 What a way to welcome you and say good morning. Thank you, Linda and Olivia. Good morning and welcome to the First Unitarian Society of Madison. My name is Kelly Crocker and I'm one of the ministers here. Today I'm joined by the worship team of Drew Collins, Linda Warren, Daniel Karns and a very special thank you and welcome to our guest musician, Olivia Montgomery. At First Unitarian Society we question boldly, listen humbly, grow spiritually, act courageously and love unapologetically. If you're visiting us today, welcome. We're so very glad that you are with us. If you would like more information about our activities and programs, please stop by the welcome table located in the commons. We also hope that you'll be able to join us for coffee hour immediately following the service, also located right out here in the commons. And for those of you connecting with us virtually today, we're glad that you are with us as well. We hope you'll be able to take a moment and watch the announcement slide shown briefly after today's service to learn more about our upcoming programs and activities. Our seventh grade compass points youth will be surveying our community on your beliefs about what happens after we die. They will have a table set up in the commons following today's service. They may be milling about, they may be handing you a survey. Please take one and share your thoughts with them. Next week we will observe our annual All Souls service in which we remember our honor dead in part by reading aloud the names of our own members who have died in the past year. If there is someone that you would like included in that listing of names, you can send me an email through our website. You can also just come up and let me know after service. We would love to include your loved ones as well. And one special note about today's service, we are trying a few modest changes. I know Kelly introduced these last week. And we do welcome your feedback. We got some feedback last week that was very helpful. And so if you have thoughts on our changes to our order of worship, please let me know after service. And now I invite you to join me in a moment of silence as we center ourselves, bring ourselves fully into this time as we join together once again in community. Come whoever you are. Do you hear that voice calling you, calling us? That voice which calls us together here today in this room made holy by our presence and by the sacred breath we share in our singing and speaking and silence. That voice which calls us to remember that we are not alone and that we are inextricably linked to all other life, woven into a vast tapestry of existence of which we are a powerful and holy part. And just as we have been called together here today, we act as the voice, the heart, the hands of another call, the call to walk with the wanderers, to sing and dance with the worshipers, to proclaim the memory of those who have taken their leave, to wrap the despairing and the broken in the arms of love and community, and hold the hands of all of us who have broken our vows and call us back again and again to the covenant and work of justice, humility and steadfast faithfulness. For all this we are here together today. So come yet again, come, let us worship together. And I invite you now to rise in all the ways we do and join in the words on the screen if you can see them on this extremely sunny day as we light our chalice. With this familiar simple act, we welcome the light of the flame, we welcome the heat from its glow, we welcome each other into this sacred hour together. And now we come to the first of those changes we mentioned a moment ago. Last week we brought back our exchange of friendly greetings. So before we do that, I just want another reminder about be attentive to the needs of those around you and your own needs. Some of us welcome hugs with open arms, some of us do not. Some of us love to shake hands, others are not there yet. Some of us want to just wave, maybe meet eyes. However you want to share a greeting, love and peace and welcome, I invite you into the sharing of friendly greetings. Let's sing our opening hymn together. Come, come whoever you are. Come, come whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. Ours is no care of and of despair. Come yet again, worshiper, lover, it is no care of and of despair. Invite anyone who'd like to come up closer for our story to come on up to the carpet. Good morning. Hey, Genevieve. How are you? I like your stripy dress. You got a new video game? What's it called? Pokemon game. How many of you like Pokemon? Pokemon's a thing in my house. Yeah, exactly. We should have. Hey, Jay, you've got Pokemon cards right there. Well, good morning. It's so good to see you all. I've got a story for you today that involves a whole bunch of mice calling a meeting. Do you ever think a whole bunch of mice would call a meeting? Yeah, well, OK, so before we tell, before we get to the ending of this story, what do we know about cats and mice? Cats, wow, did you? We did not even practice, but you were a beautiful chorus together of saying cats eat mice, right? So how do you think mice feel about the cat? Scared, bad, traumatized, terrified? So