 you're here, but we also know that you're going to find this is a special place and if you would like to learn more about our special buildings, please gather after the service over here by the windows and we offer guided tours to give you a chance to learn more about our buildings again after the service. And speaking of the service, this would be a perfect time to silence those pesky electronic devices that might interfere with your ability to enjoy the service and that includes those of you in the balcony. And if you are accompanied this morning by a youngster, and that youngster would rather enjoy the service from a more private space, we have a couple options for you. One is our child haven at the back corner of the auditorium and there's also comfortable seating out in the commons from which you and your youngster can see and hear the service. The service is brought to us this morning by a dedicated team of shy volunteers, but I'm going to read their names anyway. Operating the sound system is Peter Daley, Tom Boykoff is our lay minister, Janine Nisbaum was our smiling greeter upstairs and I think she's still smiling up there. Our ushers include Marty Hollis, Nancy Daley, Bob Alt and Paula Alt. The all important hospitality and coffee are being served by Sandra Plitch and Gal Bliss after the service. And the flowers behind me have been provided generously by Mikayla Moy. Just a couple announcements before we get on with our service today. The first is that you might recall some comments that Michael made last month when he mentioned a t-shirt that had caught his eye and the slogan on the t-shirt was you can pretend to care, you can't pretend to show up. And that is the philosophy behind the FUS Moses Ministry team, which is planning a statewide action day on Wednesday, April 29, downtown Madison. And you can participate in that and if you do you'll hear from social justice advocates Hannah Rosenthal and Reverend Everett Mitchell. And you'll have a chance to meet with our state legislators urging them to increase state funding for treatment alternatives and diversion programs from prison. Even if you can only come for part of the April 29 event, you are welcome to attend and you can get more information by visiting the Moses table in the commons after the service. The final announcement includes one of my favorite events of the FUS calendar and that of course is cabaret and this year it's an old fashioned cabaret. There will be constant entertainment from this stage organized by Dan Broner and featuring people from within the FUS family. It's going to be a lively auction. You can see a sample of the preliminary catalog will be available in the commons after the service and as usual there's some exciting items offered by FUS members for the auction. It's a party. The party begins six o'clock on Friday evening, that's this Friday evening which means it's only about five and a half days until cabaret and I know I'm going to buy my ticket today because I'll save five dollars by buying it today and you can do the same. We can all save five dollars together after the service. So think about that and also think about the fact that cabaret is coming and it's really quite incredible. It's an auction, it's a party and the food is very edible. The talent is top notch and you'll be so impressed. You won't believe it's possible to have this much fun at FUS with constant entertainment both musical and otherwise. Fantastic auction items to fit a budget of any size. Oh soon we'll be at cabaret and when it's over we will say oh what fun for you and me at First Unitarian Society and soon we'll be at cabaret and when it's over we will say oh what fun for you and me at First Unitarian Society. Behave yourselves. So with that please 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. See you at cabaret. We're glad you're here this morning. Our opening words are from the retired Unitarian Universalist minister Richard Gilbert who served our churches in Ithaca and Rochester, New York for many years. We summon ourselves from the demands and the delights of the daily round, from the dirty dishes, the unwaxed floors, the unmowed grass and the untrimmed bushes, from all incompleteness and not yet startedness, from all that is unholy and unresolved. And we summon ourselves here to attend to our vision, a vision of peace and justice, of cleanliness and health, of delight and devotion, of the lovely and the holy, of who we are and what we can do. Today we summon the power of tradition and the exhilaration of newness, the wisdom of the ages and the uncanny knowing of the very young. We summon beauty, eloquence, poetry, music to be bearers of our dreams and so we would open our eyes, our ears, our minds, our hearts to their amplest dimensions. We rejoice in all of life's manifold promises and its possibilities. I invite you to rise in body and spirit for the lighting of our chalice. And if you will join me now in reading our words of affirmation. The light of this chalice is a frail thing. It can be snuffed out by winds of cynicism and apathy. May its little flame be a reminder of the power of the spirit. Let us rededicate ourselves to providing light that lifts our hearts and increases the world's joy. And in keeping with that joy, please turn to your neighbor in exchange with them a wonderful and warm welcome. I'd love to be joined by some children up