 Testing audio. The Unitarian Society of Madison. My name is Kelly Aspruth Jackson, and I am one of the ministers here. This morning I am joined by my colleague Kelly Crocker, and 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. We are so glad to be able to connect with you virtually today, and we hope that you will be able to join us for our virtual coffee hour, immediately following the service. The information for joining can be found on the homepage of our website, FUSMadison.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, and we encourage you to take a moment and learn about upcoming programs and activities. I invite you now 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 see all as it is, and may it all be as we see it. May we be the ones to make it as it should be, for if not us, who? If not now, when? If we have any hope of transforming the world and changing ourselves, we must be bold enough to step into our discomfort, brave enough to be clumsy there, loving enough to forgive ourselves and others. This is answering the cry of justice with the work of peace. This is redeeming the pain of history and with the grace of wisdom. This is the work we are called to do and this is the call we answer now. To be the barrier and the bridge, to be the living embodiment of our principles, to be about the work of building the beloved community, to be a people of intention and a people of conscience. May we, as a people of faith, be granted the strength to be so bold, so brave and so loving. Now I invite you to join with me in the words of aspiration for the kindling of our chalice that appear on the screen. We join our voices in a holy communion of mind and heart, dedicated to the promises that bind us in compassion with one another. In this hour, we light the flame that signals our intention to find the sacred in every living thing. Bro. Tell a story about Anansi, the spider, and how the king who did not care very much for him called him to his court one day and said, Anansi, you are so clever. I have a mission that only you can possibly fulfill and if you do so, I will give you a great big reward for it. You see, I've decided that there are two things in this world that I need very badly to have and I know that you can get them for me. And Anansi said, well, king, if that is your wish, just tell me what it is that you want and I will get it for you. The king said, well, that would be too easy. So you know that I want something. Go out and find it for me. Anansi thought, well, that's not a very easy challenge at all. And he went home and on his way home, he passed a flock of birds that were flying overhead and he called out to them because he'd done a favor for the birds in the past, you understand? He called out to them and said, my friends, I need your help. Will you give me one feather each? Just one feather each. And they thought it was an odd request, but they did it. So all the birds in the sky dropped one feather down to the ground and Anansi gathered them up and put them all over his body until he looked a little bit like a bird, I suppose. Funny sort of bird. And then, being a bird, he flew through the air back to where the king was and he nested in a tree high above where the king was talking with some of his advisors and he listened to the king talking about his plan. The king said, I can't stand that Anansi. He thinks he's so clever, he thinks he knows everything. He doesn't know this though, so he's not going to be able to fulfill my quest. And one of the advisors asked the king what it was that he actually wanted and he said, well, what I actually want are the golden slippers that death wears when he goes to sleep at night and the golden broom that he uses in order to sweep out his house, but no one who ever visits death comes back anyway, so even if he figures it out, I'll still win. Anansi, still in the form of a bird, thought that is definitely a problem, but he flew back down to the ground and decided, well, there was no thing to do about it other than to go and visit death. So he plucked the feathers off of his body, first of all, and packed himself a lunch and he started out walking to the place where death lives. And on the way there, he passed a stream, he came to the stream and it was busy and fast running enough that he knew it was going to be a little bit of trouble across, but he thought, well, I should have my lunch first. So he sat down to eat his lunch at the river's edge and while he was eating, he heard a voice from the river asking him to share his meal. He thought, well, it's always good to make a friend, so he tossed a little bit of his food into the river and the river was very pleased by this and so it slowed just enough that there were a few stones in the river that he could hop across and get to the other side. So he came to the house where death lives and he just knocked at the front door. Death was very pleased to have a visitor. No one ever wants to go see death, you understand, so he doesn't get a lot of opportunities to entertain. So he invited Anansi to stay the night. Anansi took him up on the offer. Now he was wise enough to realize that if he fell asleep in death's house, he wasn't gonna wake up again. But he just lay there in the bed, trying to stay awake and death came in to check on him to see if he'd fallen asleep and saw that his guest was still awake and said, is there something I can do to make you more comfortable? Anansi said, well, I can never seem to fall asleep unless I have a pair of gold slippers on my feet. And death said, well, it just so happens that I have a pair and so Anansi put the gold slippers on his feet and he went back to trying very hard not to fall asleep. He stayed