 this gathering of Madison Unitarian Universalists. It is so very good to be together. My name is Kelly Crocker. I use she, her pronouns, and I serve as one of the co-senior ministers at the First Unitarian Society. I begin our time here this morning with the acknowledgement that we are on the ancestral homeland of the Ho-Chunk nation, a place they call Dejope or Four Lakes. My name is Kathy Converse. I use the pronouns she, her. I'm a member of the Prairie Unitarian Universalist Society and I'm currently serving as their president. If you're here today with joy in your heart, we bid you welcome. If you are with us with tears in your eyes and pain in your heart, we bid you welcome. If you are here in a little unsure of this people, this gathering, this community, we bid you welcome. If you are here with an overwhelming love for your faith and your companions on the journey, we bid you welcome. However you found your way here, whatever you're carrying with you, we bid you welcome and we're so very glad that you are with us. We want to bring your attention to our busy hands corner, which is inside the shelter. You'll see, thank you for waving guys. So at any time we invite our children, our families, anyone who would like some movement or activity during the service to gather over there. We also want to let you know that today's service includes elements traditional to each of our congregations. So there will be some things that feel familiar and some things that don't. And finally, instead of sharing our announcements this morning, we want to encourage you to read the weekly announcement email sent from your home congregation. Please read the email. We will now have a moment of centering silence. I'll ring the bell for the chime to start the silence and then ring the bell again at the end. Good morning. Are we not that awake yet? Good morning. Yay. Thank you, Brian. My name is Karen Armina. I use she, her pronouns, and I am the minister for the James Reeb UU congregation. And I'm Kelly Aspruth Jackson. I use he, him pronouns, and I am the other co-senior minister for First Unitarian Society. We gather this morning in witness and in celebration as Unitarian Universalists from three congregations and maybe even beyond. We gather as one body knowing that the faith tradition to which we belong or which we're exploring or which we might be participating in for the very first time is larger than each of us and larger than the communities in which we worship regularly. The flaming chalice is a symbol dating back to World War II Europe when the Unitarian Service Committee commissioned Hans Deutsch to create an image as a logo for brochures created to help Jewish refugees escape Nazi persecution. Unitarians, Universalists, and Unitarian Universalists across the globe now use a flaming chalice in their logos and their services. And it symbolizes many things, including the light of reason, the warmth of community, the flame of hope, and the fire of commitment. As we light our chalice this morning, we invite you to enter the sacred space of our own making, to remember that a thousand or more gathered communities are doing the very same thing, and to open your hearts to the words of the covenant written by Unitarian minister James Vila Blake in 1894 and still adopted by many UU congregations today. These are his words. Love is the spirit of this church and service its law. This is our great covenant to dwell together in peace, to seek truth in love, and to help one another. I invite you now to sing the James Reeve Chalice response. The words are written in your order of service, and Linda will play it through once first. And Alice and Haika are here to help us. Light which is before. And now let's stay seated or rise, whatever you wanna do in body and or in spirit, to sing together our opening hymn, number 347, gather the spirit. Our trials in this light appear all the same. Passion and strength of song. We would like to invite, like to come up a little closer for our story today to come on up. We've got a little red blanket on the concrete up here. I have a question. It applies to everyone whether you're on the blanket or not, who here likes stories? Yeah, me too. Hopefully all of you, because you came up, right? Okay, stories are great. The characters, the twists and turns, and maybe a lesson at the end sometimes. Well, today we're gonna be talking about the stories of our congregations. And so Kelly found a story that comes from the Zulu people of South Africa, and it's a story about where stories come from in the first place. All right, so here we go. Once upon a time, there weren't any stories to tell yet, but there was a family. Now families can come in lots of different forms, but this particular family had a mother, and a father, and a whole bunch of children. And they were pretty happy, and life was pretty good. But every night when it got dark and it was time to go to sleep, the children would ask their parents. Mama, Papa, tell us a story. Have you ever asked someone for a story when it was time to go to bed? Maybe when you were already supposed to be asleep. Anybody ever done that before? I know it happens quite frequently in my house. Maybe there's that night when you're just not quite sleepy yet and you want just one more. But the problem was there weren't