here. Are there any in the house? So today the children are going to help the grown-ups and the grown-ups need help. Today we're going to play a little bit. Okay. So we're going to ask the grown-ups to join us because we're going to go for a little walk in our imagination today. So can everybody get your imaginations going, close your eyes and get your imagination going? Can you do that a little bit? Okay. We're going to go for a walk together. You're going to go, I want you to start imagining that out in front of you is a big field. Some of you go to the arboretum, so it's like a big field out in front of the arboretum. And we can see way in the distance we can see a forest. So we're going to walk to the forest together. And I don't know what's between here and there. So you need to pay attention so that if we have to, if I forget how to get back, you can help me. Okay. So we're just going to start out together. So let's just walk. Let's just start walking. Isn't this fun? We'll walk through the, we'll walk through the, the, it's been all mowed nicely here and it's pretty nice. Like that nice mowed grass, the ground is kind of flat. What do you, what do you, what do you smell? It's a beautiful spring day. What can you smell? You smell anything? Flowers. Flowers, yes. And flowers are starting to come out pretty soon. And oh my goodness. Look. Look up in the sky. What do you see in the sky? Lights. Mm-hmm. They're lights. And what else? We're imagining now. We're out under what? What? Birdies. And what else? Clouds. Clouds. There's clouds in the sky. In the sky. Yes. Wow. Blue in the, blue in the sky. So, so now we're coming. We're coming now. We're now, oh we're coming up now on some tall grass. So now let's go through the glass. Come on grown-ups. Come on. Get with the program here. Here we go. So we're going through the tall grass. What's in the tall grass? What lives in the tall grass? Corn. Corn. Okay. What else in tall weeds? And what else? Are there bugs? Any bugs? Yeah. Bees. Bees and bugs in the tall grass. Okay. And ladybugs. Sometimes there's ladybugs in the, lots of worms. Can you see them? Can you see them? Okay. Okay. We're kind of coming to the edge of this. So now we're going to walk a little more. There's a little kind of. Okay. Here we go. Kind of a nice day for walking outside, isn't it? Okay. So now we have come to some mud. Okay. So here we go. Well, fortunately this is not a big patch of mud. So now we can kind of, let's rub our feet a little bit and walk a little bit more. Oh my goodness. You know what's up ahead of us? There's a stream. I think we're going to have to swim. Can you swim? Can we all swim? What's in, what's in the stream with us? What's in the stream? Fish. Fish. Sharks. Sharks. Sharks. I think there's sharks in the stream. I think we need to get out of this stream before the sharks. So now we're going to walk a little more. We're getting closer and closer and closer to the woods and the sun doesn't get through us. We're going to swim across the water. Really fast. Let's go really, really, really fast. Okay. Now we're going to run. Run some more. Run some more. Now we're going to go through the tall grass. And we're going to run some more. And run some more. We made it. We made it. And I don't, I don't see the bear coming. It's coming after us. That's a good thing. I think he probably could turn back at the, no, there's not. So you get to, you get to imagine the next bear. Okay. All right. Well, thank you for going on this. I think we got the, I think we got the grownups going a little bit here because what we were doing here wasn't it was we were having a little time of play together. And grownups and children play together sometimes and everybody is better for it, I think. When grownups and children play together. So now we're going to send you off to your classes because we're going to sing a song called, um, what are we going to sing? We're going to sing the sun that shines in the sky. That was an amusing little ditty, continuing on in the spirit of play. This from Robert Folgem's book, What on Earth Have I Done? And Robert Folgem, as you know, was a Unitarian Universalist minister before he became one of the country's best known humorists. This reading is entitled, Players. The Sunday morning lady, she's a player, definition, persons with enough nimbleness of mind to accept a surprise invitation to jump into a quick game of imagination. People with a loosey-goosey sense of mischief. Players are also laughers. And you can't tell a player by the way they appear on the outside. Example, here's a uniformed city bus driver standing in the door of his vehicle staring out into the rain. An invitation from me passing by. Okay, I say to him, here's the deal. I'll pay for the gas. You'll drive us to California to the beach at Santa Monica. With a straight face, he replies, okay, meet me here at midnight. It's the end of my run and they won't miss me or the bus until morning. I'll get some barbecue. He smiles. He's a player. On the other hand, there's a tailor's shop on Queen Anne Avenue. Sign in the window says, alterations and repairs for men and women. The tailor is standing in the doorway. I stop and say, I'd like to get altered and repaired. She looks at me cautiously, goes inside, closes the door. Definitely not a player. Here's me again at a well-known company there to pick up copies of my