let's set the scene. We are calling together a whole group of scared, traumatized, terrified. What else did we have? Very terrified. Very terrified. Extremely terrified mice all got together and said, what are we going to do about the cat? And they came up with all kinds of ideas. So if you were these poor, traumatized mice, what ideas would you come up with? I heard run away. Max, eat the cat. If we want to talk later, you know where to find me? I adore you. OK, one at a time. Mashed potatoes, turn the cat into mashed potatoes. Didn't we have a story about mashed potatoes like two years ago, and you remember? Ride on the cat. So turn the cat into a horse, put a saddle on it, and ride the cat. OK, see ya. Turn it into mashed potatoes. So we need a magical element into this story. OK, AJ, what you got? Oh my goodness. OK, well here, let me tell you what they came up with. The oldest mouse stood up and said, I have an idea. What we need to do is to, do you remember? What was the ending? What did they decide to do? Put a bell on the cat. Then we will hear the cat coming, and it will give us time to run away. So they thought about this with all the other ideas that they came up with, and they said, wait a minute. This is a good idea. We need to put the bell on the cat. So then the old mouse said, I'm really glad we all agree. We have a bell. We have all of us. Now here's the bigger question. Who is going to bell the cat? OK, so I think the whole point of this story, which this story is hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years old. And I think we retell this story because it's really, really important to come up with ideas, to be as creative as we can be. And we know that the problems in our world are as big as what to do about the cat if you're a mouse. But here's the thing we need to remember. Somebody has to actually do it. So today, what I want you to remember is that together, all of us, because there isn't an ending to this story when you hang on one second. When you find this story online, and believe me, I looked and looked and looked this week, when you find this, it always just ends with the wise old mouse saying, who will bell the cat? And I like to think that they did it together. It was going to take all of them. So what I want you to take away from the story about the cat and the bell and the traumatized, extremely terrified mice, is that we can be very brave, and we can do really hard things if we're doing it together. OK, I'm going to turn off my mic. Drew is going to start to sing. And if you've got things you want to tell me, come up and tell me. I am all yours. Let's sing the children to their classes, number 1018 in the Teal Hymn. They'll come and go with me to that land. A lot of good ideas I hear. Come and go with me to that land. Come and go with me to that land. Come and go with me to that land, where I'm barred. Come and go with me to that land. There'll be freedom in that land. There'll be freedom in that land. There'll be justice in that land. There'll be justice in that, justice in that, justice in that land. They'll be singing in that land. They'll be singing. Come and go with me to that land. He is from childhood. It has become this bit of a running joke in our family. My mother will say, you know who I ran into? Barbie Regan's mother. You remember Barbie Regan. You went to elementary school with Barbie Regan. And as I'm shaking my head, either my father or my sister will say, she doesn't remember Barbie Regan. They're right. I never remember anyone that my mother mentions. I trust her that these are real people that I had experiences with, but I got nothing. There is one thing I remember though. So vividly, I could paint you a picture. The home of my maternal grandmother. I can still feel the soft linen tablecloth that must have been washed a thousand times. I can smell the soup bubbling away on the stove. I can still taste her capilletes even though I haven't eaten them in more than 10 years. I can hear her voice asking for a kiss before I left. And I can hear the squeak of the magical kitchen drawer where she kept the secret supply of snacks just for her grandchildren. My grandmother's home was a place I belonged without question for the entirety of my childhood. Then the day came when I had to tell her that I had left the Catholic church and was heading off to a Presbyterian seminary. I will never forget the look on her face as she said, then you are no longer my granddaughter. The tears began to flow. I gathered my coat and my bag and I left. My belonging was gone and my heart was broken. I drove the 20 minutes back to my parents' house where I found a very confused father standing at the door with a phone in his hand and saying, I have no idea what is happening with the two of you. I cannot understand a word that she is saying but it is your grandmother. I said hello and my grandmother immediately said, I am so sorry, honey, pay no attention to a foolish old woman. You are mine and I am yours and my love is stronger than anything else. We all need those places where we belong, where our love is stronger than anything else. If the statistics are to be believed, many of us don't. The Surgeon General has declared loneliness and epidemic in America, citing some of the following facts. 