awake the whole night and so he never had to worry about waking up again. In the morning, death was bothered by this. He felt like he'd been cheated a little bit and there was a fly that was buzzing around his head that made him an even more of an ill mood. Anansi said, let me help you with that friend and he grabbed the golden broom that was sitting in the corner and he chased the fly all around death's house and then out the door and into the yard and then down the road and before death realized it, Anansi had made off with the gold broom and the gold slippers but when death did realize it he was not happy about it and he chased after Anansi until Anansi came to the river again and said, my friend, my friend, I need your help. Death is chasing me. I need to get to the other side of you very quickly. And so the river parted ways entirely and Anansi ran across it on dry ground in those golden slippers and then the water rushed back in just as death was getting to the river and swept him away and Anansi made his escape. So he stopped at home just long enough to get a sack to put the broom and the slippers in and he went to see the king. He came before the king and said, I think that I have found those two things that you have been looking for, your majesty. But just to make sure, why don't you tell me what they were before I show you what's in my sack? The king was sort of caught. So he said, well, what I wanted were the two golden slippers that death wears at night and the golden broom that he uses to sweep out his house. And so Anansi opened his sack and showed that that was exactly what he had inside and everyone was very impressed and even the king had to admit that Anansi had fulfilled his quest and so he was now forced to give him a big reward. But the king had a thought just before Anansi left with all of that treasure that he gave to him. He said, you know, earlier yesterday, I saw a very strange bird up in the tree. Do you know what bird that was, Anansi? Anansi, who was very clever, said, your highness, I cannot answer that question. After all, I don't know everything. I invite you into the giving and receiving of today's offering. We give freely and generously to this offering in order to sustain our community here and also the ongoing work of our outreach offering recipients. This week's offering will be shared with the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. The UUSC advances human rights and social justice around the world, partnering with those who confront unjust power structures and mobilizing to challenge oppressive policies. Their work is grounded in the belief that all people have inherent power and dignity. So you will see on your screen that you can donate directly from our website, fussmedicine.org. You will see our text to give information there as well. And we thank you for your generosity and your faith in this life we create together. On November 10th, 1898, there was a violent coup in the city of Wilmington, North Carolina. A group of organized insurrectionists who had been telegraphing their militant anti-democratic intentions for months, openly marching in the streets, holding rallies in public places and threatening to murder their political opponents took the final step that they'd been building towards. They assembled at the local armory and through some combination of collaboration and intimidation, seized control of the guns that were theoretically intended to defend the city from hostile forces such as themselves. Their first target was the office of a local newspaper which they burned to the ground, part of a coordinated effort that saw similar attacks on presses all over the state. The bulk of the mob went from there to terrorize whole neighborhoods, destroying businesses and attacking unarmed folks both on the street and in their own homes. Meanwhile, the ring leaders of the affair executed the next step in their plan. They rounded up the mayor, the entire board of alderman and the chief of police and forced them each to resign from office at gunpoint. Then, by no authority other than the weapons in their hands this group appointed an entirely new city council and made the mastermind of their plot, the new mayor. The newly and illegally appointed mayor then produced a list of leading figures in the city who might be most able to oppose his authority and that of the mob and gave orders to his men to round them all up. These undesirables were force-marched to the local railway station and put onto trains bound out of state, in some cases accompanied by some of their armed kidnappers to ensure that they would not return. Somewhere between 60 and 300 people were killed in the Wilmington coup and its coordinated riot. Perhaps another 2,000 or so folks fled the city having suffered the loss of their livelihoods and now in fear for their lives. The city's elected government was never restored. The coup plotters won and the state and federal governments never challenged the men who had by violence forted the results of a free election and taken power for themselves. What ought to have been a crisis of the highest order in a country that aspires to be a democracy went relatively under-reported in its day and remains a fairly obscure historical episode today. And we can explain the passive acceptance of it then and the ignorance of it now by no other means than the power of white supremacy. That term can and I believe should accurately be applied to any system or structure that establishes or maintains power and privilege for white folks at the expense of others. But in this case, I do not even have to make a value judgment to use it. The people who organized the coup of 1898 in Wilmington used it to describe their