 to the First Unitarian Society of Madison. My name is Kelly Asperuz Jackson and I am one of the ministers here. Today I am joined by the worship team of Linda Warren, Daniel Karns and Stephen Gregorius. We are also joined today by special guest musician, Phillip Delacris. Thank you so much for sharing your gifts with us today. The vision of FUS is growing souls, connecting with one another and embodying our UU values in our lives, our community and our world. We look forward to greeting you all for coffee hour right outside these doors in the commons following today's service. You'll also find their activities for all ages coordinated with today's theme after the service we're going to be doing an art project in which we start from the same beginning and see where our own individual creative minds take us from there. We hope that you will be able to stay after the service for coffee or tea and to create something beautiful together. If you are visiting us today, welcome. We are so glad that you are with us. If you would like more information about First Unitarian Society, please stop by the welcome table that is also located out there in the commons. We hope you'll be able to stay and join us for coffee hour so we can greet you and get to know you a little bit. For those connecting with us virtually, we are glad that you are with us as well and we hope that you will be able to join us for our virtual coffee hour immediately following today's service. The information for joining can be found on the homepage of our website, fussmedicine.org as well as on the slide that will be seen again after the postlude. Our announcement slides will also be shown briefly after today's service. We encourage you to take a moment to learn about upcoming programs and activities. And now I invite you to join me in a moment of silence to center ourselves and bring ourselves fully into this time as we join together once again in community. Bless today your hesitancy, your shy shrug, your behind the scenes skepticism, your sweet stoicism. Bless your boredom and your anxieties, those worries that will not quiet no matter the mantras, the metas or the mediating moments. Bless your impatience and your butterflies, your brash tone and your desire to talk to no one, to care about nothing, to be invisible and invincible, to be already perfect and with ease, of course. Bless your shame, your self-doubt, your inner critic and your coping techniques, all of them, whatever they may be. Bless most of all, your broken heart and all the longings that made it so. Bless your grief, your anger and your still pressing hope, all of these, we bless. All of these, all of ourselves, we bless. In this gathering made holy by our wholeness, this community made sacred by our scars, come to be blessed, come to be a blessing, come. Let us worship together. And now I invite you to rise in all the ways that we do and to join me in the words for the lighting of our chalice. We light this chalice remembering and honoring our own tradition and celebrating the rich diversity of traditions among us. As we search for justice, meaning and purpose, may we remember that justice, meaning and purpose live first in deeply listening to one another. Gather the spirit. Folks, I invite you to be at rest if you would like to be and also for anyone who wants to, to come join me here for a story. I tell you this morning, have you ever heard one of those stories that's got different versions from different parts of the world? Is that a familiar idea? Like how there's a Cinderella story that has a glass slipper in it, but then there's a bunch of other Cinderella stories from different parts of different places and they have maybe shoes of different sorts or a hair band or something else, but it's kind of basically the same story just with details changed. So this story, I've heard lots of different versions of. We were just having a conversation a couple of weeks ago with the Zoom coffee hour in fact and someone said that they thought it was a Jewish story and maybe there's a Jewish version of it. I don't know, there's a lot of different versions of it out there, but the version I know best is Taoist and that means that it comes from long ago in China. And this story is about a farmer who had a little farm, not a lot of stuff there and on that farm he had a horse. Just one horse though, not a big farm, just big enough to have one horse. Now, one day that horse ran away, which is not a great thing to have happen when you're a farmer, especially when you just have the one horse. So everybody around, all of his neighbors, everybody else in the village said, what a bad luck he had. Do you think that was a good thing or a bad thing the horse ran away? Bad thing. Certainly you would have been in the majority, but the farmer just said, well, we'll see. And a little while later, that horse came back and this time there was a second horse with her. Now everybody in the village said, that was very good luck, worked out well, now he has two horses. Do you think it was a good thing or a bad thing? A good thing. Well, you would have been in the majority, definitely. But the farmer just said, well, let's see what happens. So this horse was wild, and if you want the wild horse to be able to be ridden, you have to spend some time teaching it how to take a human rider. And so his son, the farmer's son was doing that one day, trying to teach the horse how to move stably and keep a rider on its back and listen to commands, that sort of stuff. And it reared up and it tossed his son to the ground. His son broke his leg, very badly. Now everybody in the village said, what bad luck he had. Do you think it was a good thing or a bad thing? That his son broke his leg, yeah, it sounds bad. I don't want to break my leg. I don't want anybody else to break their leg either. So I'd agree with you, but the farmer just said, we'll see. So a little while after that, some soldiers came through the town. They were there from the government to find people to be more soldiers. They were going around the different villages and saying, you've got to give us a certain number of people to come join the army. They didn't have a real choice about it. It was that kind of a government. But the farmer's son had such a badly broken leg that they