 Thank you. Good morning. Welcome to the First Unitarian Society of Madison. This is a community where curious seekers gather to explore spiritual and 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 good, a force for good in the world. My name is Rosalind Woodward and on behalf of the congregation I'd like to extend a special welcome to visitors. We're a welcoming congregation so whoever you are and wherever you are on life's journey we celebrate your presence among us. Today we're glad to welcome Reverend Misha Sanders. She's a recently called minister to the Northwest UU congregation of Sandy Springs, Georgia. So welcome Misha. We trust today's service will stimulate your mind, touch your heart and stir your spirit. And now I invite you to a moment or two of silence as we bring together contemplation, meditation, prayer and settle in fully to this service. And now let us join in singing our opening hymn, my in-gathering hymn, 361, enter, rejoice and come in. Into this place, bringing all you hold with you, though your heart may be heavily burdened, whether you be on the brink of tears or burn with unquenchable rage, this community can hold you and your strongest emotions. Yes, even the messy ones are welcome here. Come in if you sing just a little bit too loud, still as statues and just breathe it in. If you sway to the music moving your soul, you are welcome. Come in and say amen when the spirit moves you, preacher preach. Close your eyes quietly and let your mind flow free on the blessed words. Come into this place with every piece of yourself gathered up and let us be the church incarnate. Let us bring forth the spirit of all that we love by the words of our mouths and the doing of our hands as we make sacred this time together. Roz is going to light our chalice for us this morning. Would y'all say the words with me that are printed in your order of service? We light this chalice to affirm that new light is ever waiting to break through to enlighten our ways, that new truth is ever waiting to break through to illumine our minds, and that new love is ever waiting to break through to warm our hearts. May we be open to this light and to the rich possibilities that bring us. Now's the time for you to say stuff to each other. Yeah. We invite all the young and young at heart to come forward for our message for all agents with Reverend Michele. If you want to, I'm loving the kitty ears, morning everybody, anyone ever told you a story? And yeah, of course, right? We've all heard stories. But have you ever heard a story where when you, when someone starts telling the story, you're not sure exactly if you think, hmm, I wonder if this is a made up story or if this really happened? Have you ever wondered about that sometimes? Is this true or are you just making that up? I wonder that a lot. Well, this is a story that some people believe is true exactly the way I'm going to tell it to you. Some people believe the whole thing is just made up and we're meant to make other kinds of meaning out of it. And some people believe that some parts of it might be made up and some parts might be a little bit, maybe not. So this story comes from the Christian Bible, which is a book that I grew up learning about in the church that I grew up in. And it is about a day when a whole bunch of people in the city called Jerusalem had gotten together for a big feast day, a big celebration. And it happened every year. It was called the Day of Pentecost. It's a big, big deal in the Jewish calendar for Jewish people. But what had happened this year was that someone, that these Jewish folks had been following, some of these Jewish folks, his name was Jesus, he was a rabbi, he had been killed actually. That's not a happy part of the story. But they were together on this feast day wondering what to do next because people were there from all over the world that they knew for this feast day. But Jesus' followers were a little sad that day and they didn't know what came next. And so they were gathered just altogether by themselves in a little room waiting to figure out what to do next because the person who was their leader was no longer there. And they weren't sure what to do without a leader. And here's where the story gets a little bit, hmm, is that true? I'm not sure, but here's what it says happens. They were together waiting for instructions from someone, from God in their minds to tell them what to do. Now that their leader was gone and suddenly, why don't you know it, a big wind picked up and just started blowing all through the house. They had the windows open, I guess. And just wind everywhere, everyone's hair was just going crazy from this big wind and it was shaking, the wind was so strong that it was shaking the house. And suddenly as the story goes, all of a sudden they looked around and they could say, see little sparks of fire just showing up on everybody's head, like whoa, there's a spark of fire on here, but it wasn't hurting them. No one's hair was getting burned, just like mine isn't burned because this is a real fire, right? And another, hmm, did that really happen thing? They started to say, hey, you have fire on your head, hey, do I have fire on my head, but they weren't speaking in their own language. Suddenly they realized that when they opened their mouths and started to speak, they were speaking in different languages. What in the world? And they started going out of the house to try, they're like, what, something is going on here? They left the building, I don't know if they were scared and they was going to fall, it was shaking, I guess, they said it was shaking, and what, here's where it gets really interesting. Remember I told you that there were people from all over the world gathered there? Well, all of