 to First Unitarian Society. My name is Kelly Aspruth-Jackson, and I am one of the ministers here. Today I am joined by the worship team of Linda Warren, Drew Collins, and Stephen Gregorius. The vision of FUS is growing souls, connecting with one another, and embodying our UU values in our lives, our community, and our world. If you are visiting us today, welcome. We are so glad that you are with us. If you'd like more information about First Unitarian Society, please stop by the welcome table. It's located in the commons, just through those doors, the tables to your left. We hope that you will be able to stay and join us for coffee hour immediately after the service, also in the commons. For those connecting with us virtually today, we are glad that you are with us as well, and we hope that you will be able to take a moment to watch the announcement slides after today's service to learn about upcoming events and activities. A word about what is going on here, just in front of where I'm standing. Entering the auditorium today, you may have seen the offering of a piece of paper on which you could write down whatever thought, feeling, or experience you wish to let go from the year now past. If you don't have one yet, there is still lots of time to pick one up during or after the service. And for those of you at home with something that you are needing to release, I encourage you to write it down on your own piece of paper. You can dispose of it in your own way. Just please be sure to be careful and make sure that there is a grownup involved if you actually use actual fire. Anytime between now and shortly after the service, you are invited to deposit your piece of paper in the jar provided. I will be taking that jar and this brazier that it's resting on outside to ceremonially burn away all of those things that need letting go of a little while after the service. 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. We bid you welcome on this first Sunday of the new year. Like Janice, we gather with part of us looking backward and part looking forward. We gather on the edge of the new year saddened by our losses, cherishing our joys, aware of our failures, mindful of days gone by. We gather on the cusp of this new year eager to begin anew, hopeful for what lies ahead, promising to make changes anticipating tomorrow's and tomorrow's. We invite you to join our celebration of life knowing that life includes good and bad, endings and beginnings. We bid you welcome. And now I invite you to rise in all the ways that we do and join me in the words of affirmation for the kindling of our chalice. Out of the darkness, light. Out of the light, warmth. Out of the warmth, joy. Out of the joy, togetherness. May this flame hold us for the time we are here with one another. And now let us sing our opening hymn together, number 58. Ring out, wild bells. This story this morning, but first a little question. Has anyone ever seen a lion dance before? It's what the picture is there. It's a practice common in several different parts of China associated with the practice of the martial arts. It's a beautiful, both artistic and athletic presentation in which two people together form the body of a lion. So there's one person at the front sort of responsible for the mask and one person at the back responsible for the tail and they dance and move together to create the motions of a lion. And this story, this story is one of the stories. I wanna stress just one of the stories about where that dance came from. So this is the way that the story goes. That long ago there was a village and in that village every year a monster came to town. It came up out of the sea. It stood up on a dry land and it destroyed everything that it found. Ransacked all the stored food. It damaged all the houses. It ruined all of the crops. And every year the townsfolk, knowing not what else to do would have to just leave town on the first of the year. Early in the morning they would get up, they would leave the town and just let the monster do what it was going to do and then it would go back into the ocean and they'd be safe for another year. So one day, as it was coming up on that new year where the monster was going to appear again, one day an old man came to town, a traveler. And everyone was busy. Everyone was busy getting ready, getting things secured, locking things away, trying to make the best defense of their home that they could and packing up whatever they could carry to get ready to go up into the mountains and hide for the new year's day. So no one greeted the traveler warmly, no one was there to receive him. He walked all the way into town without anyone saying so much as a hello. But finally he did reach one home where an older woman was boarding everything up and getting things ready to head up into the mountains like everybody else. And she said, oh, friend, you don't wanna be here. You see, there is a monster coming tomorrow. We all know this and that's why we're heading up to the mountains. You can come with me if you want, but you don't want to be here when the monster arrives. The old man said, that seems like it's a little bit of a problem. So every year, every year this monster comes to town. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And every year, every year you just leave and let it do whatever it's going to do. Yeah, pretty much it's a monster. It's a very dangerous thing. Well, the old man thought about it and said, all right, I'm going to take care of this problem for you and the rest of the town. All that I ask in return is that you allow me to spend the night in your house because I don't have a place to sleep for tonight. And she said, I don't think that's a very good idea, but he wouldn't be dissuaded. And well, she did want him to at least have a place to sleep for the night. So that night, the old man slept in the old woman's house. And in the morning, everybody, just before the sun was rising, everybody went up into the mountains. But he stayed behind. So then, up out of the sea, came the monster, Nia, the monster that had been terrorizing this village since who knows when. And it stalked into the town. And it prowled down the streets. And it munched and it