 Please join me in a few moments of centering silence so that we can come together in spiritual community and now please remain seated as we sing our in-gathering hymn this little light of mine and The words that we will sing are printed in your order of service. So not the whole song but what we have here Thank you I'm gonna let it shine So little light of mine I'm gonna let it shine I'm gonna let it shine, let it shine let it shine let it shine Everywhere I go I'm gonna let it shine Everywhere I go I'm gonna let it shine, everywhere I go I'm gonna let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine Building up a world, I'm gonna let it shine Building up a world, I'm gonna let it shine Building up a world, I'm gonna let it shine and let it shine, let it shine, let it shine. Good morning. Good morning. If we weren't awake, we are now. Loud Gong and Fun Song. Welcome to the First Unitarian Society of Madison. This is a community where curious seekers gather to explore spiritual, ethical, and social issues in an accepting and nurturing environment. Unitarian Universalism supports the freedom of conscience of each individual, as together we seek to be a force for good in the world. My name is Karen Rose Gredler, and on behalf of the entire congregation, I would like to extend a special welcome to any visitors who are with us this morning. We are a welcoming congregation, so whomever you are and wherever you happen to be on your life journey, we celebrate your presence among us. Newcomers and others are encouraged to stay for our fellowship hour after the service and to visit the library, which is directly across from the center doors of this auditorium. Bring your beverages and your questions. Members of our staff and lay ministry will be on hand to welcome you. You may also look for persons holding teal colored stoneware coffee mugs. These are FUS members knowledgeable about our faith community who would welcome visiting with you. Experience guides are generally available to give business, to give building tours after each service. And I believe we have one this morning. So if you're interested in a tour of our sustainably built complex here and the landmark Frank Lloyd Wright building across the parking lot, please come up here to the area by those windows on your left after the service to meet your guide. We welcome children to stay for the duration of the service. However, because it is difficult for some in attendance to hear in this lively acoustical environment, our child haven back in that corner and the commons area outside the auditorium are great places to go if a child needs to talk or move around or jump up and down or whatever. The service can still be seen and heard well from those areas. This would now be a great time to turn off any devices that might cause a disturbance during the hour, especially your cell phone ringers. I'd now like to acknowledge those individuals who help our services run smoothly. This morning our sound operator is David Bryles. Our lame minister is Tom Boykoff. Our greeter is Corrine Perrin. Our ushers are Liza Monroe and Dick Goldberg and hospitality folks making coffee and probably lemonade and back in the kitchen are Allison Brooks and Biss Nitschke. Please note the announcements in the red floors insert in your order of service which describe upcoming events at today's society and provides more information about what will be going on during the next week or two. So look at these announcements and see if there's anything you're interested in. Again, welcome. We hope today's service will stimulate your mind, touch your heart and stir your spirit. Thank you. Even as we would leave behind us under the chalice, the words are printed in your order of service. We now kindle, inspire us, use our power to heal, to hinder. Now if you'll take a few moments to reach your neighbors. I want to come up for the story. There's some, not to call you out, but right over there are some. Any more? Any children at heart who want to come up? Well, maybe I should come over. What are you guys doing? Good, okay. Well, I'll tell you what I'm reading today. Since Jim will be talking about some things related to perhaps wanting more than we have. Come on, sweetheart. We picked a book for you folks that talks about thanks so that we can think about all the great things we do have and appreciate them. Does that make sense? Okay, so this book is called An Awesome Book of Thanks. I say, thank you. Say all these little fuzzy people here. Hi, sweetheart. Do you want to come up for the story? Thank you to the sun above. Thank you for my friends I love. Thank you for the earth and air. Thank you for the food we share. See that? Look at all those little friends. They're all little animals. And thanks for trees and thanks for trains and for the breeze and for the rain. Here you see trees and you see wind, energy generation and trains. This is a modern book with those, what? And rain, you're right. Don't let me miss anything. You catch me on this, okay? And thanks for books to fill my brain. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Look at all those books. There's a million of them. You see that? Books, books, books. Yeah. And thank you, thank you, ocean deep. What's that big guy there? You're right, a whale. That's absolutely correct. And there are other things in there too. And desert dry and mountain steep. See, there's a desert on the one side. You're absolutely correct. Desert and mountain in these pictures. They're a sharp cookie. And pigs and cows and ducks and sheep and horses, geese and hens. See those guys? Oh, is that right? Okay. And balls to kick and kites to fly and places to go when you need to cry. Ever need to do that? Look, this little person went to his bedroom. Hi. Thank you, thank you, thank you. To moms and dads and sisters and brothers, teachers and doctors and artists and others. Look at all those furry little people. And they all have different roles and we appreciate all of them. Say what? Do you? Oh yeah. And look, there's a king or a princess or somebody. Yeah, there's a doctor. Cool. Who make our lives so much better for living. Thanks to music and dancing and singing and giving. Thanks for patience and hopes and rewards