manuscript. I'm visibly annoyed. This is my third trip to get what I was promised yesterday. The anxious clerk, Miss Saucer's eyes, is obviously new to the herd behind the counter. She does not know what to do with me or for me. The work is still not done, despite promises, but I know that getting mad at her is not going to help. Okay, I say, I will not make any trouble. Just give me a really clever off-the-wall creative excuse. The wildest thing you can think of, just make me laugh and I'll go away. Miss Saucer eyes retreats to the back of the shop and consults with her boss. Now she is a high-energy, sharply dressed woman who marches briskly toward me with a steely look. She leans over the counter and explains, sir, you may not know this, but this store has been a front for the Irish Republican Army for years. We're supposed to be turning in our firearms, and it seems that a bazooka is missing from our inventory. But when we find it, things will get back to normal. If I were you, I wouldn't make any trouble just now. I'd advise you to come back tomorrow. She is a big league player, a garbageman. A garbageman in front of a monster truck. It's a lousy day, cold, rain, but this guy is a player. This time the invitation comes from him. As I pass by, he says, hey, you look prosperous. Thank you, I say, I feel prosperous. You look like a guy who might have some frequent flyer miles. As a matter of fact, I do, quite a few of them. Listen, he says, I need enough of those frequent flyer miles to get me to Buenos Aires one way. I've got enough, I say, they're yours, but what's in it for me? Take the keys to the garbage truck. It's yours, and even trade. Yes, I've always had an urge to drive one of these things. I'd like to dump a load of garbage in a certain person's front yard. So it's a deal, I say. You got a license to drive a truck? Well, no. The deal's off. I can't be part of anything illegal. But no problem, if you go get a license, I'm here every Monday. As he drives off, I wonder how many other people on his route get the same offer every day. He has all the nervy characteristics of a non-stop all day player. He is an old favorite of mine, probably from high school speech, which I've always loved is by Robert Frost. It's called Two Tramps in Mud Time. Out of the mud, two strangers came and caught me splitting wood in the yard. And one of them put me off my aim by healing cheerfully, hit him hard. I knew pretty well why he'd drop behind and let the other go on his way. I knew pretty well what he had in mind. He wanted to take my job for pay. Good blocks of oak it was, I split as large around as chopping block, and every piece I squarely hit fell splinterless as a cloven rock. The blows that a life of self-control spares to strike for the common good that day, giving loose my soul, I spent on unimportant wood. The sun was warm, but the wind was chilled, you know how it is on an April day when the sun is out and the wind is still, your one month on in the middle of May. The time when I most love my task, the two make me love it more by coming with what they came to ask. You think I never felt before the weight of an axe head, poised aloft, the grip of earth, an outspread feet, the life of muscles rocking soft and smooth in the moist vernal heat. Out of the woods, two hulking tramps from sleeping God knows where last night, but not long since in the lumber camps. They thought that chopping wood was theirs of right. Within of the woods and lumberjacks, they judged me by their appropriate tool, except as a fellow handled an axe, they had no way of knowing a fool. Nothing on either side was said. They knew they had but to stay their stay and all their logic would fill my head as that I had no right to play with what was another man's work for gain. My right might be love, but theirs was need, and where the two exist entwined theirs was the better right, agreed. But yield to will, to their separation, my object in living is to unite my avocation with my vocation as my two eyes make one sight. Only where love and need are one and the work is play for mortal stakes is the deed ever really done for heaven and the future's sakes. Thank you. Well, in a parting gesture that now feels like 99 bottles of beer on the wall, I agreed to offer one last sermon for bid at the 2014 auction here at FUS. It was generously purchased by Makayla Moy, who offered the idea of a sermon on play. And I am grateful and delighted for this opportunity to be with you again. In his book, Play, author and psychiatrist Stuart Brown, MD, founder of the National Institute for Play, compares play to oxygen. He writes, it's all around us, yet goes almost completely unnoticed or unappreciated until it is missing. This might seem surprising until you consider everything that constitutes play. Play is art, books, music, movies, comedy, flirting, daydreaming. Play is a state of being, purposeless, fun and pleasurable. For the most part, the focus is on the actual experience and not really on accomplishing anything. Brown notes several kinds of play, object play, stuff you do with your hands. Social play that involves interaction with others like the play in Fulham's essay. The rough and tumble play, think baby animals or dad play. Later play, which involves not so much what goes on on the field as what goes on in the stands, so think Mallard's baseball. Ritual play, which is what goes