50% of Americans experience measurable loneliness at any given time. Over 20% of American adults say they often or always feel lonely or socially isolated. This isn't surprising when we've been living through a pandemic which for so long drove us away from each other and our routine connections. Loneliness, the feeling of isolation or disconnection which can occur when we are objectively socially isolated but can also happen when we are in a crowd but feel alone. That loneliness creates a sense of danger and uncertainty. It wakes up our animal brain. Animals like to be together for safety, for protection, for the sharing of resources. We are no different. We are animals who prefer to be together. And so we find communities to belong to, places that feel like home where we are welcome in the fullness of ourselves, places where we can bring in all of who we are. We have examples of welcome throughout time. The activist Rosemary Harding remembers her growing up days in the South. She especially remembers the hospitality of her mother, Ella Lee and her great-grandmother, Mariah or Mama Rye. Mama Rye was born in Africa, was a slave in Virginia and died in 1930 at the age of 107. Both these women cultivated a deep welcome as well as a profound mystic spirituality. In the years that Harding was growing up her house was a regular stop for neighbors, relatives and friends. Her parents made that house welcoming. Sometimes too much so it seemed for all kinds of people came through, not just neighbors and friends, but peddlers, professional gamblers, petty thieves, a regular itinerant bookseller who appeared often in ragged clothes and so many who were without homes. Her mother would set out beautiful china dishes and slices of her homemade pound cake for all of them, especially the ones just passing through. It was as if she knew that they needed special attention and besides she genuinely enjoyed hearing their stories and learning from them. She knew that wisdom came from many sources. The efforts my parents made to be neighborly Harding writes and to reserve judgment against those who society viewed as outcasts served as important examples for their children and grandchildren as we grew into adulthood. That welcome was the foundation of my family spirituality. This idea of a deep revolutionary welcome such as the one in her family goes even further back in time into Judaic history. Karen Haring author and UU minister reminds us that it was Abraham who long ago set the bar for welcome so high. His storied welcome of three total strangers tells us what true hospitality looks like. Abraham did not wait for the unannounced visitors to arrive at his tent. He ran out in the heat of the day to greet them, inviting them under the shade of his oaks. He didn't ask for names, country of origin or photo ID. Instead he bowed, requesting the privilege of washing their feet, offering them a little bread. He did not serve whatever he had on hand. He ordered fresh cakes made from choice flour and a tender calf from his herds slaughtered and prepared especially for these three strangers whose names he didn't know. Wayfarers who turned out to be angels in disguise. That welcome was often regarded as the basis of one's relationship with the holy. In folklore from around the world, the holy of holies shows up in disguises. As a foreigner, as an undesirable neighbor, a pesky creature even. And the one who opens the door to that stranger and welcomes them to the table is the one who entertains angels unaware. Not only does this earn favor in the eyes of the divine, it also not coincidentally creates a harmonic social order in which food and shelter are shared and the possibility of friendship is invited. Welcome then is a spiritual, moral and practical virtue. We find this in our own history with William Ellery Channing, the 19th century Unitarian, sometimes called the father of Unitarianism in the US who said in a sermon about slavery, I am a living member of the great family of all souls. And sometimes I think congregations have no greater purpose than to convince us all of that and to proclaim it to anyone who needs to hear it, which is everyone. Whoever you are, wherever you come from, whatever your story, you are a living member of the great family of all souls. And you belong here in that family. You have a place at the table. As the Reverend Victoria Safford put it, no matter what the world has told you, the universe is glad to see you and we are too. In this place, we mean to be for each other as wide as we can get each other to extend. The ears and eyes, the welcoming voice, the incarnate embodied real, live embrace of the universe, the holy, whatever you call it. I'm not sure that God has any other way of showing up except through us. We all have stories of places where we belonged and then for some reason we didn't. Maybe it was because of what we believe. Maybe it was because of who we love. Maybe it was a disagreement with a decision being made. Whatever it was, those moments of break are painful ones and most often, unlike