 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 my colleague, the Reverend Kelly S. Bruce Jackson, and the worship team of Linda Warren, Drew Collins, Stephen Gregorius, and Daniel Karns. It is an absolute joy to be here with you in person. Thank you for being here today. The vision of First Unitarian Society is growing souls, connecting with one another, and embodying our Unitarian Universalist values in our lives, in our community, and in our world. For those of you connecting virtually with us today, we are glad you are with us, and we hope you will be able to join us for our virtual coffee hour immediately following the service. The information for coffee hour can be found on the homepage of our website, fussMadison.org, as well as the slide at the end of the service. Our announcement slides will also be shown briefly after the postlude, and we encourage you to take a moment to learn about our 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 in community. Will everything be okay? What can I do? In these days, we find ourselves too often stuck with these questions on repeat. What's going to happen? Will everything be okay? What can I do? We grasp at signs and markers, articles of news and analysis, Facebook memes and forwarded emails as if the new Zodiac capable of forecasting all that life may yet bring our way as if we could prepare, as if life had ever made any promises of making sense or turning out the way we thought. As if we are not also actors in this still unfolding story. For this hour we gather to surrender to the mystery, to release ourselves from the needing to know, the yearning to have it all already figured out and also the burden of believing we either have all the control or none. Here in our song and our silence, our stories and our sharing, we make space for a new breath, a new healing, a new possibility to take root. That is courage forged in the fire of our coming together and felt in the spirit that comes alive in this act of faith that we are, that we believe still a new world is possible that we are creating it already and now come let us worship together. And I invite you now to join us in the words of affirmation that are up here on the screen as we light our chalice. Each time we light the chalice we renew our commitment to our Unitarian Universalist faith. With the spark of a match we make it new again. As fresh and surprising as the first day we encountered the spiritual community and realized we were home. We light this chalice for renewal of our faith. I know this rose will open. I know my fear will burn away. I know my soul will unfurl its wings. I know this rose will open. And let us rise and body and our spirit and sing together hymn number 126, Come Thou Fount. Come Thou Fount of every blessing to Thou our hearts to sing Thy praise. Streams of mercy never ceasing call for songs of loudest praise. While the hub of life's perfection fills our hearts with joy and love, teach us ebbs. May we still, Thy goodness, prove vision, lift our eyes to what may come. See the lion and the young lamb dwell together in Thy home. Hear the cries of warfall silent, feel all love glow like the sun. One another, then our heaven, our lives to higher ways. Lift our gloom and desperation, show the promise of this day. Help us find ourselves in long union. Help our hands go fount of justice, Earthly fair as heaven. This is the story that I want to tell you today. A long time ago in Japan, there was a Buddhist monk who lived all alone in a very little house high up in the hills. There was very little that he had in the whole of the world, but he was quite satisfied with the little that he had. So it was one day while he was meditating alone in his very little house that a thief snuck into his home. The thief was the exact opposite of the monk in some sense because he was not satisfied with anything that he had. He had never been satisfied with anything that he or anyone else had, in fact. And he was looking to take whatever he could from that monk. But try as he might, he couldn't find anything in that little house. There was just the monk all by himself and nothing at all worth stealing. The thief was very disappointed. Seeing the disappointment on the face of the thief, the monk felt quite a great deal of pity for him. So he rose from his cushion and he took off his robe. The only thing he had that the thief could take and he gave it to him. The thief, perplexed and still unsatisfied, left disappointed. All alone again in his little house seated once again in meditation, this time a good bit colder. The monk looked out the window and saw the light from the full moon there. He had pity again for the thief who is missing out on seeing the moon. And he composed this poem, the thief, he left it behind, the moon at my window. I invite you now into a time of giving and receiving where we give freely and generously to this offering which sustains our community here and also supports the work of our outreach offering recipient. This week's offering will be shared with healthy food for all who helps salvage food that might otherwise be wasted should become a valuable, nutritious resource for families, food pantries and non-profit organizations that are providing food in our community. In partnership with FUS members Mike and Cassie Weiss of Crossroads Community Farm, healthy food for all is providing many Madison area families with free, high quality seasonal produce delivered to their homes. Your gift will support this partnership. So you'll see on the screen that you can donate directly from our website, fusmattison.org. You'll see the text to information, text to give information there as well. And for those of you here in person, there are baskets out by the doors. We thank you for your generosity and your faith in this life we create together. In the late 1700s, there was a mechanical curiosity that toured Europe and later North America. It was a large wooden cabinet set with a