those people did not speak the same language, and many of them thought that they couldn't be fully included in the celebration because they didn't really understand the language, and all of a sudden these weirdos with fire on their head come out of this room, and everybody started noticing, hey, those weirdos with fire on their head, language that I can understand, and all of these people from all these different languages, what languages do you know of? Spanish, most of us here speak English, any other languages you can think of? No, any language that people spoke there, suddenly they were hearing the good news that everybody is included and everybody can participate fully in this celebration, no matter who you are or where you come from, they can hear those words in their language, and that is the story of the day of Pentecost that I learned when I was a kid. Do you believe that some of it may have happened and some of it may have been not so sure? We can get some meaning out of that though, that sometimes people might come into our celebrations not sure if they can be fully included because they're a little bit different than the rest of the folks here, and it's downright magical when people who aren't sure if they can be fully included realize that we can speak about inclusion in a way that they can understand, and that's what we try to do here in this church. That is what Unitarians did when they first started, what do we do in church every morning? We light a what? We light a flaming chalice to symbolize everyone is welcome here, we're going to do our best to speak in ways that you understand, but what if we, what if when the fire lit up on those people's heads in the story, what if that's sort of like us being our flaming chalice? Us being the welcome, right? Because if we are the welcome, then what happens when we, when we take the light out of our chalice? Do we suddenly not be welcoming people anymore? No, because that's just a symbol, just like this story is, because the welcome lives in all of us, just like a bright burning fire on our heads, but not a real one. All right, we are going to sing our first hymn this morning and you all are going to do fun things that include everyone I trust. Thank you for listening to my story. Thank you for bringing supplementary reading materials in case it got boring. We're going to sing together hymn number something or other. Hymn number 1024, when the Spirit says, You are invited to rise in body and or spirit. We'll do three verses today. Do, sing, and dance. The reading is by Naomi Shihab Nai and it's called Gate 4A. Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport terminal, after learning my flight had been detained for four hours, I heard an announcement. If anyone in the vicinity of Gate 4A understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately. Well, one pauses these days. Gate 4A was my own gate. I went there. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor wailing loudly. Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be late and she did this. I stooped, put my arm around the woman, and spoke to her haltingly. The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been canceled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the next day. I said, you're fine. You'll get there. Who's picking you up? Let's call him. We called her son, and I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and would ride next to her. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for fun. Then we called my dad. And he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out, of course, they had 10 shared friends. Then I thought, just for the heck of it, why not call some Palestinian poets, I know, and let them chat with her. This all took up about two hours. She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life, patting my knees, answering question, she had pulled a sack of homemade mammal cookies, little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts out of her bag and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the lovely woman from Laredo, were all covered with the same powdered sugar and smiling, there is no better cookie. And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers. And two little girls from our flight ran around serving us all apple juice and they were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend, by now we were holding hands, had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition, always carry a plant, always stay rooted to somewhere. And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, this is the world I want to live in. The shared world, not a single person in this gate, once the crying confusion stopped, seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies I wanted to hug. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too. This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost. Honored to be here with my colleagues Karen and Reverend Karen Armina. Thank you for joining us. Humanist leaning, theist on a good day, agnostic on all the days, a lover of praying, especially when I'm mad at a God I might not believe in. And some of you may know, some of you do know, most of you do not, that I came out of a fire and brimstone Pentecostal tradition that taught me a whole heap of things about, well, a whole heap of things that I don't believe anymore about what that day of Pentecost meant that I talked to the kids about this morning and what may have really happened there. We celebrated the calendar day of Pentecost two weeks ago, but I'm not done preaching this sermon yet, so you all get it. Bear, because we're unitarian universalists that I am preaching to a beloved body of believers in all kinds of very different things because that's an easy