 Well, actually, piano, but it could be a string bass or a chord major. It could be a keyboard or a chord major. It's actually a bridge. Is it sounding? It's great. I can hear it like this. Yeah. It takes you through all of it. I'm sorry. Oh, you're in there. Did you say follow somebody? Absolutely. I'm sorry. What a view. Welcome to the First Unitarian Society of Madison. This is a community where curious seekers explore spiritual, ethical, and social issues in an accepting and nurturing environment. Unitarian universalism supports the freedom of conscience for 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 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 are on your life's journey, we celebrate your presence among us. May today's service stimulate your mind, touch your heart, and stir your spirit. I invite you now into a few moments of contemplative silence as we settle in and come fully into this time and place together. Please rise in body or spirit. Standing for the opening words and the lighting of the chalice. Cherish your doubts, for doubt is the attendant of truth. Doubt is the key to the door of knowledge. It is the servant of discovery. A belief which cannot be questioned binds us to error, for there is incompleteness and imperfection in every belief. Doubt is the touchstone of truth. It is the acid that eats away the false. Let no one fear for the truth that doubt might consume it, for doubt is a testing of belief, and the truth stands boldly and unafraid, and is not shaken by the testing. Truth, if it be truth, arises from each testing stronger and more secure. Therefore, let us not fear doubt, but let us rejoice in its help. It is to the wise as a staff to the blind. Doubt is the attendant of truth. And now would you please join with me in reading the words of affirmation printed in today's program. We gather this hour as people of faith, digging always for deeper truths, as people of hope, working diligently for a better world, as people of love, eager always to create closer connection. May this flame we now kindle, signify our faith, our hope, and our love. And in the spirit of that love, please turn to your neighbor and exchange with them a friendly greeting. This time I'd like to invite any children to come to the front for the message for all ages. So all of you are having a staycation, right? You know what a staycation is? It's a vacation where you stay home. Because you're on vacation, right? No? Not yet? It'll come Monday. Yeah, that's right. Most people will be off for spring break, I think. So this is a story with some pictures that will be up on the big screen called I Wonder. Any of you ever wonder? Good. Well, this is a story about Eva, and Eva is out and she loves to look at the moon. And as she's walking, she notices how the moon seems to follow her from place to place, disappearing behind trees and mountains, and then reappearing again in some place new. Look, mama, there it is. The moon looks so beautiful in the sky. How do you think it follows us, Eva? Her mother said. Eva thinks about that, and she just can't really figure out how the moon keeps following her. Well, it's okay to say, I don't know, her mother says. When we don't know something, we get to wonder about it. Well, Eva says, I wonder if the earth and the moon are friends. Her mother smiles. I kind of like that idea, she said. But mama, how does the moon really stay so close to the earth? Well, says her mother, there is this invisible force, and that force is called gravity. It's called gravity, and gravity pulls everything in the universe together. Gravity keeps the moon close to the earth, and it keeps the planets close to the sun, too, so they can circle around and around and around. Well, Eva understands a little bit better, and she starts to wonder and says, mama, where does gravity come from? I don't know, Eva. Nobody really knows that for sure, and when nobody knows the answer to something, it's called a mystery. A mystery is something for everybody to wonder about together. Oh, how fun Eva thinks. And she imagines herself wondering about gravity together with all the rest of the people in the world who don't have an answer to it. Eva watches the moon disappear behind the clouds as she walks, and she's excited now to see something else, something else new. I wonder how many grains of sand are in the whole world, mama. I wonder about that sometimes, too, where mother says, but there's trillions and trillions and trillions of grains of sand, and nobody really knows exactly how many. And so Eva tries to think about all of the sand in the entire world, and she says, it feels so big. I can't keep it in my imagination. It kind of makes me feel dizzy thinking about something that big, and now I feel like maybe I'm falling. I know what you mean, her mother said. I think other people probably feel that way, too, sometimes when they think about really big things. Eva walks down another path, and she's looking for the moon again, and then a small orange butterfly appears, and then she noticed that there are butterflies everywhere. Mama, where did all those butterflies come from? Well, mama says that those butterflies have been flying around now for a couple of days, and they started out as little caterpillars, and those caterpillars came from eggs, and those eggs came from other butterflies. There are cycles all around us, Eva's mother says, and one thing is always ending, and another thing is always beginning. Everything is always changing. Eva, can you think of something else that changes? So Eva thinks about that. Well, clouds, frogs, and me. And later Eva wonders, mama, what was there before butterflies? What was there before gravity and frogs and clouds? What was there before