any stories to tell. There were no adventures to remember or imaginary tales to repeat, so the children were always disappointed and the parents were always stumped. So one day, the father said to the mother, we have got to find these children some stories. If I stay here and take care of the house and all these children, will you go out into the world and find stories to tell them? And so the mother agreed to this plan and off she went. Now, in the course of this journey, she met some animals. So I need your help now. What animal do you think that she should meet first? An axolotl. An axolotl? An axolotl, right? An axolotl. What? Half unicorn, half axolotl. Half pegasus. That's pegasus. Wait, that's too many halves. Half. Okay, all right. So a one and a half unicorn, pegasus, axolotl. That's what we got. What about the cat? And a cat. There's another half cat. Okay, it's too full. All right, so axolotl, unicorn, pegasus, cat, that's... It's not an alacate axolotl. Alacate axolotl. Now I understand the name. Thank you for teaching me about this animal. So she met an alacate axolotl and said, hey, alacate axolotl, do you have any stories that I could take home to my children? And the alacate axolotl said, oh yeah, I've got a lot of stories. Oh, so many stories. You wouldn't believe it. I'm just full of the brim with stories. Boy, the stories I could tell you. And she said, okay, so tell me one. And the alacate axolotl remembered that they had something to do the next town over and got out of there real fast because didn't actually know any stories was just trying to look like a big shot. Ah, yeah. So on she goes with the alacate axolotl had left. So she continues on the journey and she comes across another animal, Cleo, an albino woodpecker. Wow. And so she says to the albino woodpecker, here's what's happening at home. My children are always asking for stories. We don't have any stories to tell them. Do you have stories that you can share in the albino woodpecker? Said, oh, I got a million of them. I fly around all day. I see everything. I got so many, but you know what? There's tasty bugs in that tree over there and I don't wanna miss them. And the albino woodpecker was gone. Mm, mm, mm, mm. So she pressed on until she came to a third animal. Did anyone have a third animal for me? A monkey. I heard a monkey. All right, so there's a monkey who I would normally, I would be like oop, oop, oop, oop, oop, oop, oop, something like that. But this monkey was a very sleepy monkey. So it was more like oop, oop, oop, oop. And she went to the monkey and she said, monkey, you gotta help me. I'm looking for stories for my kids. They're driving me nuts. I need, I need your help. And I was like, go away, I'm too sleepy. So she didn't get any help from the monkey. All right, on she goes. One more animal, a polar bear. So she comes across, this must be the most interesting. The most, this must be the most interesting place to travel with these animals. So here is this huge, large, lumbering polar bear. And she says to the polar bear, I really need your help. I talked with an ala cat axolotl. I talked with an albino woodpecker. I talked with a world's sleepiest monkey. None of them could tell me any stories. I am at the end of my rope, help me. And so the polar bear says, I don't have any stories to share. But I know who does the sea turtle. I'm going to take you to the sea turtle. And the sea turtle, the sea turtle was helpful, but maybe not as helpful as the polar bear had hoped because the sea turtle didn't have any stories either. But the sea turtle did know where some stories might be found. So the turtle took the mother way down deep under the sea all the way to the place where the spirit people live. These were the people who lived under the sea instead of on dry land, which is a thing that can happen in stories. So the mother explained her problem and the spirit people wanted to help. But they wanted her help in return. See, these were the people who lived deep in the ocean. They didn't know what it was like to live on dry land. They couldn't go up there themselves. So they thought about this and they came up with a solution. Here's what she said. She said, my children's father is very good at carving wood to make pictures of people and animals and other sorts of things. He can carve you a piece of wood that will show what our life on land is like and then you can look at it anytime you want. So the spirit people really liked this plan. And in exchange for her promise to bring back this carving that showed life here on dry land, they gave the mother a big, beautiful shell. It was a magical thing. And what do you think would happen when you held the shell up to your ear? It would tell you a story. So the mother returned home. The mother returned home and that night she told her children everything that had happened on her journey. And she told their father that he would need to carve an especially beautiful picture out of wood. And she showed the children the magic shell and asked if they wanted to hear a story. But they already had and now so have you. So we are gonna rise in all the ways we do. Our next hymn comes sing a song with me. I am Ron with he, him and y'all pronouns because I grew up in Oklahoma. But this is I think familiar song for everyone. The