on on the field. And imagination play, the telling of stories. So think five-year-old extrovert. I have one of those in my family right now who, when paired with her introverted cousin, elicits the response, oh Zoe, way too many words. In his TED talk, Stuart Brown encourages his audience to do a play history. Use a starting point in the memory of your most joyous moment and then build on that. And I would really encourage you to do that because I did that in preparation for this sermon. And it was really a delight for me. So I took his advice and I noticed that it is remarkable that it has taken me 30 years in the ministry to consider play and fun as topics for theological reflection. The reason this is remarkable to me is that play and fun have been prominent parts of my experience for my whole life. I was blessed to be the child of playful parents. Though my dad loved football and baseball, that had very little to do with his sense of play. Dad was like Folgem's description, a player. And that was the lens through which he viewed the world. In his youth, he was known at that time as what was called a practical joker. But then as he aged, he became more the trickster who in mythology, exhibits a great deal of intellect or secret knowledge and uses it to play tricks on otherwise disobey normal rules and conventional behavior to teach a lesson. His prey were often among the strong and the arrogant whose lack of self-awareness made them easy marks. I was the only child of my parents' second family born when the other children were in their teens. And from mid-September, as many of you know, until mid-May until mid-September, we lived on an island on Rainy Lake in northern Minnesota where we had a small fishing resort. In the early spring, when it was still really cold outside, we would spend the weekends starting to get the place ready. So around noon on that first Saturday, and this was the memory that I went to to start my play history, dad would come into the house and say, let's go on a picnic. So my mother and I would pack a basket with hot dogs and buns and marshmallows and condiments. And then my father would take us on an exhibition through the house to find the best spot to make a fire. So we would go down into the bedrooms and then through the kitchen and the dining room. And then we would find ourselves in the living room where the fireplace was. And we would agree that this was the best place. We would spread a blanket on the floor and we would gather firewood from the wood box, which we then built a fire with elaborate care. And we would roast our hot dogs and our marshmallows without ever braving the elements. Sometimes dad would read a story or we would play a game and then it would be back to work. And the rest of the summer help assembled, there was often singing and when we watched the dishes and card playing and swimming in the afternoons. When I saw Mary Poppins as an adult and heard her say, in every job that must be done there is an element of fun. You find the fun and snap the jobs a game. I had a lived sense that that was so. My father loved movies and we would often go together just the two of us leaving the theater for the car which often headed directly for the Dairy Queen. He would take my hand and say, let's run. And we would run to the car just for the pure joy of feeling the air on our bodies. Sometimes we would go for walks in the evening and dad, we lived on a rural road and dad would start to bark. And within minutes every dog for a country mile had joined in to the chorus. My experience of my mother and father is summed up in a quotation by LP Jax, a Unitarian minister who wrote in the 1930s. He says, a master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play. His labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues a vision of excellence through whatever he is doing and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself he always appears to be doing both. My parents were by necessity hard workers and by disposition inclined toward the golden rule. But the seriousness that characterized some of the religious churchgoing folks that we knew, the concern for wasting time, the quest for perfection, the guilt and shame, the fear of failure, the sense of judgment and the withholding of generosity seemed to me always to be in stark contrast to what I had experienced in my family. Neither risk takers or risk avoiders, my parents raised me to see mistakes as learning opportunities instead of failures and sources of guilt or shame. They also lived in the north woods on the lakes of northern Minnesota where a relationship with the natural world and the Harvard classics and a parade of summer people and small town life shaped their world view. I often wonder if the complete lack of formal religious affiliation did not figure prominently in my parents' capacity to see places for playfulness and fun. Though they clearly had their own work ethic, it was neither definable nor in reaction to what I came to know as the Protestant work ethic. Here now from the Gospel according to Wikipedia. The Protestant work ethic or Puritan work ethic is a concept in theology, sociology, economics and history which emphasizes hard work, frugality and diligence as a constant display of a person's salvation in the Christian faith in contrast to the focus upon religious attendance, confession and ceremonial sacrament