my grandmother, those moments last a lifetime, not just 20 minutes. Now a few years ago, during our first interim period, Doug Watkins and I were asked to meet with a woman who had visited our congregation. She said she wanted to give us feedback on that experience. She bravely came in to tell us that she was a queer black woman who was looking for a religious home after coming out to her home congregation, the community in which she was raised and loved into being and told she was wrong. She could not live this way. She would burn for all eternity. I need a new place to call home, she told us and I was hoping this was it. But she continued, I felt welcomed here in my queerness but not in the skin I'm in. It was a painful moment for all of us, a moment of courage and vulnerability. It was a stark reminder that we need to do the work to be the people we want to be, the people we claim to be, the people who know how to welcome the fullness of people, not just pieces and parts. Community is hard. Wendell Berry wrote, community I'm beginning to understand is made through a skill I have never learned or valued. The ability to pass time with people you do not and will not know well, talking about nothing in particular with no end in mind. Kinda sounds like he's been to our coffee hour. Just to build trust, just to be sure of each other, just to be neighborly. A community is not something that you have like a camcorder or a breakfast nook. No, it is something you do and you have to do it all the time. Our vision statement says that we are a spiritual community of belonging. We will transform ourselves and society through the practices of radical welcome, deep listening and compassionate, authentic connection. We envision a world fueled by love and justice. This vision is born out of a recognition that our world is a difficult place. Filled with horrors and atrocities, we have no idea how to hold and know there's no way to make sense of. We mourn, we grieve, we shake our heads in confusion and our fists in rage. There isn't much we know for certain, but we do know this. People need to belong. People need to have places that feel like home where they are welcomed in the fullness of their being. Our theme this month has been welcome because we know that there is a world out there that needs our welcome, that needs community, that needs people who will make mistakes, but is willing to try and try again. When we talk about welcome here, a welcome that goes to the very heart of who we are and why we exist, we mean that we will welcome each other in our fullness, in our wholeness, our holiness. A holiness which may be at any moment full of holes and contradictions, full of fear and brokenness and doubt. Come, come, whoever you are, we say, not just when life is full of joy and beauty, but when you are lonely and filled with despair, come, come, with the unfinished, imperfect, holy wholeness of your being. Come in not only with your achievements, but with your vulnerabilities. Come in and glimpsed the flawed humanity that we share. This home will hold it all as it holds us all. So how do we do this hard thing? I'm gonna bring us back to my grandmother for a moment. Along with the smells and the sounds of her house, I also remember this needle point that her sister had created that hung in the dining room. It was that passage from the book of Galatians about the fruits of the spirit, you might know this one, but the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. I had to look it up, I did not remember all of that. As I was thinking about that needle point, I thought, I'd like to make us one of those for here, not that I have the skill to do such a thing. But if I did, I would make us one that to be the community of welcome that we hope to become, I would say we need courage, wonder, permission, persistence, trust and wisdom. Courage found in the willingness to begin knowing it will be hard. Wonder, becoming enchanted with each other, truly honoring and loving the diversity of human experience. Permission to do the work, to fail, to mess it up, to make amends and to try again. Persistence to not give up when it's hard, when it is nothing but struggle. Trust, ourselves, each other, the work we're trying to do, the vision we are trying to create. And wisdom, to remember that we are all living members of this great stream of life, that we belong here together at this table in this home we share. Think back to what you found when you arrived here. Did it feel like home? Can you commit to offering that to others? To doing the difficult and vital work that is ours alone to do, so that no one here feels like they are welcome only in pieces. In the coming months, you will be hearing about new initiatives from our welcoming congregation renewal team. These are the folks looking at how we welcome one another here, what we do well, what we can improve, coming up with new ideas for us to try. I ask you to be open to the ideas, to feel the discomfort, and before saying, no, I don't wanna do that, to try, just try. Examine that discomfort, sit in it for a bit and ask yourself, what did I find in this place? How can I offer that to others? Can we do this