words are in your program. Looks like you already found them. And I understand we're supposed to be able to picnic afterwards. So I think we will throw in an extroversal at the end about come have a picnic with me. Sing a song with me. Come sing a song with me. Come sing a song. It's hard to find. It's in the wind. It was in the wind. Staying for the picnic if you wanna join Barbara and I. Thank you, Ron. I am reminded by you that we have not introduced the rest of our musicians this morning. And so Drew Collins over there in the red from FUS. Linda Warren from FUS. Linda, where are you? Linda's back in the shade. Good for her. And Jennifer Headstrom too back there in the shade from Reeve. Am I missing anyone? Bob Park, where's Bob? Barb, Barb. Thank you, Barb. Sorry about that. It is so good. Is there something fun going on back there? Awesome. Good. It is so very good to see so many of you here. I love this reminder that the hundred something folks who make up the congregation I serve are just a fraction of the Unitarian Universalists in this city. So thank you all for being here this morning. This service was born in the hearts of the reverends Kelly. Is that what they call you? And myself along with the reverend Matt Aspen who served Prairie Society through this past June, I think, right? We thought it might be inspiring and energizing for you all to be together, to meet each other. And I hope that that's true. Our plan was that the worship leaders would tell some stories about our congregations and Unitarian Universalism. And our hope is that you all will tell each other some stories over your picnics. So James Reeb, UU congregation, or Reeb as we call ourselves is 30 years old this year. Yay. We are, go Reeb. We are an offshoot of First Unitarian Society, or FUS as we're often calling you or you often call yourselves. Intentionally planted on Madison's east side to offer another Unitarian Universalist home with support from both FUS and the Unitarian Universalist Association. And Prairie, thank you. Thank you. Love the interaction. The vision of our founders was for a smaller congregation that was connected to their neighborhood, that was vibrant with children, that was welcoming to all and that was committed to the work of peace and justice. I see those aspects of the original vision as threads that have woven and continue to weave the tapestry of our congregation's life. And I'm gonna reflect a little on each of those threads to give you all a sense of who I at least feel like we are. Our connections with our neighborhood for one have varied over time. We started out meeting in a local park and we rented space from a childcare center in the neighborhood way back in our early years. And since we've had our own building, we've used it to offer space for many local organizations to meet and to share our values with banners and messages of peace and justice on our windows and on our walls. We've partnered on workshops and trainings and meals and gatherings, including a long-standing monthly community potluck and program called Sustainable Saturday Night that we recently had to sunset due to a lack of momentum after the worst parts of the COVID pandemic. We're currently restarting our relationship with Just Bakery, who will be selling their yummies after our service next week and trying to reach out to our other neighbors with whom we've lost connections over the last few years. The pandemic has also frayed the thread that is the vibrancy of children at Reeb. We've had a religious education program since the very early days and lots of families supported by dedicated members and professional staff. And we love to have children and youth among us. We are rebuilding our program now. And frankly, it is slow. It's slow going. We're focusing more intentionally on family ministry as we do that. So things like multi-generational worship with a busy hands corner, coming of age in our whole lives programs for our youth classes twice a month. And we're creating more opportunities for people of all ages to come together for food and fellowship like today. And our DRE, Genevieve, who's back there in the busy hands area. She might wave, she might nod. There she is. Hi Genevieve. Genevieve is working with your DREs to build a collaborative youth program among all three of our congregations. That leads really easily to the next thread. Reapers, that's what we call ourselves. We want everyone who comes through our doors to feel included. Members and friends talk with everyone and work hard to help new folks orient to our space and our ways. And we also know that our space and our ways need to change when we learn that they're not as welcoming as we thought they once were. Reapers know that we make an especially beautiful tapestry when there are people of all kinds learning and growing together and they're willing to make that happen even when it's hard. And they take care of each other informally through social connections and more and more now formally through a mutual aid network we call our Caring Tree. And then there is our commitment to peace and justice. Reapers engage in the hard work of learning about the culture of white supremacy and other ways that systems oppress and marginalize people and they show up. We share the money we receive in our offering every