in the Catholic church. The Calvinist theologians taught that only those who were predestined could be saved. Since it was impossible to know who was predestined, the notion developed that it might be possible to discern that a person was elect by observing their way of life. Hard work and frugality as well as social success and wealth were thought to be the two important consequences of one being part of the elect. Protestants were thus attracted to these qualities and supposed to strive for reaching them. This was the lens through which much of the dominant church going culture viewed itself. This was a wholly different lens than that of my heathen parents. This ethic planted in the psyche of generations growing up in the 19th and early 20th century was that the idea that work and achievement themselves were of highest value. All that with the popularization of modern science which posits an approach to rational, linear, measurable approach to problem solving. The concept of play associated with recreational pleasure and enjoyment was viewed among real grownups as the purview of children. The social scientist and writer Barbara Ehrenreich poses the question, why has it been so difficult for observers especially perhaps white bourgeois Europeans to recognize play as a time-honored category of experience? Her reflection continues with a quotation from American anthropologist David Graber who blames laissez-faire economic theory which emphasizes productivity as the dominant value. Ehrenreich goes beyond this to assert that for the past hundred years Western scientists has been on a mission to crush all forms of agency. Scientists never allowed that hydrogen atoms might lust after oxygen atoms or that living creatures might swim or run or fly just for the fun of it. The goal of science was to replace agency or whim or desire with deterministic mechanisms. Birds flew to find food or escape predators and the ones who failed to do so were eliminated by natural selection. The science of economics as viewed by Ehrenreich sees all human actions springing from the rational calculations performed to fulfill biological needs. Add this to the industrial revolution which began to change the nature and understanding of work. And yet among the working class the idea of leisure and fun persisted in neighborhood bars and in some homes and even that got curtailed by an amendment to the U.S. Constitution which outlawed the sale and transportation and use of alcohol. This was promoted by the dry crusader movement, think of that, by rural protestants and social progressives and Democrats and Republicans and was coordinated by the Anti-Saloon League and the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Now a conspiracy theorist might identify all this as a cultural campaign against any manifestation of fun. But in spite of all of this a few counter-cultural strains have persisted. The pleasure seeking excesses among the upper class throughout the ages, the persistent playfulness of children and animals and the universal cross-class and cross-cultural influence of the creative spirit reaching, stretching, striving across hardship and suffering and defying economic pressure and religious fervor and manifesting over and over in art and books and music and movies and comedy and flirtatiousness and daydreaming. In all times and in all places humans have defied limitations and rules to engage in a range of voluntary intrinsically motivated activities. I contend that play and laughter, the fun-seeking part of each of us, the surprising power of art of all kind, the awe in the face of the extravagance of the natural world, the ways in which we participate in holes that are greater than the sum of their parts. All of this comprises the substance of the spirit. It is what connects us as secularists to that which is greater than ourselves and gives us life and sustains us. Many years ago I was visited, I was a new minister and I was visited by a man who was in obvious emotional pain. He said he had been depressed. He had left the Lutheran church in his youth and was feeling a great spiritual emptiness. After a litany of woes he paused and then posed the question I had hoped never ever in my ministry to hear, what he said is the meaning of life. I suppose he really thought that I might know. I mean I was what, 42 years old. I was a minister. I wisely decided to help him focus on what was the meaning of his life and the source of his spiritual emptiness. Clearly he was feeling a lack of connection to that which was life giving and sustaining. Where I asked, did he feel most happy and fulfilled and free? And after a moment he said it was when he was playing hockey with his old guys league team. It was the act of play, of teamwork if you will, where he knew himself to be in a relationship with a whole that was greater than the sum of the parts connected by ritual and structure and yet free to respond and create and engage. For him it was play that was the generative activity that brought meaning to his life. This is the theology that is suggested in the work of Martin Buber in the I-Thou relationship and in the concept of the creative encounter in the work of Henry Nelson Wyman. Play by its very nature is interactive, relational, generative to the degree that it can remain separate from the dominant cultures, cultural forces of competition and achievement and