work with courage, wonder, permission, persistence, trust, and wisdom? So I'll leave you today with words from Lisa Cron as she accepted a Tony Award for the Broadway musical Fun Home. She said, for many, many years I have had a recurring dream. I don't mean a metaphorical dream, a Dr. King dream, I mean an actual while I'm a sleeping dream, that I suddenly discover the apartment I live in has a whole bunch of rooms that I didn't know were there. And I'm like, how did I not know about all these rooms? And I've been thinking about that dream because we all live in this big house. And we've all been sitting in these one or two main rooms and thinking it was the whole house. And lately, lights are coming on in other rooms and we're all like, I didn't know we had a garden. We have a ballroom, the pantry is full of food, and I had no idea. The thing is, all those other rooms have always been there and there are really interesting people in there doing rafishing things. And wouldn't it be great if we got to know them more? You guys, our house is so big. Let's not just go back into the living room. My friends, our house is so very big. Let's not just stay together in one comfortable room. Let's explore, let's expand, let's challenge ourselves and each other, let's dance in the ballroom and let us always, always fling the doors of this house we share open wide in welcome and in joy. And I now invite you into the time of giving and receiving where we give freely and generously to an offering which sustains and strengthens our community here as well as the work of our outreach offering recipient who this week is Freedom Inc, a black and Southeast Asian led nonprofit organization that works with low to no income communities of color. Their mission is to achieve social justice through coupling direct services with leadership development and community organizing that will bring about social, political, cultural and economic change resulting in the end of violence against women, gender non-conforming and transgender folks and children within communities of color. So there's multiple ways to share your gifts. Baskets are being passed here in the auditorium. You'll see on the screen, you can donate directly from our website, fussmedicine.org. You'll see the text to give information there as well. We thank you for your generosity and for your faith in this life we create together. We gather each week bringing with us the joys and the losses of our lives and the lives of those we love. We share them here knowing they are held in this community of love and support. We light a candle for Andy Combs, brother-in-law of Mary Kessler who passed away on Monday. We send our love to Mary, her sister Cindy Sidorf and their family as they grieve Andy and journey these days without him. And we light a candle of sorrow with the ongoing violence in Palestine and Israel. In the face of so many narratives of dehumanization, so much pain and suffering, the loss of so many lives. We remain adamant that empathy for human suffering diminishes no one and together we yearn for the outbreak of peace. And we light a candle for all those hopes and fears, joys and sorrows that remain in the sanctuaries of our hearts. If you'll join me in a moment of meditation with these words from Maureen Killaren. Blessed is this holy ground that holds us. Holy are the places of memory, the places which have formed us, where we store the icons of success and shattered dreams and gather threads and pieces of what we would become. Holy are the places of memory. Holy are the places of the dream, the places over the rainbow, where all children are wanted and all people are fed, where colors are the source of celebration and youth and age come to the table as one. Holy are the places of the dream. Holy are the places of change and pain, the places of our struggle, where the rivers of our lives run fast and we hold on, hold on and grow. Holy are the places of change and pain. Holy are the places of connection, the places where we risk ourselves, where hands touch hands, touch souls, touch minds and in awareness still, we change our lives. Holy are the places of connection. Holy are the places of becoming, the places of clear vision, where life and world are intertwined and we can see forever in this moment and we give thanks. Holy are the places of becoming. Blessed is the ground which holds us. Holy and hole making is this place. And our in spirit to sing together our closing hymn, number 1028, The Fire of Commitment. Together we will create brave space because there is no such thing as a safe space. We exist in the real world. We all carry scars and we have all caused wounds. In this space, we seek to turn down the volume of the outside world. We amplify voices that fight to be heard elsewhere. We call each other to more truth and love. We have the right to start somewhere and continue to grow. We have the responsibility to examine what we think we know. We will not be perfect. This space will not be perfect. It will not always be what we wish it to be, but it will be our brave space together and we will work on it side by side. Blessed be, go in peace and please be seated for the postlude.