week. We've formed ministry teams to work on the issues we're most committed to and we're actually right now figuring out how to organize ourselves even better. We just adopted the eighth principle and we'll be organizing a racial justice team which is consistent with the statements of conscience that we've adopted over the years on over-incarceration and racial justice and solidarity with the immigrant community. The very last thing I want to tell you is about the tapestry itself, the hole made out of those threads, their story. Reeb is an amazing community with a depth of heart that blows me away. They care deeply about each other, their congregation and their community. They are earnest and dedicated to making the world a better place. They're deeply generous with their time and their talent and their treasure. They have remodeled their building twice, mostly with their own labor, the second time during a recession and they keep it up themselves. They care. They pay their staff and me fairly and they contribute to the larger association. They work together from a place of love to create something rare and special, living those threads as articulated now in their mission statement. We are a faith community rooted in Unitarian Universalist principles called by love to welcome the seeker, cultivate relationship, nurture spiritual wholeness and grow justice in the world. Find out more over picnic food. I think we're gonna see some common themes going back and forth here. I'll mention that the question was talk for six minutes. That was the guidelines. So here we go, we're Unitarians. I'm gonna give a brief history of the Prairie Unitarian Universalist Society or I'll be calling it Prairie. Similarly, Prairie was established in 1967 as an offshoot of FUS and at that time it was to relieve overcrowding that was going on in the religious education program, which is probably a problem we'd all like to have back. Some 30 adults and 78 children began a church, school and discussion type Sunday morning services at the Holy Name Seminary. The next year bylaws were drawn up, 41 people became charter members and an executive board was elected. By 1969, Prairie had grown to 65 adults and 100 children and it became affiliated with the UUA. The next 11 years found Prairie renting at four different locations until finally buying our current building which is on Juanona Drive in 1980. Prairie's current membership unlike the 100 children is 110. In 1972, Prairie voted for a system of lay ministries. This was instead of having a called minister. This system engaged Prairie members and others from the wider community to lead Sunday services and this plan continued for 33 years. Our services are still primarily lay led and include discussion periods after each presentation. When we have a minister they present up to twice a month. We love music, we have a choir, we try to include music done by individuals or small groups during each of our Sunday services. Matt Aspen was our first full-time minister and he served until July 2023. We're now developing a transition team to look into our future direction. We've had quarter time, half time and full-time ministers since 2005 and we're gonna see where we go next. We have part-time staff, an administrator, director of religious education and very importantly a janitor. We have a lot of lawns to mow. We have an active RE program despite a much smaller number of children and our RE program and children still remain a major priority. We enjoy their presence in all our Sunday services. They're there for the first half of our services and then we also have a lot of intergenerational services that includes them for the full time. We continue to have our whole lives education and we're certainly hoping that that's one thing that we can get our groups together on to have more young people. We have great participations of families. We form circle dinners every fall and we try to include as many families as possible. Since 1970, Prairie's had annual fall retreats and we now do it at Bethel Horizons, which is in Dodgeville and this is a social and spiritual highlight of the year. We have discussions, art, hiking, campfires, talent shows, talent shows are in themselves worth watching. Singing and Keylogged Ceremony. One of the nice things about Prairie is you can be three years old, play the piano and get a standing ovation. As for governance, in 2012, Prairie changed from a board that included committees and everybody to a policy-based board. We have four officers and three trustees. If a minister is serving, they're an ex-officio member. Board meets monthly. The members on the board are assigned liaison duties to the 11 standing committees to ensure communication. In the past year, we started quarterly leadership team meetings and this is the board with all of the committee chairs getting together to get a sense if we're all going in the same direction. Our building was first remodeled in 1988 and again, 30 years later in a bad pick in 2019. During that construction, we were out of the building meeting at Oak Park Place until the onset of COVID and then we were essentially homeless. We then started meeting virtually until our return to in-person in March 22. Based on the response from having virtual services, we continue to offer both virtual