everything? I don't know, explains her mother. Maybe nothing, but that's another mystery. Her mother says, I like trying to imagine what was here before the beginning of everything. What do you think was here, Eva? And Eva pauses. Well, I don't know. She thinks for a long time, and she said, well, maybe there were feelings. Maybe there were feelings. And as she walks home, Eva sees the moon again, glowing brightly over the roof of her house. Let's go inside, mama, and let's see if we can see the moon from the upstairs window. And so that's what they did. We live with some really big mysteries, and when we come upon one of those mysteries, it's really kind of a little gift to us, because every mystery is something to wonder about, and for everybody to wonder about together. So the question is, what do you wonder about? And you don't have to answer that now, but you know, in our religious education program, we have all kinds of things that we talk about that people wonder about, and sometimes we actually can come up with a few answers for those wondrous questions, for those mysteries. So now it is time for you to go to those children's religious education classes, and we are going to sing you out with our next hymn. Thank you for listening. Please be seated. At this time, I invite you to join me in the spirit of meditation and inner communion. Thickle spirit of springtime weather, of the greening grass and the soggy soil. Help us to understand that we belong to something so much greater and grander than ourselves. Increase our appreciation for the intricate cosmic web into which our own ephemeral lives are woven. When we find ourselves frustrated, impatient, with the slow pace of winter's retreat, when we are eager for shorts and shirt sleeves and oppressed by the weight of winter clothes, may we then alert ourselves to the larger picture because the crocus, after all, is content to wait in no rush to bear its fragile blossoms. The fish will still spawn when the ice is gone and the robin lay her powder blue eggs when instinct tells her it's safe to do so. Despite what scripture might imply, the world was not meant to serve at our pleasure or on our timetable, and yet too often the world has become a victim of just that assumption. And if, per chance, nature did accede to our winter weariness, everything else would be completely out of kilter. No sap would flow for maple syrup. Our skin would feel a mosquito's unseasonable prick and tired fields the urgent bite of the farmer's plow. Spirit of life that make us all things new give us a lesson in compassion and humility that we might see beyond our own immediate self-interest and become an integral part of your perennial plan for restoration and renewal. Let us continue on in a moment or two more of silent meditation. Blessed be an amen. I have two readings to share this morning. The first from the field of science, the second from the humanities. Michael Spector writes, C. Everett Koop is one of the most famously right-wing men ever appointed to a senior position in the public health service. In 1991, when President Ronald Reagan nominated him for the position of Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop was a noted pediatric surgeon from Philadelphia with the beard of Abraham Lincoln and a strident opposition to abortion. Even today, his 1979 book, Whatever Happened to the Human Race, remains a touchstone for those who are opposed to legal abortion. But Koop had no public health experience. Surgeon Generals are usually quickly confirmed and then instantly forgotten. Before Koop, few Americans could have named even one. No public health official in American history, however, generated more controversy. Liberals on Capitol Hill denounced Reagan's choice for what it was, a blatant attempt to place ideological fealty over the demands of public health. And so the battle for Koop's nomination dragged on and on for nearly a year, but in the end, he was confirmed. He then proceeded to alienate nearly every supporter he had on the religious and political right. To fight the growing epidemic of AIDS, he recommended a program of compulsory sex education in the schools, and he argued that children should be taught to use a condom. He campaigned vigorously against smoking in public spaces, thereby angering the tobacco industry. When President Reagan asked him to prepare a report on the psychological effects of abortion, the conservatives finally felt certain of the result. And yet, after meeting with activists on both sides, reviewing hundreds of scientific publications, Koop declined to say that abortion was always more dangerous than the alternative. The administration was shocked. Koop later said, you know, I never once changed my stripes during all of that time. What I did in my job was what any well-trained doctor or scientist would do. I looked at the data and I presented the facts as they appeared to the American people, because in science, you can't hide from the data. The second reading from Reina Maria Rilke's collection of letters, entitled Letters to a Young Poet, where he is responding to a letter from a young aspiring poet that he is mentoring and he tells this young man, your doubt may become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing. It must become critical. And so ask it. Whenever it wants to spoil something for you, ask it, why? Why is something ugly? Demand proofs from it. Test it. Find it perplexed, embarrassed perhaps. Maybe rebellious. But don't give in. Insist on arguments and act this way, watchful, consistent every single time. And the day will arrive when, from being a destroyer, doubt will become one of your best workers and perhaps the cleverest of all those tools that are building your life. So with