wouldn't take him in the army even if he wanted to go. So he got to stay home, eventually his leg healed and he was able to go back to working on the farm and doing all the other things he wanted to do. And everybody said what good luck it was that his son had broken his leg. So do you think that was a good thing or a bad thing? See, bad thing, right? Okay, we've got actually something of a consensus here on the floor, but it was still a bad thing to break his leg, whether he got out of being in the army or not. But the point is there was some debate about it. And the farmer just said, well, let's see what happens. And that's the end of the story, but it's not the end of all time, right? Because things just keep happening. One thing after another thing after another thing. And so even if it seems bad, the thing that just happened, even it seems very bad and I wouldn't disagree with you about it, it was bad. That doesn't necessarily mean that nothing good can come out of it. And even if it seems good, it's a happy event. We're all pleased about it. That doesn't mean that nothing bad can happen after it either. Thank you so much for joining me for the story. All right, you can go back. Sometimes you forget which thing is next and whether you need a mask on for it or not. I invite you now into a time of giving and receiving where we give freely and generously to this offering which sustains First Unitarian Society and its work in the world. You will see on your screen that you can donate directly from our website, fussmedicine.org, and you'll see our text to give information there as well. There are also baskets at the exits to the auditorium in which cash or checks may be placed. We thank you for your generosity and your faith in this life we create together. I want to tell you is a very simple story. It doesn't have a lot. It's about a traveler who traveled from near to far, from here to until once in their travels, they came to a beautiful palace with gorgeous walls of alabaster, fine stained glass windows, countless rooms. But the sight of it was terrifying because the palace was on fire. There were flames licking in all of those windows. It had swept up over the walls to the very height of the highest tower. And yet, though it was burning, there was no one around trying to put it out. It just blazed. The traveler in shock and curiosity cried out, is no one the master of this house? And there came a figure in one of the windows, stepping out onto the balcony with the flames roaring behind them. And they said, I am the master of this house. That's the story, but it's not the only way of telling the story. So maybe we should go back. Buh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh. Buh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh. Once there was a traveler who traveled from near to far, from here to there. Who traveled all over the wide world until one day they came to a palace. It had walls of alabaster And stained glass windows, countless rooms. The traveler was in awe of the place. But strangely, it seemed to glow with a light from within, shown like the sun, even in the dark of night. And there was no one around, just an empty building, it seemed like. In awe and wonder, the traveler called out, is no one the master of this house? And the answer came when a figure came to one of the windows and stepped on to the balcony and said, I am the master of this house. So there you go, the same story, same characters, same places, most of the details the same, but something completely different, just by changing that one important detail. So friends, please rise now in body and your spirit and join me in singing hymn number 322 from the Muslim tradition about Mullah Nasreddin Hoja, who was a real person, but in many of the stories about him, he's more like a folk character than a historical figure. The story goes that the wise man was sitting one day under a walnut tree and thinking about how beautiful and elegantly arranged the world is. Ah, he thought to himself, it is true that the world is a very fine place, but it is not perfect. For if I were to order the cosmos, I would make some corrections. For instance, walnuts are very good to eat, and in their season they fill the branches of the trees on which they grow, but they are very small. And one has to eat a great many of them in order to be filled. Pumpkins, on the other hand, are quite large and nourishing. If I were the master of the universe, I would ordain it that pumpkins should grow on trees just as widely and abundantly as walnuts do, just at this moment. As Nasreddin was thinking all this to himself, a single walnut happened to fall from the branch on the tree he was seated under. It landed with a gentle tap on his head and bounced into his lap. For a long moment, Nasreddin stared down at the walnut, and then he jumped to his feet, pronouncing a long, loud, heartfelt prayer of thanksgiving. Thanks that he was not the master of the universe. The difference between good and bad, fair and foul, a blessing and a curse, can turn on the smallest matters. Little bits of information, the briefest moment in time. It is not just that different people perceive and experience the world differently. That's obvious enough. It is that we are each those different people from moment to moment, taking in new information, losing track of old details and brewing up different feelings inside of us. Perhaps you never imagined a pumpkin tree as Nasreddin did, but I trust that, like him, you can imagine some way in which the world would be different if you were in charge of it. And even if your idea is about the best use of the power to rewrite existence would prove more practical than his, the fact remains. While it is always in our power to change the world in some way, it is never in our power to change the world in all ways. In coming to terms with this hard fact in her childhood, our theological ancestor Margaret Fuller coined an affirmation which she returned to throughout her life. I accept the universe. It is possibly the most famous quotation from this most prominent woman of the transcendentalist circle. Supposedly, the Scottish philosopher and historian Thomas Carlisle, who was a real piece of work, by the way, I just need to fit that in there somewhere, upon hearing that