and in-person services. We found that that better meets the needs of many of our members to be able to connect virtually, particularly if they happen to be currently living in California or Arizona. In addition to our main building in 2013, we purchased the building next door which at one time had been a percentage for the former church and we purchased that from a family and we call it the annex. And it's used for offices, RE functions, workshops and storage. And we currently are renting a permanent space there to the Allied Wellness Center staff. And we do rent if people did a building. Prairie has a focus on interaction with the natural world if we're supporting social justice awareness and actions. We have an active prairie in front of our building which we burn every few years. We have a rotating display of local art on our walls. We have a green congregation certification. We donate half of our Sunday offerings to local social justice agencies. Our members volunteer time and many monthly community activities such as food preparation. We became a welcoming congregation in 1998 and renewed in 2020 to support the LGBTQ plus community. Most recently, I had appointed an ad hoc committee to study the UUA report and widening the circle of concern. And that report focuses on making churches more deeply welcoming to blacks, indigenous people of color and those of marginalized identities. Coming out of that, we now have an interweave group which meets monthly. We're hoping that today will be a new step to integrating our three UU congregations and more activities together. And I just wanna say thank you to Mary Mullen, Ruth Calden, Rosemary Dorney and Barb Park who are charter, three of charter members and they put together, this is volume one of two volumes of a complete history from day one, a 50 year history. And they're available if anyone's interested to go on the web. It's very interesting reading about the growing of UU in Madison. Thank you. Well, I really appreciate the opportunity to learn so much about y'all because I'm still learning Madison. You may find it amusing as I do that the role of summarizing the story of Madison's eldest Unitarian Universalist congregation falls to the person up in front of you with the shortest tenure in Madison. While I do not speak from a long duration of experience I can offer you the perspective of someone who arrived recently and had to look closely and listen deeply in order to get acquainted quickly with the community that I serve. As well as the view of someone who had to do their own research in order to accept the invitation to come here in the first place. So this is the story that I can tell you about the First Unitarian Society of Madison. We have 144 years of history. In that time we have been a very small congregation and a very, very large congregation and occupied nearly every other point on the scale in between. The founding generation of the society articulated its purpose in their original bond of union which with small amendment remains an integral document for us to this day. It calls in part for our congregation to make integrity of life its first aim and leave thought free and to accept those of whatever theological opinion who wish to unite with us in the promotion of truth, righteousness, reverence and charity among all. To outline that century and a half of story that followed from this I'm gonna give you three threads that interweave with each other. Place, beauty and moral imagination. Place has an inescapable importance for our congregation. I see your head nodding, yes. You know where I'm going with this. The landmark meeting house building designed by FUS member Frank Lloyd Wright is a crucial part of our identity. Just as our congregation is the reason for that place's creation and the reason it has persisted and endured for over 70 years. It was an ambitious project undertaken when FUS was not especially abundant in numbers or in material resources. But the members of the congregation of that era hold together to make it happen. They literally hauled stone from the quarry to the site of the new meeting house. They built pews by hand and they wove fabric for the auditorium curtain. Now having an internationally recognized piece of art for our spiritual home can be both grandly inspirational and a weighty responsibility. Trying to fit and always evolving and eventually quickly growing congregation into the parameters of that work of art has shaped many of our most important decisions over the years, including supporting the formation of new Unitarian Universalist congregations in Madison as we strained at the meeting house seams and most recently the decision to construct the atrium wing of our building which expanded our capacity to welcome all those wishing to unite with us and gave us the opportunity to embody our values of environmental stewardship on an entirely new level. The place which so informs our past and present leads us inevitably to the second thread of our story, beauty. Now it is natural to appreciate beautiful things and the shared experience of making and enjoying beauty together is I believe important to every congregation. But creating, reveling in and sharing beautiful things is integral to First Unitarian Society in a way that I have rarely seen the like of before