respect to that all too human propensity to question and to challenge assertions that do not square with our experience, well on that question of doubt, the Bible delivers a decidedly mixed message. The Gospel of John may be the most overtly hostile toward those with a skeptical turn of mind. In the four canonical accounts of Jesus's ministry, this is the only one that includes a post-resurrection interchange between Jesus and the disciple Thomas. Now as you may recall, Thomas was not present when the crucified Jesus suddenly and unexpectedly first revealed himself to his compatriots. They came back from that experience, found Thomas, we have seen the Lord, they tell him. But Thomas is doubtful. Wishful thinking can cause people to visualize things that aren't really there. Unless I see the print of the nails in his palm, unless I can put my hand in the wound in his side, I will not believe. A short time later Jesus makes a second appearance and he challenges Thomas to inspect that risen body. Abashed, Thomas quickly confesses his belief in the Lord. But Jesus upbraids him. Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed. It would not be too many more years for that lesson to take hold. Doubt is a symptom of spiritual weakness and human willfulness. For subsequent generations of Christians, that meant accepting the gospels at face value and resisting the temptation to quibble about even their most dubious claims. Now by contrast, the author of the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes, also known as Cahelet, that author invokes his own life lessons in order to call into question much of what passed for conventional wisdom at that time. It simply isn't true that good people invariably prosper, he wrote. That justice is always meted out fairly. That wealth and power ensure human happiness. All of this, Cahelet says, is poppycock or as he put it, mere vanity and a striving after the wind. Now the creator of that ancient text was no cynic, however. He urges his readers to find pleasure in life's small graces and to live righteously without harboring illusions. As Jennifer Hecht says, the teacher makes a simple appeal to experience the evidence of history and of our senses. Ecclesiastes was almost certainly composed by someone imbued with the questioning skeptical mood of Greek philosophy, which was very much in vogue in third century BCE Palestine. There's also tantalizing hints of Buddhist thought because Buddhism as well places a premium on personal experience and careful discernment. Annie Tenzin Palma was a teacher in the Kagu order of Tibetan Buddhism and she recalls a story from the ancient texts in which a group of villagers come seeking an interview with the Buddha and they complain to him, many teachers come to our village and each one has his own doctrine and each one claims that their doctrine exclusively is true. It makes us totally confused. How do we judge? The Buddha listens sympathetically to the villagers and he says, you have a right to be confused. This is a confusing situation and then he offers them the following counsel. Do not take anything on trust merely because it has been passed down through tradition or because your teachers say it or because the elders have taught you or because it is written in some famous scripture. When you have seen it when you have experienced it for yourself to be right and true, then you can accept it. Here again the teacher points to the primacy of personal experience which is not to say that those ancient scriptures have nothing worthwhile to say to us or that the sage does not deserve an open and respectful hearing. The kind of doubt that both the author of Ecclesiastes and the Buddha recommend to us is more akin to the fearless, sifting and winnowing by which alone truth may be found. The phrase that we find in Bascom Hill and that has guided students and faculty at the University of Wisconsin since 1890. And this is also the kind of doubt that I as a Unitarian Universalist subscribe to. It is a commitment to that process as Robert Weston put it that eats away the false while simultaneously revealing precious nuggets of truth. Now to be sure we should not place doubt on too high a pedestal for then it risks becoming a caricature of itself. The British novelist and Unitarian W. Somerset-Mann had just this in mind when he gestingly described his co-religionists as people who very earnestly disbelieve in almost everything that everyone else believes and they have a very lively sustaining faith and they don't quite know what. So we should not presume that doubt is ever and always profitable. An open mind, curiosity, a healthy skepticism, yes these are essential preconditions for the cultivating of wisdom and ever-deepening understanding. But just as faith can become arrogant and exclusive so can doubt. And I suspect we have all met people who doubt not in the constructive spirit of Buddha or Raina Maria Rilke but in the condescending manner of the early 20th century essayist H. L. Mankin he who dismissed faith as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. As reverent doubters we Unitarian Universalists employ this tool in order to become more discerning and more secure holders of not absolute but provisional truths that can always be improved upon. And so the ultimate objective as Jennifer Heck puts it the ultimate objective is enlightenment. It is to teach us to live well and aware in this strange place we occupy between meaning and meaningless nets. Nevertheless, even as people who profess to live the questions as it were rather than passively submit to preordained answers sometimes we too may rue that choice. Doubt can be discomfiting. And more than a few times in my 40 years in the ministry I've heard