assumption to make, anywhere you are in unitarian universalism, right? I believe, though, that it is no accident nor incidental detail of my particular calling that I am a former United Pentecostal. And it is no small thing and no lightly made choice that unitarian universalism is unequivocally the beloved faith of my grown-up soul. Both truths together are exactly what make me a humanist leaning theist on a good day, agnostic on all the days, lover of praying, especially when I'm mad at a God I might not believe in. We are told in the book of Acts in Christian Scripture that the day of Pentecost is when God poured his spirit out upon God's people in a little room in Jerusalem like a mighty rushing wind that filled all the house. We are told that actual fire lit upon their heads without doing any harm. We are told that they spoke in other tongues to signify the infilling of that spirit. The people who had gathered from all over the world for that Jewish holy feast day, which is what Pentecost was before Christianity co-opted it and most of the other good celebrations that we know and love, were people from all over the place, from all over the known world. Speakers of many languages were present and the story goes that these local dudes were suddenly, I don't know where, after the big dust up of wind, speaking the good news of universal inclusion in languages that everyone gathered could easily understand. That's it, that's the Christianized message of Pentecost as it is commonly taught. Boom, there it is, spirit filled people, they spoke in other languages so that others could hear the good news in their tongue. Now I know that is too much suspension of disbelief for nearly everyone in this room, including and especially me. I also know that we know that no sacred text was written with the intention of being taken literally. I know that there was probably other deep metaphorical meaning that has been completely lost on us through translations and cultural shifts over the millennia, but I also know that to me, there is no other religion-based story that is more universalist, unitarian universalist than this one and I'll tell you exactly why. Let me tell you what being a unitarian universalist raised in Pentecostalism means to me. It means that I get to have in my cultural canon of sacred stories a tale of the most diverse group of people imaginable assembled for a celebration, a group, a smaller group of which had gathered specifically to listen for ways in which they could do the greatest amount of good for the most people in a time of major leadership transition. Y'all know anything about that? I thought so. When spirit unexpectedly and unceremoniously showed up and showed out and showed them that they could celebrate common ground through diversity, not in spite of it. Oh, hierarchy? Everybody gets equal access to all that is good and holy? Source, God, evolution, natural progression didn't suddenly give everyone a common language or perspective and hasn't done so anywhere yet that I know of. But the story tells us that on this day spirit spoke through people in ways that all the other people could understand, people who never expected that they could be fully included in the celebration because they were too different. That revelation required a recalibrating and a screwing up of all the religious dogma I was taught about what made that story significant and worth sharing through the generations. It was never about, okay, don't tell my parents this. It was never about the woo-woo of speaking in tongues. That is something that a particular sect of a particular faith made up to feel special and set apart, which is exactly the opposite of the whole dang point. Speaking clearly and deliberately in ways that draw people in and include us all. And again, beloved Unitarian Universalists, siblings in faith. They often speak in our spaces of the spirit of life. We address the spirit of life when we pray, when we invite each other into a time of meditation. The spirit of life. We use that as sort of a placeholder for the source that each of us would define very, very differently. There are as many opinions about what that spirit is in this room as there are people here, probably more, because I know I have several working definitions depending on my mood. But the infilling, if the infilling of the spirit is anything real at all, then it must be about nothing less than radical inclusion. And saying things that we believe matter in ways that people can understand. Let's spill water down my face. And so this, I believe, is the true call of the story of Pentecost. We, believers in covenant, not creed, atheists, theists, and everyone who rightly makes up their own definition of the holy, if we are to believe that full inclusion of all who want to know what we have to offer is a worthwhile goal, then inherent to our values and right in the principles and covenants that define who we are together, there is this truth, that we are speaking in the spirit when we speak in the languages of the hearers. In real Unitarian Universalist congregational life, that might mean having hearing augmentation devices ready for those who need them. Always speaking right into the microphone so that those hearing augmentation devices work. The sermon for non, printing the sermon for non-hearing folks to read, there's an option, including a relevant and thoughtful message for children, language that they can understand, creating worship that honors the needs of people with neurodiversity and cognitive differences, setting up our spaces to welcome people of all abilities, radically welcoming unconventional families, whatever that means, finding practical ways to navigate literal spoken language barriers, calling people of all genders and