outcome and hold its center as a voluntary intrinsically motivated activity. It retains a certain transformative power. When play loses its focus on fun or joy or creativity and leads to violence and injury and pain and rejection or even fame and fortune, it is no longer play but a corruption of play which has been co-opted by the dominant culture. Paul Koacic, author of Babylon Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization writes, those societies in which seriousness, tradition, conformity and adherence to long established, often God prescribed ways of doing things are the strictly enforced rule have always been the majority across time and through the world. Such people are not known for their sense of humor and lightness of touch. They rarely break a smile. To them change is always suspect and usually damnable and they hardly ever contribute to human development. By contrast, social, artistic and scientific progress as well as technological advances are most evident where the ruling culture and ideology give men and women permission to play, whether with ideas, beliefs, principles or materials and where playful science changes people's understanding of the way of the physical world works, political change, even revolution is rarely far behind. This contrasting view is the undercurrent of the millennial culture. For example, we see it invading the workplace. Many large companies, especially those looking to innovate and to create like Google and Yahoo and Epic, have drastically altered their workspaces allowing time for more collaboration, flexibility, unorthodox, and non-existent. This is a very important part of the work space that we see in projects, meeting strategies. One has only to visit the campus of Epic systems in Verona to see the commitment to an aesthetic of whimsy and playfulness in the work space. Models have been changing to intentionally develop a sense that employees are a part of something greater. Millennials are known for seeking or even demanding a sense of greater purpose in the workplace, open to seeking even projects with learning components. They are developing a better sense of work and play by pursuing work places that provide for opportunities for the divine spark that is generated by play. At best, motivated by more creativity and generative relationships rather than a more narrowly defined ethic of productivity and competition and moral obligation, our younger generations are providing us with a hope for a more spirit and joy filled future. People who are playing are not at war. People who are laughing with others are in touch with their common humanity. As I reflect on the seeds of playfulness that were planted in me by the whimsy of my father and sustained by the same spirit that's present in my husband and our children and their children, I have come to appreciate this potential in a deeper way. In his novel, Jitterbug Perfume, the author, philosopher Tom Robbins writes, very well, he would lighten up. As a matter of fact, he felt as light and bubbly as the froth that flew from the lips of the waves. Whatever else his long unprecedented life might have been, it had been fun. Fun if others should find that appraisal shallow frivolous so be it. To him it seemed now to largely have been some form of play. And he vowed that in the future he would strive to keep that sense of play more in mind, for he'd grown convinced that play more than piety, more than charity or vigilance was what allowed human beings to transcend evil. May it be so. We will continue our service now with the receiving of our offering. It is through the gifts that we support the work of this beloved community. We do gather each week as a community of memory and a community of hope. To this time and this place, we bring our whole and occasionally our broken selves. We carry with us the joys and sorrows of the recent past and seek here a place where they might be received and celebrated and shared. So we would pause now to send prayers, good wishes, support to Sarah and Sean Goodman. Sarah, as many even know, was our intern last year. Their daughter, Carolyn Elizabeth Goodman, was born on April the 11th and passed away on April the 12th. A memorial service will be held here in the Atrium Auditorium on May the 2nd at 10 o'clock in the morning. And the Goodmans would ask that if you do plan to attend that you wear bright colors to the service. In addition to that sadness just mentioned we would also acknowledge any unarticulated joys or sorrows that remain among us and that as a community we hold with equal concern in our hearts. Let us sit silently for just a moment or two in the spirit of empathy and of hope. And so by virtue of our brief time together this morning may our burdens be lightened and our joys expanded. And Karen has a word or two because we're going to do a slightly different version of hymn number 1024 in the Teal hymnals. So we're just going to do, we'll sing four verses and we'll do, do, play, laugh, do. Got it? Do, play, laugh, do. All right, let's put the grave. But the lives we have lived and the time we have spent are treasures too precious to say. What can we do with our lives but work and hope let our works by our work bind our dreams to let our dreams bind our work to our play. What can we do with each moment of our life but love till we've loved it away. Love till we've loved it away. Go in peace.