a staunch Unitarian Universalist say that it must be nice to have that bedrock belief system like religious conservatives that they can fall back on. The good news though is that people who are cautious in their certainties as we are who are open to alternatives are less likely to be severely traumatized when that bedrock of belief buckles under the weight of a lot of discomfiting evidence. And so the bottom line is that despite some reservations you use do see doubt as a good thing a highly serviceable tool as we try to make sense like those villagers of the many truth claims that keep crossing our path as Elford Lord Tennyson the great 19th century British poet once put it there lives more faith in honest doubt believe me than in all the creeds. It should also be pointed out that despite the bad press that doubting Thomas receives in John's Gospel not all Christians think that doubting Thomas's reservations were misplaced. Take C. Everett Coop the former Surgeon General whose story I shared a few moments ago Coop was a conservative Christian who was appointed to his post with the expectation that he would establish public health policy on a logical basis. But Coop was also a scientist and like any self-respecting scientist he entertained his doubts and they ended up taking him in a direction that he had not expected. His early supporters they took him to be a true believer first and a medical practitioner second but as Coop later said I never changed my stripes I did what any well-trained scientist would do I followed the data. It's unfortunate that more religious conservatives have not followed Dr. Coop's example. When George W. Bush was the president he was a self-declared evangelical Christian and he claimed to be guided by God in his decision to invade Iraq. The original pretext was we will recall the need to discover and to destroy some Hussein's stockpile of WMDs weapons of mass destruction. Now if President Bush had relied on the data that had been painstakingly gathered rather than on his faith in God's guiding hand then he would have let Saddam's floundering regime topple of its own accord because there were no WMDs as numerous experts had attested before that invasion took place. Jim Wallace is another evangelical leader of a more progressive bent and before the invasion he tried to engage the president on this issue Bush wouldn't see him and later Wallace said faith you know faith can cut so many ways and when it is designed when faith is designed to certify our righteousness then it can be very dangerous 15 years later the people of Iraq are still living with the fatal consequences of too little doubt but here's the thing so far today I have been discussing honest doubt doubt employed for the purpose of exposing error deepening our understanding and creating more legitimate and trustworthy human institutions unfortunately in recent times we have been witnessing the spread of dishonest doubt the kind of doubt that's deliberately designed to sow confusion and mistrust and to manipulate public opinion the fact is some things deserve our skepticism more than others and when well-established theories and facts are called into question it leads to as Russell Shorto puts it a world written by doubts and confusion without an arbiter or any rules and that's where we are today examples abound from the fruitless debate over Barack Obama's birth certificate to the alleged criminality of undocumented immigrants to the hollow Second Amendment claims of the NRA to the unsettled science of climate change our current president sows doubt continually doubts about the integrity and the fairness of the media doubts about the motives and the character of a whole host of dedicated civil servants doubts about our allies abroad doubts about Hillary Clinton's margin of victory in the 2016 popular vote it's no wonder so many Americans feel bewildered eager for some source of authority that can cut through all of these competing truth claims so the question is what happened to bring us to this perilous point in our history perhaps not the whole but at least part of the answer may lie in a strategy that the American tobacco companies began rolling out in the 1950s to protect their own financial interests it is a strategy that worked amazingly well for several decades the last chapter of that story was detailed in the 1999 film The Insider in which Russell Crowell plays a biochemist employed by and then harassed by the Brown and Williamson tobacco company and a fuller summary of that sordid tale is contained in a recent book by Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway simply entitled Merchants of Doubt so realizing that a growing body of scientific evidence confirmed the harmful effects of smoking and of secondhand smoke the executives of Big Tobacco knew that no ordinary publicity campaign was going to save their bacon because if consumers were convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that smoking was dangerous they'd try to quit or they wouldn't start smoking to begin with hey there goes the profit margin and thus as Oreskes and Conway write the industry manufactured an artificial debate convincing the mass media that responsible journalists had an obligation to present both sides of the issue the industry did not need to win this debate they only needed to keep it going doubt is our product explained a tobacco executive's memo in 1969 doubt is our product it is the best means of competing with the body of fact that exists in the minds of the general public it is the means of establishing a controversy around smoking now tobacco products sold in this country today are accompanied on the packaging with clear warning labels tobacco advertising is banned from the airways