Fuller had said this, declared, by God, she'd better, but for anyone, and perhaps more so for a woman in the 19th century, as Fuller was. To make this declaration had a certain radical power to it. It wasn't a statement of surrender or passivity. It was a bold claim that the universe was a thing in need of her acceptance. And as she wrote and read and thought and argued and traveled throughout her life, we might say that acceptance of the universe, the totality of it, allowed her to challenge and to try to change some of the specific conditions within it that she found most objectionable. Now, in the Jewish story of the palace ablaze, a traveler comes upon a striking scene. The only description of it, given in the Talmud, where it is originally found, is the Hebrew phrase birah doleket. Now, birah is pretty simple. It means palace, any sort of very large, very fancy house. But doleket is a little bit more complicated as a word. It can mean on fire, but it can also mean illuminated. This is the reason for the two different tellings of the story that we heard before, this one word. But they are not meant to be alternatives, not mutually exclusive interpretations. They are meant to express something true by being taken together, not as two stories, but as one story that has to be told twice in order to be understood. The palace, the world, is both on fire and illuminated, both awesome in its beauty and awful in its tragedy. In the original Star Wars film, the young Luke Skywalker is told a story by the mysterious sage Obi-Wan Kenobi about his long lost father whom Luke has never met. Obi-Wan explains that Luke's father, Anakin Skywalker, was a good and noble person in particular, a good friend, and that he was betrayed and killed by the evil Darth Vader. In the next film, Luke learns that, in actuality, Darth Vader is his father, just going by a different name. I realize that this is an important plot twist that arrives very late in the movie, so modern custom might expect a spoiler warning in such circumstances. But this secret's been out for a number of decades now, and besides, I don't give spoiler warnings about Bible stories either. It isn't until the third movie that Luke gets to confront his mentor about all this. Obi-Wan has already died at this point, but that's not a barrier to conversation in the context of Star Wars. The ghost of Obi-Wan insists that he did not lie. When Anakin turned his back on his previous values and his previous self and embraced a path of hatred, it was as though that good man died, and the new person he became had killed him. So Obi-Wan says, what I told you was true from a certain point of view. The perspective from which we approach the world absolutely matters, and the wide variety of human viewpoints are only some of the evidence of that. It is a matter of survival to be able to accept the universe as a palace on fire, that it can and will, at some point, disappoint us, hurt us, make us angry, sad, or afraid. It is no less important, however, to be able to appreciate and celebrate the beauty and the wonder that are in the world, to find and embrace the opportunities we have to be grateful for things as they are, including the many different views of what is that we hold across our lives. Creating a community of love and support, a place in a time where we can share the celebrations and the sorrows of our days. Barb Avery asks us to light a candle this morning in celebration of Theodore Avery Schultz Johnson, who was born June 2, much to the delight of his parents, Colleen and Andrew, his grandma Barb, and many, many relatives and friends. Welcome, Theo. We light a candle in solidarity with the people of Ukraine, both in their suffering and their struggle. Together, we yearn for peace for them and for all people and an end to all wars of conquest, anywhere and everywhere on Earth. I invite you now to turn with me both inward and outward as we enter together into an attitude of meditation and of prayer. In this moment, we reside in the company of ourselves and of each other and of the holiness which dwells between and within all people. We share now a time when we are hungry, thirsty, lonely, and tired by degrees, an instant in which we are hopeful and scared, tearful and glad, solemn and playful and curious and bold, armored by a panoply of wants and made vulnerable by many different needs, still with a common heart we yearn. For the health and well-being and freedom of all people, whether they live near or far, whether or not they look like us, whether or not they speak as we speak, whether or not they pray as we pray, whether they love us or hate us, whether or not we have yet found a way to love them, whether they be strangers or friends or our very own selves, may all people be healthy, may they be well, may they be free. And if this be not possible in the world we share, may we be among those who's calling it is to change the world. Blessed be an amen. Your spirit for joining us in our closing hymn, number 12, Life the Benediction, before the benediction. Some of you rode your bikes to church today. Thank you so much for doing that. Here that I think you're going to see someone from a door prize on the way out. And they are Ben Weiss, Connie Weiss, Haley Timassanu, I think. I apologize in advance. And then someone with an unattributed electric bike. And I think I might know who that is. But hopefully you know who you are. Here, then, these words of benediction. Take time each day to remember you are a part of the interconnected web of life. Bless a stranger with a smile. Tell the people in your life how much they mean to you and take a moment every day beginning today to give thanks for all that you have. May you have the strength, courage, and commitment to begin or continue the rewarding journey of self understanding. May you have the wisdom to forgive yourselves, the grace to ask for forgiveness, and the compassion to forgive others. All right, I don't have to warn this. You are the creator of your life. It's up to you. Forgive your trespasses as you forgive those who trespass against you. May you live your beliefs and feel at one with everyone and everything. Blessing upon you. Blessing upon me. Blessings upon every living thing. Blessed be. Amen. And please be at rest for the postman.