cause. Their stated goal was to establish total white supremacy in the city and eventually throughout the state. The first decades after the end of the Civil War were a time of great change in the United States and particularly in the former states of the Confederacy. Constitutional amendments had outlawed slavery and established a new legal equality regardless of race. It was a deeply imperfect process and there were still tremendous racial disparities in terms of access to power, to wealth and to opportunity. But the country still had moved dramatically in the direction of equality. In Wilmington, North Carolina, black folks, most of whom had survived slavery were the majority in the city. They were still a small portion of the city's elected officials, but all of the city's officials depended on black voters for their support. The civic government was multiracial in its values. The term then was fusionist. And though it can't be said clearly enough that the black folks there and throughout the country were still at a spectacular disadvantage starting from zero and subject to discrimination and threat in nearly every sector of society, nonetheless, they were managing to thrive and grow in collective power and personal resources. This is what the coup was about. Destroying the hard-won gains of the black community in Wilmington, destroying the ability of black folks and the white folks who had made common cause with them to exercise their political rights and re-establishing the sort of government of, by, and for white supremacists that had prevailed before the outbreak of the Civil War. Every one of the people killed by their insurrection was black. And they managed to drive so many black folks out of Wilmington that the city became majority white. At the next election, the insurrectionists managed to win not a fair election, but a legally certified one. It might be that you've heard some or all of this before. If that's the case, I hope that you do not mind the review. But I feel confident in predicting that it is a new story to a great many of us, despite the many very fine and advanced educations to be found in our congregation. So perhaps we may take this as an illustration of how poorly we know and understand ourselves as a nation. It is not by accident that we remain collectively ignorant of our own history. And the Wilmington coup is at least as much white history as black and as profoundly American history as is the Gettysburg Address or George Washington crossing the Delaware. But the contrast in what is generally known and what is generally not is again attributable to white supremacy, less in this case to people who actively carry that banner with pride, but instead to the structures and systems made up of countless individual choices that make whiteness powerful, preferable, and normal in the United States at the expense of black and indigenous folks and other people of color. In his deeply personal essay, Letter from a Region in My Mind, the great James Baldwin writes of how infrequently those with power give it over to those without it. It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep. They suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping. Whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be. The way that we collectively understand our history, or don't, shapes the reality in which we live and cast each of us in roles which we did not and could not have chosen when we were born into this world, but which we were each assigned on the basis of the circumstances of our birth. Nonetheless. And by now I trust that there is someone out there who might wish to say, all right, Reverend, that was a nice enough history lesson and you've shown off your political science degree. But didn't you also go to seminary one time? And isn't that the more relevant education for the job that we all called you here to do? Is a belief commonly held that questions of racial injustice are fundamentally political in nature? And that political matters are necessarily distinct from spiritual ones. But it is one of the spiritual insights of our tradition that we are all connected in the interdependent web of existence. And any system of injustice, racism most certainly included is a sorrowful reminder that the connections we share can harm as well as nurture us. The long history of injustice that set the table of our present era binds us to each other in ways that cannot be discounted or set aside. Put starkly, if my life is enmeshed in a system that oppresses my neighbor, I cannot grow my soul by ignoring that fact. That one level of painful connection alienates us on every other level. So instead, the pursuit of spiritual growth demands that I do what is in my power to disrupt that system of oppression in which all of us are caught and change it. The feminist author, professor, and activist Bell Hooks recently of Blessed Memory use the term dominator culture to describe the overlapping hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, religion, and other identities that shape power and privilege in our society. And the way in which challenges to those hierarchies are met with either the threat of or actual violence. In her words, dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity, moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, reveling in our differences. This is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values of meaningful community. Forging a world of shared values for humankind is one of the ultimate spiritual aspirations of our religious tradition. So the work of racial justice is inescapably part of our collective work as Unitarian Universalists and pursuing it helps to remove an impediment to the personal