to be. Today we're just beginning this conversation. I urge you to continue to let it move further. Because to paraphrase the early 20th century Black Unitarian activist Fanny Barrier-Williams, quote, the hope of the dark races in America depends on how far whites can assimilate their own religion. Think about that. Blessed be in our man. And now I invite you to join together in this uplifting, closing hymn, number 1020 in the Teal Hymnals. Please be seated for the benediction and the poster. If we have been unsettled by this time together, then perhaps it is good. For tranquility due to a lack of awareness, that brings only a false and precarious piece. If we've learned something new in our time together, this is good. For new light must be ever breaking in to dispel the clouds of our darkness. If we are leaving still unsure about where the truth lies, well this is good as well. The truth is never all in. The quest for wisdom and understanding must be open-ended. And if we are going out inspired to change the world or ourselves just a bit for the better, then this too is good. And a blessing for the brief time that we have spent together today. Blessed be in our man.