identities by their true names and pronouns, amen. Assuring that our seating options accommodate all body sizes, lifting especially in our worship, the wisdom of the oppressed and the marginalized, making it a priority to share multicultural music, even if sometimes it makes us a little uncomfortable, preaching from all of our Unitarian Universalist sources and then some, the words of our modern day world changers, the wisdom from the world's myriad religions, the wisdom of science and nature and technology and ongoing discovery that we can't even imagine yet, including that all here. That, my friends, is how I believe one goes about the business of speaking in the spirit. Tongues of fire, indeed. The metaphor of fiery communication is significant to me, partly because of what fire can do. Out of control, tongues of fire kill and destroy. Deliberate, tended tongues of fire can burn away the dross and leave behind only the strong and precious things of value. Tongues of fire, light, the chalices that really are a metaphor for us, after all. We are the tended, welcoming fire. We are the radical welcome and hospitality and our words have the power to strengthen or to destroy. I see my vision of Unitarian Universalist community and the reading that Roz shared with us today from Naomi Shiavni. The minute she heard any words she knew however poorly used, she stopped crying. We called her son and I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother. Then we called her other sons just for fun. Then we called my dad. Then we called my Palestinian poet friends. Then she pulled out a sack of homemade cookies and offered them to all the women at the gate. Not a single woman declined. This can still happen anywhere, says Naomi. Not everything is lost. May we strive to be fluent or at least conversational in the languages that allow other people to cease their fearful weeping and break out the cookies and apple juice on high anxiety days when there is uncertainty in the air and no one is sure that we're gonna get where we intend to go. May we strive to be fluent or at least conversational in the language, the languages of naturalism, Judaism, atheism, Christianity, humanism, Islam, paganism and all of the other faith languages that are always at some point right here among us as perfectly valid and wonderful ways of being Unitarian Universalists together. May we strive to remember the lessons I learned from that fiery story from my childhood faith when spirit unexpectedly and unceremoniously showed up and showed out and showed people that they could celebrate common ground through diversity, not in spite of it. May we strive to ever be mindful that tongues of fire have the power to strengthen or to destroy and it is our responsibility to never leave the flame unattended. In a little while we're gonna sing one of my favorite hymns, The Fire of Commitment and it is my highest hope for us. The, some of the lyrics taken from this song, may the fire of commitment set our mind and soul ablaze. May our hunger and our passion meet to call us on our way. May we live with deep assurance of the flame that burns within. May our promise find fulfillment so our future can begin. May all of the good we hope for ourselves and for each other be stoked and fueled here today as we speak together in ways that all can hear the message of saving love in their own languages. May it be so. We're gonna speak the language of money now. It's offering time, y'all. Our offering will now be gratefully received and joyfully given, I hope. This is a time when it's nice to acknowledge all those people who've been helpful for the service. First of all, the musicians got bumped off the program. So our angelic choir is Karen Roberts, Alice Kisling and Wendy Adams, and of course Linda Warren, who pulled it all together. Thank you for the beautiful music. The ushers were Paula Alt, Pam McMullen, and we recruited at the last minute, Polly Quelves. Anybody that wants to volunteer to do this is very welcome. At the welcome table was Karen Rose Gredler, Biss Nitschke and Jeannie Hills, our faithful Jeannie. I've got the coffee ready this morning. And Smiley is our lay ministry. And thanks to Steve, who is staff who is winging the sound operator, we really do desperately need sound operators. So anybody that has any techie skill would be very gratefully received. And for those visitors who are here, there will be a tour of the building. And John Powell will meet you in that far corner after the service. Just hang out there, get yourself a cup of coffee, or get yourself a cup of coffee and hang out there and meet John, and he will give you a tour of the whole building. And now this is also a time when we join together each week, a community who gathers with joys and sorrows written on our hearts. In this place, we love and are loved. We forgive and are forgiven. We give and we receive in return. We come together to find strength and common purpose, turning our minds and hearts toward one another, seeking to bring into our circle of concerns all who need love and support. And we'll have a moment of silence. Please remember we're the part of the web of life that makes us one with all humanity, one with all the universe. Now please rise and join me as you can for the last time. Fires of commitment, 1028 in the teal hymnal. The holy dwells in each of us. The spirit of the holy dwells in each of us. The spirit of love dwells in each of us. May the flame of our chalice remind us that eternal love dwells in our hearts. May the flame of our chalice remind us that the spirit of life dwells among us as we gather in faith community. May the flame of our chalice remind us that the arc of the universe needs our embodied love and faith in order to bend toward justice. Amen.