work of our faith, seeking to live a meaningful life. But returning to James Baldwin's essay, he articulates there something even more personal, even more precious that should make all of us care about the work of racial equity. Baldwin says, it is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word love here, not merely in the personal sense, but it's a state of being or a state of grace, not in the infantile American sense of being made happy, but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth. That line once again, love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. If you have ever loved someone and been loved by someone, then you know that the experience inevitably teaches you things you did not expect to learn about yourself. Sometimes hard things you wish you didn't have to discover and sometimes wonderful things that you're grateful to get to know. Through the experience of loving and being loved, we might come to see ourselves as truly beautiful for the first time. We might also be forced to confront our own frailties, addictions or traumas. And both of those insights are gifts because both of them are true. Our country wears a mask of a simple, untroubling history in which things always get better over time and our thorneest challenges lie behind us. It is a mask that much of our country believes it cannot live without. But once I examined that mask, I felt very clearly that I could no longer live within it. The good news I have for you is that the only way out of that mask is love. Love of the generous, tenacious and sometimes frustratingly honest sort. And the story that you heard earlier, the king set a task for an anse without telling him what it was. Sometimes the work of dismantling systems of oppression in pursuit of racial justice can feel impossible in the same sort of way, like a challenge that we don't even know the terms of. Sometimes it is a struggle to begin. I don't ever want to tell you that there is only an exactly one right way to do, well, almost anything. But I do know that we become more effective at working for change when we understand the history that brought us to our present circumstances. So if you feel moved to take some tangible action right now, or if you already felt that way and just hadn't found the next right step yet, I want to particularly offer to you the next session of Black History for a New Day. This African-American history course is designed to help folks engage meaningfully with the hard and too often unknown stories of the black experience in this country. It's organized by local racial justice organization in Himaya, and enrollment is open now for the next cohort of folks from our congregation to participate in it, engaging with the material together in order to support each other in better facing the deep wrongs we are called to change. More information can be found in the red floors and on our website, fussmedicine.org. If you're interested, but have trouble finding the connection, please don't hesitate to contact me about it. Just a few days now, after the one year anniversary of the assault on our national capital, when a violent mob sought to dismantle a multiracial government in order to restore more traditional hierarchies, it seems more important than ever that we learn from our history in order to develop strategies to avoid repeating it. Truly, your life and your liberty are each bound up with mine and ours with all of our neighbors. In possibly his most repeated quotation, James Baldwin said, not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. So often the history and reality of racial injustice goes unfaced because for those of us who are white, to face it would mean facing ourselves. And that is a frightening prospect. But if we have the courage to begin it, the prospect is also wonderful to be able to look upon ourselves really and truly and perhaps for the first time start the work to make change. Each week we gather our hearts at times dancing with joy or drowning in sorrow. We bring these cares here in the spirit of community, knowing they are all held in love. This week we light a candle of great joy for Rob and Mary Savage who are welcoming their first grandchild, Charles Robert Rykoff, who was born on December 27th. We send our congratulations to the very happy parents, Britt and Jeremy, and we send all of them our best wishes as they welcome Charlie into their family. We light candles of gratitude for two recent birthdays in our congregation, Charlotte Wolf on January 6th, and Sparrow Senty in late December. Very happy birthdays to you both. And we light a candle of celebration for Samantha Herndon who was married to Bryce on New Year's Eve. We send them our congratulations and our best wishes for all the years ahead. We light a candle of loss for Louis Mitroff who passed away this past Monday at the age of 99. Louis would have been 100 on February 7th and a celebration of life will happen virtually on Zoom on February 7th. We light three more candles of sorrow and gratitude for the lives of Jane Preiser, Pamela McGee and George Berry, three of our members who have all passed away. We remember all of them with great fondness and love and we know they are already so deeply missed by those who loved them. And we light one last candle for all the joys and all the sorrows that we hold in the silent sanctuaries of our hearts. May we hold them all in love, in gratitude, and in hope. We are none of us seamless, none of us free of worn patches or stray threads, none of us perfectly or entirely whole. Rather, our lives are defined by our open stitches, the places where we have been blessed with incompleteness so that we may be allowed the possibility to grow.