smoking is prohibited today in most public facilities but the tobacco strategy of sowing doubt the strategy lives on some of the same scientists who shilled for big tobacco subsequently went to work for guess who ExxonMobil and they were given the task of poking holes in the data related to climate change a similar strategy has been employed by the forces seeking to undermine the Affordable Care Act public education and a host of other programs and policies that were designed to serve the general public but policies that raise the hackles of certain powerful vested interests so dense has this cloud of doubt become that it's begun to feel almost like we're all being gaslighted now that's a psychological term that served as the title for a 1938 stage play and later a suspense film starring Ingrid Bergman in which a sociopathic husband tries to convince his wife with all kinds of little strange actions and speeches that she is going crazy she's being gaslighted which is defined as those strategies, behaviors and statements a person uses to cause another person or persons to doubt their memory their perceptions or their sanity now there's an extensive literature today on this subject and therapists can help clients to determine whether a partner or a co-worker or an acquaintance is acting or speaking in a manner designed to create serious disabling self-doubt but not just individuals groups can be gaslighted charismatic cult leaders practice gaslighting so that followers will lose trust in themselves and place their exclusive trust in that cult leader and it's a strategy that dictators use like Vladimir Putin who uses gaslighting masterfully to command the loyalty of the masses in Russia so the long and short of it is doubt can clearly be a double-edged sword we lose our freedom and our independence of thought by binding ourselves too tightly to certain beliefs but also by allowing wholesale doubt to overwhelm our powers of private judgment both of these pose a threat but it may well be that the latter is the graver of the two threats that we face as a society today so if we must have faith and yes we must and if we must trust and yes we must let it be with our eyes wide open and although we must never cease from questioning let that questioning be with due diligence and with undying respect for the wisdom of the ages as Francis Bacon the eminent British scientist and philosopher put it some 400 years ago if we begin with certainties we shall end in doubts if we will be content to begin with doubts we may end with a few certainties Blessed be this week as was the case last week we will be sharing the offering with our Unitarian Universalist Service Committee that is working around the world to promote justice peace and sustainability please be generous monetary gifts for the members of this community each week and we also appreciate the gifts of service that are rendered by people in our congregation the service of our choirs of our harpists and of the other people who have helped to complement our service this morning including Karen Rose-Gradler our worship associate Alex Manville our sound operator and Smiley who doubles both lay minister Dan Usher, Liz Wessel another Usher that was recruited at the last moment Elaine Lohr who greeted us up at the front door Jeannie Hills is a yeoman in providing coffee service for her on Sunday mornings and she is doing so again would be lovely if someone would perhaps agree to help her on a particular Sunday morning we expect that there will be a guide also following this service to meet newcomers who would like a tour of our facility typically we meet over on that side of the auditorium by the large windows and Nancy Werma is a signed up to be our guide and we also appreciate the efforts of the interim minister's search task force who will be interviewing applicants for our interim minister who will be with us between the time that I step off this stage in June and a permanent settled minister is brought on board in 2020 what qualities would you value most in an interim minister what do you think an interim minister should know about this community please stop by the table in the commons where members of that task force will be stationed for a little chat and perhaps a nice piece of chocolate we also gather each week as a community of memory and of hope and to this time and place we bring our whole and sometimes our broken selves we seek here a place where these might be received and celebrated and shared and so now two notations one Al Cannon, a long time member of First Unitarian Society died at Attic Angels after a 10 year struggle with multiple myeloma a gathering in Al's honor will be held at Attic Angels on June the 24th a Sunday afternoon we also send our very best wishes to Douglas Hill who has been heading up our music director's search committee Doug had surgery this week and is now resting comfortably in his home in addition to those two just mentioned we would acknowledge any unspoken joys or sorrows that remain among us and as a community of concern and caring we hold these in our hearts as well let us sit silently for just a moment or two in the spirit of empathy and hope and so by virtue of our brief time together may our burdens be lightened and our joys expand please rise now in body or in spirit for our closing hymn number 345 the mysteries of life are many and there is so much that we cannot explain let this not deter us from yearning and working for the good may we feel our strength be of good cheer may joyful laughter and beneficent power be ours and may a sense of our own blessings fill our hearts and brighten our days in a few moments our service of worship will conclude let our service to the world come at us please be seated