chess board attached to a mannequin wearing a turban. The device was called The Turk. In its public displays, spectators would be invited to sit down and challenge the automaton, a human-like machine to a game of chess. The Turk would move its pieces about the board with a clockwork arm and was able to win nearly all of the games that it played. People were fascinated, and several famous figures are said to have challenged the Turk and lost, including Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. There was much debate and theory as to how the machine could possibly work, but its owners refused to reveal the secret. The secret turned out to be a deceptively simple one. The Turk was not an artifact of time travel or an advanced chess-playing computer 200 years ahead of its time. The machine was able to put on its impressive display because hidden inside its cabinet was an actual human being. Various chess masters rode along inside the body of the Turk during its tours and played its matches, keeping track of the pieces on the table above with a special pegboard. The only mechanical accomplishment of the Turk was a clever, but still fairly simple system of gears to allow its arm to make the hidden chess players' moves. This is a historical curiosity that in some ways illustrates the popular western theological understanding of that thing called the soul. In both Judaism and Christianity, the soul is an animating force, the intangible yet essential element of any living human. It goes back to the second chapter of the Book of Genesis in which the first human being is formed from mud and then is filled with the breath of life. This breath makes a person a person and more than just an empty vessel or a powerless machine. According to this understanding, our bodies are like the Turk, complicated and impressive, but functionless without the presence of a secret passenger to give us thought and volition. Now, there was a movie many years ago called Dark City. Did anyone see it? No, I'm not surprised. Almost nobody did, because it came out when Titanic was still number one at the box office. The film is about a society of sinister aliens who have built a city and filled it with humans in order to search for the soul. Every so often, they put everyone in the city to sleep and swap their lives around. Go to sleep a doctor, you wake up a fry cook. Go to sleep a homemaker, you wake up a lounge singer. Wake up at a different place with a different name and a different set of memories. Given the same false history and current context, will different people make the same decisions? Are humans anything more than the sum of their recalled experiences? If the answer is yes, then the difference would seem to be something invisible, immaterial, unquantifiable. The soul. Now, the soul has an added level of meaning in Jewish and Christian theology as the eternal or at least very long-lived dimension of ourselves. So that it is the soul that experiences the afterlife, whatever shape that might take after the body has died. Depending on whose idea of the afterlife we're talking about, the soul might be given a new body or it might go on to exist in some purely spiritual plane. In fact, although reincarnation, you know, where we die and our souls live on to be reborn and live out further lives, although that is something we generally think of as being an idea specific to the Eastern religions of Buddhism and Hinduism, who each have their own concepts roughly equivalent to the soul, it also has a presence in the West. Early church leaders and a variety of Christian heresies have affirmed the transmigration of souls, which is the sort of fancied upterm that just means reincarnation, that people who study theology use when Christians are talking about the idea. And some strands of Jewish mysticism entertain the idea that one person's soul may divide into many parts after death so that several different people at once may share the same reincarnate soul and that these fragments can even move around as people live so that you might spend some days as the reincarnation of one person and others with the soul of someone else. The religious system with the most complex anatomy of the soul that I could find in my research is that of the ancient Egyptians. Depending on the era and which writing or tomb painting you follow, a human soul in ancient Egypt could be said to have at least five and as many as seven different components. These include ibb, the heart, the source of all emotion and will, ka, the vital essence which animates the living but also persists after death, and ren, the name, which is the source of a person's identity and allows them to live on perpetually so long as it is still spoken among the living. I mention all of this because we live in a society where the spiritual language of Christianity is all around us so we tend to speak about religion using words from that language. But we are a particular group of people with a particular set of values and ideas and a particularly vast diversity of ideas about God and the afterlife. And other matters that most religions at least pretend that they only have one position on. So I want to offer us a working definition for a term that I consider to be very important, soul. This isn't the only thing that it can mean, obviously, but I believe it may touch on the sort of thing that we often tend to mean based on our tradition and where we are today as a movement. So here goes. Our souls are the potential within us to share love, feel awe and joy, create beauty, struggle for justice, and mourn what has been lost. The word soul might mean more than that. The breadth of life understanding might still appeal to some of us, for instance, but our soul is at least the sum of our potential to bless the world by being in it. I gathered this definition from William Ellery Channing, the godfather of American Unitarianism, in much the same way that James Brown was the godfather of