in my life as a Unitarian Universalist. Either as a cause or a consequence of this, there is a prominent inscription on the wall of the landmark auditorium, a poetic quotation of ambiguous origin. I've done a lot of digging on this folks and I'm still not confident in where it came from first. Here it is though. Do you have a loaf of bread? Break the loaf in two and give half for some flowers of the narcissist. For the bread feeds the body, indeed. But the flowers feed the soul. Feeding souls with beauty through music, architecture, dance, studio art and yes, literal flowers is a deep, deep part of what we are for and about as a community. But if beauty nourishes our souls, what are they being nourished for? Our efforts over the decades to answer this question leads to that third thread, moral imagination. A recurring theme in our story is the determination to do big things in pursuit of high ideals. The building projects and the congregation fostering I've already mentioned but FUS has also in more than one of its eras sought to be an engine for social progress. In the 1940s, the rabble rousing young FUS minister declared on his local radio program his resignation from the white race. Now the framing of that declaration might make us scratch our heads ever so slightly today but for a white clergyman to offer such a blunt and extremely public indictment of whiteness and its power in the pre-civil rights era was a pretty big deal. Much more recently, our congregation helped to found the Dane Sanctuary Coalition and committed to being a level one sanctuary congregation literally preparing to offer our undocumented neighbors refuge to live within our spiritual home if called to do so. If place has a certain inherent stability to it not permanency but stability and beauty a comforting constancy then it is the moral imagination of FUS that is the most cyclical. The critical dimension of our story which generates the drama of the plot. Just a few months ago, we completed a nearly year long process of consultation and discussion as a congregation with a vote to approve a new set of vision and mission statements. These are our latest attempt to articulate what larger purpose calls us on as a community. So here they are. The vision of First Unitarian Society is to be 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. And our mission statement. At First Unitarian Society, we question boldly, listen humbly, grow spiritually, act courageously and love unapologetically. So you know, just some small ambitions. I see y'all getting ready, thank you. So it is traditional for each of our congregations to take an offering. And I understand that all of us also split the money received between our own operating costs and a local organization whose work aligns with our missions. This morning, instead of trying to figure out how much of your gifts should go to each congregation, we're gonna simply give everything that we collect today to Wilma's Fund, a program of Madison Outreach LGBTQ Community Center that provides relief for LGBTQ plus homelessness and support to prevent homelessness. It was started by Donald Haar, an openly gay man who began the fund with proceeds from drag shows that feature his drag character, Wilma Flynn Stone. We will pass offering baskets around here in the park. And if you are watching the service from here or afar or not from here, if you're watching the service from afar or later even, you can give through your congregations donations page. Rhonda and Kevin have baskets to pass and we thank you for your generosity. Hi everybody, my name is John Wunderland, the Forgotten Musician from Prairie. I'm actually playing two short works for you today. The first one is For My Grandfather, which is a traditional Swiss piece. And the second is Lionheart's Call, which was written by a good friend of mine, James Negus, for healthcare workers during the height of the pandemic. Friends, it is so good to be together. And so wonderful to be outside with you all in what the Simpsons, Reverend Lovejoy, dismissively referred to as the cheap showiness of nature. The wrinkle though is that when you worship in the out of doors, you have to move with the rhythm of the earth and the sky. And the sky is deciding that it's time for us to close our time of worship together so that you can move inside if you wanna spend more time together in fellowship or onto the next part of your day and we can move the electronics out of the rain. So I'm going to call forward Karen one more time to offer our benediction and then we'll move in the postlude with deep apologies to the missed and beloved pieces of music. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Kelly. The radar says we have about five minutes. So, and so as we extinguish our chalice, I offer the words of benediction that I share with the gathered community at James Reeve congregation every Sunday. Know that this space through which we connect is made sacred by our presence and our intention. May we remember that we carry with us the power to make sacred space everywhere. May we hold the love, the courage and the strength that we learn and practice together and do everything we can to move them out into the world knowing that we have enough and that we are enough. Go in peace, friends or stay. Blessed be, amen.