crunched and it thrashed and it bashed everything that it found. But it was used to the way that the villagers boarded up all their houses, tried to make them as impervious as possible. It was used to that. It was used to the way that the streets were cleared of anything that might be valuable or that they didn't want to see just destroyed whole cloth. But it wasn't used to this one little hut in the town being so beautifully decorated with streamers and lanterns and all sorts of beautiful things. It looked like they were having a party which the monster was not happy about. So it prowled over to this heavily decorated house. And it could hear inside the sounds of laughter and music and all sorts of fine things which the monster was not happy about. And so it prowled up to the door and just as it was about to tear the door off of its hinges, the door flew open and loud bangs of firecrackers going off. Bam, bam, bam, bam. And out of a cloud of smoke came the old man laughing and the monster was afraid. And it ran away back into the sea. And it never was seen in that town again. This is the story, one of the stories at least, of the beginning of the lion dance which is meant to be an impression of the monster neon and of the practices of the traditional Chinese New Year which I wanna remind you is celebrated on a different day than is called for in the calendar that we use here. But it is a story about laughing in the face of old lingering doubts and fears and dangers and regrets and welcoming in the new possibility that you thought, or at least everyone else thought, was never to be seen again. Ha ha ha. Well, if I had my microphone on, wouldn't it? Our gifts at this service and all the holiday services this year help provide a great deal of the funding that runs Just Dane's eviction prevention program. Sometimes the difference between a family being out on the street or staying in their home can be just a little help. With your help, Just Dane and Joining Forces for Families are helping people to prevent eviction and homelessness. There are multiple ways that you can share your gifts this morning. There are baskets at the exits to this room in which you can place cash or checks. You'll also see on the screen that you can donate directly from our website, fusmattison.org, and you can find the text to give information there as well. We thank you for your generosity and your faith in this life we create together. So today is a new day and a new year. The poet E.E. Cummings wrote for days like today, this is the son's birthday. This is the birthday of life and of love and wings and of the gay, great, happening, illimitable earth. Days like today are supposed to fill us with a sense of promise and possibility. The newspaper is full of previews and forecasts for the coming year and small talk inevitably drifts to the subject of new year's resolutions. But today or on any other day of the year, it is not always easy to seize that sort of momentum. There are days when I feel, and perhaps you can relate to this, a little bit like Winnie the Pooh. I'm thinking of the time when that silly old bear dropped by the burrow belonging to his friend Rabbit and had a bit too much to eat while there. As he was leaving, he climbed halfway through the hole in the ground that was Rabbit's front door and became stuck. Oh, help, said Pooh. I'd better go back. Oh, bother, said Pooh. I shall have to go on. I can't do either, said Pooh. Oh, help and bother. There are times in life when, like Pooh, we find ourselves in a predicament from which we want to retreat, but cannot, while going forward seems just as impossible. That feeling of stuckness can be an overwhelming force as we find ourselves developing a long and frustrating list of all the things that cannot be fixed or changed or helped. In my household, we once had a theatrical scene that we would point to to describe this feeling. It comes from the producers, the musical, rather than the original Mel Brooks movie. The two main characters, Max and Leo, have devised a scheme to make money by producing a Broadway failure, but their plot unravels when their surefire bomb turns out to be a hit. Max reads glowing reviews with shock and dismay and at the end of each line, a despondent Leo moans, no way out. The argument against that feeling of no way out. Issues from many corners, so I will begin by pointing to one that I believe puts it very well. Thomas Paine, who never actually aligned himself directly with Unitarians or Universalists as a spiritual group, though we might find some common ground with him theologically today, wrote these words as an exhortation to challenge one of the dominant sorts of stuckness in his time and place. We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation similar to the present has not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand and in this point of view, how trifling, how ridiculous do little paltry cavalings, that is objections, appear when weighed against the business of a world? Paine said this as he was calling for independence from Great Britain for the American colonies in 1776 and for the formation of a representative system of government. He was speaking to a moment in time that he considered to be exceptional, a situation not seen since the days of Noah. But that sense of promise and possibility is not something limited to the great crises and turning points of history. Each day that we awake to is new and there is no limit to the number of opportunities that life gives us to begin again. Of course, sometimes we wake up and things really are more different than usual. In the movie, Sleeper, Woody Allen wakes up 200 years in the future to a world run with an iron fist by a frightening and terrible leader. But on the plus side, deep fat and hot fudge have been proven to have powerful life-preserving properties. Or think about this, in the country of Samoa in the Pacific Ocean, a little over a decade ago, the people there went to bed on Thursday night and woke up on Saturday morning. They skipped Friday in order to hop from one side of the international date line to the other, giving up being two hours behind California to be three hours ahead of Australia instead. A day is