soul. Channing was far from the first preacher to espouse Unitarianism, just as James Brown was not a founder but was an early exemplar of his genre. Yet they both popularized their respective styles and philosophies and inspired subsequent generations to follow in their footsteps. In 1828, William Ellery Channing delivered a sermon entitled, Likeness to God. In that address, he put forward the idea that the most important quality of human beings is our likeness to God, our capacities for love, justice, mercy, and creativity that mirror in a greatly reduced form those ascribed to the God of the Jewish and Christian Bibles. So that practicing and cultivating these capacities is the mission of every human life. Our proper work, Channing wrote, is to approach God by the free and natural unfolding of our highest powers of understanding, conscience, love, and the moral will. This message clarified thinking that was already present among Unitarians at the time, and it has come to be central to how we understand humanity as Unitarian Universalists. More important, even, than the belief in God on which Channing based his original idea. The most essential quality of being human is, to us, the capacity for love and compassion, creation, and exploration. There is a scene in Ava DuVernay's film about the march from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights in 1965, in which the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is at a very low point. He is physically tired and spiritually exhausted. His soul is weary. Up late and unable to sleep, he picks up the telephone and calls his friend, Mahalia Jackson, one of the greatest, if not simply the greatest, gospel singer, then or ever. In a dramatization of something that reportedly happened many times in the course of their friendship, Dr. King asks her simply to sing him a song. Knowing of the lateness of the call, hearing the tremble in his voice, how much he must need what he is asking her for. She sings his favorite hymn to him over the phone. A gift of strength and solace passing from one friend to another. I hope it goes without saying that I would never compare myself or anyone else to Dr. King or to Mahalia Jackson for that matter. But as we all approach this coming week, the second anniversary of the official declaration of a global pandemic, I want to ask you to be gentle with yourselves and each other. Even as the virus is presently receding in our area, even as we hope, as I hope, that we have finished the last time that our community will need to suspend gathering in person, the collective trauma we have just been through echoes among us still. I do not say this to dwell on it or to make you remember something you are trying to forget. I say it because I care about you and I want you to be happy and well. If your soul is weary, there is reason for it. I do not want for you to have to hide your spiritual exhaustion. Often, too often, when I hear someone acknowledge the heavy weight of living in these days, it is as a preamble to some moral instruction. This is why you need to get serious about your spiritual practice. This is why self-care is such a crucial obligation. Now it is very true that it is good and important to take care of ourselves, but the only dependable consequence to chastising ourselves and each other over it is a spiral of shame. Self-care just becomes one more layer in the dog pile of moral obligations in a hurting world that truly does need much good hard work in order to repair. In an essay titled, If You Can't Take It Anymore, There's a Reason, the author and Lutheran minister, Nadia Bulls-Weber, wrote, I am left with wondering, am I doing enough, sacrificing enough, giving enough, saying enough about all the horrible things right now as a good person and subsequently silence the accusing voice in my head? No. The answer is always no. No, I am not. Nor could I. Because no matter what I do, the goal of enough is just as far away as when I started. Our tradition has a strong sense of moral urgency to it. For this reason, we often attract folks with an overdeveloped sense of right and wrong. We take pride in and hold ourselves accountable for what work our faith does in the world. Not just its ideals, but its effects. But sometimes we forget that all of that urgency, that driving sense of social mission, stems from one basic insight. You are enough. Enough to be worthy of life and the freedom that allows us to find meaning in living. That this universal human value applies to every person who has ever been or will ever be. That the inherent worth and dignity of each person, what William Ellery Channing called our likeness to God, cannot be erased or destroyed and persists with us, no matter what we do or do not do. Because we live in a society which does not affirm and cherish the value of every person in the way that our faith does. We are called to work and to struggle towards a more just society. But the goal is not to treat our precious and irreplaceable selves like machines. Objects which we fuel up and maintain by experiencing nature or reading a good book or through meditation or prayer. No. The goal is for everyone to have life and have it more abundantly, as the teacher Jesus is said to have said. For each and every one of us to feel worthy of being, just as we are. We don't come together to refresh and renew each other's spirits and our own so that we can go back out into the real work of living. We come together to try to make a way of being as a community in which souls may flourish and grow, in which each of us can become more fully and completely alive, sometimes for the first time. Just how this is accomplished, both in our own private moments and in our collective time together, is something I always find quite elusive. It is more about preparing the way for the possibility of that resuscitating flash of worth and wholeness to strike than a logical, well-engineered process by which we arrive at a