an unusual cost to pay for a new beginning, but it is hardly the most severe. Thomas Paine invoked the story of Noah in his vision of a new world. In the book of Genesis, only a few chapters after having created the world and the human beings that populate it, the creator becomes dissatisfied with the creation. It says, God saw how great was humankind's wickedness on earth and how every plan devised by human minds was nothing but evil all the time. And God regretted making human beings on earth and God's heart was saddened. So in the story, God decides to give the world a new start, but the cost of this new beginning will be terribly high. A flood will cover the earth and only a very few humans, Noah and his family, and a scant sampling of non-human animals will survive. This story is one of the first and the most influential examples of the idea that in order to make a new start, to begin in a new way to be the people that we want to be or build the world that we dream about, we have to destroy or discard everything that went before in the television show, Mad Men. The advertising executive, Don Draper, visits one of his star employees in the hospital. She has been through a painful ordeal that she is deeply ashamed of. Physically, she is well enough to leave, but she is being held for psychological reasons. Worn out and powerfully stuck. She is unable to face the outside world, the people she knows, or even the prospect of getting out of bed. Don, her boss, and something approaching her friend has already remade his life, already cut away the parts of himself that are inconvenient, that didn't fit with the person he'd decided to be. Seeing his story reflected in the woman in the bed in front of him, he stares her down and tells her to do anything and everything it takes to get up and never look back at this moment. Say whatever. Do whatever. The doctors need to be satisfied. He tells her, get out of here. Move forward. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened. When I feel trapped in the present moment, the lure of blowing up or abandoning the past becomes very attractive. But the past is always part of us. What has gone before shaped who we are, what we are, and where we are in this moment. History, from a painful relationship to a family secret to a civil war cannot simply be forgotten. To pretend otherwise only robs us of a part of ourselves and leaves us unprepared for the inevitable moment when the events of our past will somehow echo into the present. We need to change just like our world and everyone else in it. We all need to turn in our hearts away from selfishness, indifference, and despair and towards the forces that sustain and uphold life. Not just once, but again and again when we are angry, when we are lonely, when we are tired, or stressed, or in pain. We need to begin again, we need that sort of transformation as individuals and as a society and accomplishing it requires us to know and acknowledge our past rather than denying it. To set goals that are clear and to be ready to work hard in pursuit of them. This past Friday marked the 86th anniversary of the start of the Flint sit-down strike. Just before New Year's, 1936, workers at General Motors Plants in Flint, Michigan occupied the facilities and refused to work, to leave, or to let management remove the equipment to a different factory. They did so with the demand that their employer recognized their union, the United Auto Workers, which was then just getting off the ground. For a month and a half, in the Michigan winter, the striking workers lived and slept in those factories, holding off the police and agents of the factory owners. When they finally won recognition, it was a watershed moment for American labor. It showed other workers in other factories and in other professions what could be accomplished through organization and collective bargaining. The victory in Flint was the beginning of a new and different world, one in which labor unions in the United States and many other parts of the world had to be taken more seriously, even by large and powerful corporations. It was a transformative event. As Unitarian Universalists, we share a theological legacy that resists the idea of rare and special moments in time as being the only place to make a new start. Each moment, in our understanding, is a fresh start. In every second, there is an opportunity to turn towards wholeness and begin again in love. So we cannot be satisfied to wait for the right moment or the right visionary leader to come along. Lema Gabaui is a Liberian peace activist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work organizing women in her country to demand an end to its 14-year-long civil war. Women are often portrayed as vulnerable victims, particularly in Africa and particularly in times of war. Ms. Gabaui spent years as a refugee, keeping herself and her children alive with no power, no money, and no place of safety or security. Eventually, she began sharing her story with other women and daring to make a collective effort with the 51% of the population normally completely cut out of the peace process. She challenges me and she challenges each of us to make change where we know that it is needed, saying, if you have a situation that seems endless and is a negative situation, don't wait for a Gandhi, don't wait for a King, don't wait for a Mandela. You are your own Mandela. You are your own Gandhi, you are your own King. You know your issues, you know your concerns, and you know the solution. Rise up and do something to change your situation around. There is a Zen Buddhist saying, before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. So too with the new year and a labor strike or just about any other activity that needs to be done or can't be avoided and takes no notice of the coming and going of a holiday. Our faith affirms that the needs of the world are real. Mundane tasks like chopping wood and carrying water aren't separate from the meaning of a spiritual life. They are a part of it. Any work that is necessary to sustain life is holy. So at the start of this year, I wish you a renewed joy and appreciation for the work that you are already doing. May the new year bring you new wood to chop, new water to carry. The poet Philip Appelman wrote a poem for the new year that I believe brings home the importance of the mundane even amidst the promise and upheaval of change. It is entitled to the garbage collectors in Bloomington, Indiana, the first pickup of the new year, the way bed is in winter, like an apron lamp, like furry mittens, like childhood crouching under tables. The ninth day of X-mas, in the morning, black outside our window clattering cans, the whir of a hopper, shouts, a whistle, move on. I see them in my warm imagination, the way I'll see them later in the cold, heaving the huge cans and running, running to the next house on the street. My vestiges of muscle stir uneasily in the percale cocoon. What moves those men out there? What drives them running to the next house and the next halfway back to dream? I speculate, a social wheel? Let's make good ol' Bloomington a cleaner place to live in, right men? Hop, hurrah, healthy competition. Come on, boys, let's burn up that route today and beat those dudes on Truck 13. Enlightened self-interest, another can, another dollar. Don't slow down, Mack, I'm putting three kids through Princeton. Or something else, terror? A half hour later, Dawn comes edging over Clark Street, layers of color laid out like a flattened rainbow, red, then yellow, green, and over the black and blue of night still hanging on. Clark Street maples wave their silhouettes against the red and through the twiggy trees, I see a solid chunk of garbage truck and stick figures of men like wind-up toys tossing little cans and running. All day, they'll go like that, till dark again, and all day, people fussing at their desks, at hot stoves, at machines, will jettison tin cans, bare evergreens, damp Kleenex, all things that are Caesars. Oh, garbage men, the new year greets you like the old. After this first run, you too may rest in beds like great warm apron laps and know that people everywhere have faith, putting from them all things of this world, they confidently bide your second coming. Now, I am going to give you a bit of spiritual homework. Consider the new world that you need to live your life towards. It will come from a sense not only of the future that you hope for, but also the past that you have experienced. You may find it is attractive to use responsibilities, all the things you feel you have to do, to explain all the ways in which you cannot change. So start instead with the question of who and what you are ultimately accountable to. Answer that clearly, and it will become apparent that your responsibilities, the ones that really matter, the ones you won't give up, are a source of strength and determination. The commitments that define us can be the catalysts for our own transformation. Rather than a barrier to it. Focus on where your heart is and you will find where your spirit leads. Following it is your work for this day, this year, this life. It is a work that I can tell you is best done in community, where you can find people to share your goals, to support your struggle, and to challenge you when you have lost sight of your own ideals. Our great Unitarian ancestor, William Ellery Channing, exhorted us not to be any more satisfied to remain stuck in the burrow hole of life than Winnie the Pooh was. He said, I call that mind free, which resists the bondage of habit, which does not mechanically repeat itself and copy the past, which does not live on old virtue, which does not enslave itself to precise rules, but forgets what is behind, listens for new and higher munitions of conscience, and rejoices to pour in fresh and higher exertions. In the year now begun, may we pour ourselves forth in the work of beginning the world over again. Here we bring new water from the well so clear for to worship God with this happy new. Sing, Levy, do, sing, Levy, do, the water and the seven bright gold goggles that do shine, hold upon you, sing, you, sing, Levy, do. We gather, carrying in our hearts the joys and losses of our days. We hold our own pain and celebration and those of ones we love. We share these here, knowing they are held gently in care and in support and in love. We light a candle for Connie Weisner, who suffered a fall recently. We send her our love and care and wish her a swift and full recovery. We light a candle of grief for the 39 people who lost their lives due to the recent winter storm in Buffalo, New York. We share our sorrow both for the loss and for the failure of public leadership, which continues to leave so many so vulnerable to the ongoing global climate crisis, particularly those already living at the margins. We light a candle in solidarity with the people of Ukraine, both in their suffering and in their struggle. Together we yearn for peace for them and for all people and for an end to all wars of conquest anywhere and everywhere on earth. As this is the first day of the new year, many of us come to this hour with thoughts or feelings connected with the year now closing, but do not serve us well and which we would like to release into memories of the past rather than lingering burdens of the present. For anyone and everyone with such a burden to set down, whether you have chosen to write it out on one of the pieces of paper provided or simply to hold it in your mind for this moment, I offer this blessing on all of our behalves. With gratitude for the ceaseless flow of endless time, which has led me to this place and this moment, I renounce whatsoever the past diminishes me or anything else that lives. May the old year pass away into its place of memory. May I welcome the new year, prepared to fully embrace its possibilities. Now, may we rest for a moment together, holding all that lives within our hearts. Blessed be. And amen. Let's rise and body and a rent spirit to sing our closing hymn together. Number 350, the ceaseless flow of endless time. The ceaseless flow of endless time. Is finished, but our work is not yet done. May our spirits be renewed and our purpose resolved as we meet the challenge of the week to come. The chalice flame extinguished until once again ignited by the strength of our communion. Go now in peace. Blessed be. And please be at rest for the postlude.