predetermined destination. As the Great Plains poet Ted Couser wrote, it's like so many other things in life to which you must say no or yes. So you take your car to the new mechanic. Sometimes the best thing to do is trust. The package left with the disreputable-looking clerk, the check gulped by the night deposit, the envelope passed by dozens of strangers all show up at their intended destinations. The theft that could have happened doesn't. Wind finally gets where it was going through the snowy trees and the river, even when frozen, arrives at the right place. And sometimes you sense how faithfully your life is delivered even though you can't read the address. Sometimes our spirits can be renewed by a call in the middle of the night, one we make or one we receive. Sometimes the source of our renewal may be even more unexpected than that. In both the Hebrew Bible and in the Koran, we find the story of the second wife of a patriarch, Abraham, the mother of his elder son, Ishmael. Her name is Hagar in Hebrew, Hajar in Arabic. This is the way that a part of her story goes. Hajar was left alone in the desert trying to keep herself and her infant son, Ishmael, alive. They had no water left. She ran back and forth between two hills searching the dry earth for water. In the festival of the Hajj, Muslim pilgrims re-enact this story by making seven circuits between the hills of Safa and Marwa, just shy of a two-mile walk altogether. That trip once took place outside, but the need to ensure the safety of so many pilgrims who come each year to Mecca has led to substantial innovation. Today the procession between the two hills is made through a beautifully appointed building with wide hallways, air conditioning, and a special lane reserved for the elderly and the physically disabled. Hajar scoured the desert around her, but she found no water to drink. And eventually she had to set her son down, perhaps because she had lost the strength in her limbs to carry him any longer, perhaps because she could not bear to watch him die. Once he was set down, Ishmael kicked at the ground beneath him. And where his heels struck the earth, water sprang forth. So much water, in fact, that Hajar had to spring into action in rescue her child from the sudden flood. She called out, Zom, Zom, stop. Quit flowing. And from this phrase comes the name of the well of Zamzam, another site visited by pilgrims making Mahaj. The close of this story, this is the part that's only in the Quran, not in the Hebrew Bible, is that while Hajar and Ishmael were alone in the desert for a terribly long time, just after the spring appeared, so too did a group of travelers. And Hajar, who had been so thirsty that she thought that she would die, immediately called out to them, inviting them to come and share in the fresh water. She was not concerned about how much there was, or how many of them there were. She was simply determined to share, my friends. As we are hopefully now emerging from a wearying interval for all of us, may you resist the pressure to catch up with wherever you expected to be by now, two years ago. It is good to do good, but it is not the doing of it that makes us worthy, even though it is our awareness of the worth, the preciousness of every single soul that motivates what we do. Rather, may we find strength and renewal in this community we share, and where we have strength to lend to others, may we offer it to one another freely. Each week we gather in this space bringing with us the cares of recent days, those in our own lives and in the lives of those we love. We bring all these here in a spirit of support and acceptance and care. We light a candle of love, support, and healing for Barb Volker, who was hospitalized this past week and has now been moved to a rehab center. We know Barb would love to be heading home soon, so we are sending her every wish for strength and healing that will allow that to happen. We send our love to Barb and to Mary as well. And we light a candle of joy and gratitude for Jeremy Jenke, who celebrated six years of sobriety on February 16th. And our great congratulations Jeremy on this anniversary. And if you'll join me now in a moment of stillness with these words of prayer from Heather Ryan-Star, Gracious and Holy One. Somehow we who are still breathing still gifted or challenged with heart-beating life. We struggle to find a way to live with all of it. All the quiet beauty and all the blasting horror. All that we have to do and all that we cannot do anything substantial about. We live with all of it. The wondering churning in our minds of am I doing the right thing? Is there something else, somewhere else, that I should be? We live with all of it. This gorgeous, full, stunning, heart-breaking life we share. Days filled with hope and relief, hugs and hellos from those we have not seen in far too long. And days filled with sorrow and dread, fear and uncertainty in the face of so much devastation and loss. Help us to live with all of it. Help us to know how to move forward through this time in ways that are wise and compassionate and courageous. Help us live without unnecessary loss. Someday making calculations based only on the sacredness of life and of each other. In the spirit of invitation, let us offer up to one another a moment of stillness with space for what each of us needs to be heard and held in this time for all that is our lives, all we hold and wrestle with. We ask for blessings and a way through with grace and courage. Blessed be and amen. Come on in endless song. How can I keep and be cold? No storm can shake while to that rock and straddle as they hear the dumb ringing when friends ring. Our time together is finished, but our work is not yet done. May our spirits be renewed and our purpose resolved meet the challenges of the week to come. Our chalice flame is extinguished until once again ignited by the strength of our communion. Blessed be, go in peace and please be seated for the postlude.