and revisions. Wizards and lizards and delightful decisions. Can you see? Oh, the lizards. Yeah, the lizards and the wizards are playing basketball. Cool, huh? You wanna see this picture? Okay. Quite delightful picture of wizards and lizards in a basketball game. Thanks for taking time. Thanks for going fast. Thanks for jumping high. And thanks for finishing last. Have you ever heard that? Thanks for finishing last. Because first isn't always the best place to be. Now you have your usual tortoise and hare. And I guess they're saying it's okay to be last. It's okay to be slow. Thanks for second and fifth on through 453rd. That makes sense? See all those people have numbers on them. And the last one is 453rd. Even bad things. See that sea monster there creeping along? Sea monster. Even bad things can turn out to be good. Look, they're two sea monsters and they're meeting and they're friends. And they both have, one has flowers and one has a heart for the other. Aren't those cute? Yeah, and they're happy. No, they do not look scary. And I'm sure they don't look scary to each other. Thanks for those bumps and those bruises that turn couldn'ts to coulds. Look at this skateboard fuzzy guy. He didn't quite make it that time and he fell. Thank you to those for they make us all stronger. They make us all smarter. They make us last longer. So he fell off a few times and there he did it. But I do not suggest that you do that. It looks very dangerous. Thank you to all that has ever existed and everything else I could never have listed. What's this look like? This one, that's the whole solar system which is sort of our everything for now. Thank you with kisses and thank you with hugs from a part of my heart that is so filled with love. Yeah, look at all those pretty hearts. Aren't they sweet? I say thank you to you just for being yourself. Yourself is important as anything else. That's the story. Thank you very much. Are you ready to, let's see. We're singing a song, correct? Yeah, 121 will build a land and you folks can go to summer fun, okay? Have a good time. Bye-bye. Which have given us this unprecedented opportunity to deceive ourselves and has provided a landscape and has given us the resources and the opportunity for this feat. But each of us individually provides the market and the demand for the illusions we want and we believe these illusions because we suffer from extravagant expectations. We expect too much of the world. Our expectations are extravagant in the precise dictionary sense of the word, going beyond the limits of reason or moderation. They are excessive. When we pick up our newspaper at breakfast, we expect we even demand that it bring us momentous events since the night before. We turn on the car radios, we drive to work and expect news to have occurred since the morning newspaper went to press. Returning in the evening, we expect our house not only to shelter us, to keep us warm in winter and cool in summer, but to relax us, to dignify us, to encompass us with soft music and interesting hobbies, to be a playground, a theater, and a bar. We expect our two-week vacation to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless. We expect a faraway atmosphere if we go to a nearby place and we expect everything to be relaxing, sanitary, and Americanized if we go to a faraway place. We expect new heroes every season, a literary masterpiece every month, a dramatic spectacular every week, a rare sensation every night. We expect everyone to feel free to disagree and yet we expect everyone to be loyal, not to rock the motor, take the Fifth Amendment. We expect everybody to believe deeply in his religion and yet not to think less of others for not believing. We expect our nation to be strong and great, vast and varied and prepared for every challenge. Yet we expect our national purpose to be clear and simple, something that gives direction to the lives of more than 300 million people and yet can be bought on a paper bag at the corner drug store for a dollar. We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars, which are spacious. Luxury cars, which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for excellence and to be made illiterate by illiterate appeals for literacy. We expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and yet more neighborly, to go to a church of our choice and yet feel its guiding power over us, to revere God and to be God. Never have people been more masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed or never has a people expected so much more than the world could deliver of what the world holds and of our power to shape the world. We know about the extreme, we know about the extreme examples, but we also know about the normal, more normal expectations. Popular, good-looking, to us. Competitive, successful, follow in our footsteps. I think that's not their plan or their body's plan. Do they then become a disappointment? And what is it like to carry that sense of fear? Teachers certainly have expectations. Pay attention, be interested, learn. At least don't show you're not doing these things. But what if you're not interested? You can't pay attention. You can't or won't learn. You're gonna be hassled and you're gonna fall behind and maybe fail. You're going to carry that sense of fear. And your classmates have expectations. I can really speak only for the guys here. The expectations are clear and forceful if you were big, you should be a football player. If tall, a basketball player. If neither, at least not a sissy or a tattletale. And you should take science and be loyal to your science even if you might get beat on for that. And you should never cry, you get the tattletale. Now, Borstein, a historian that he was, is more interested in the expectations generated by the mass mediums, newspapers, radio, television, movies. These mediums expect attention, even clamor for it, but just enough attention so it doesn't become critical attention. And they know that we want instant gratification. And so they constantly tease us with the next thing right after these messages. What are the consequences of this pandering to our expectation for instant gratification? Let's check in with our assigned authority, Daniel Borstein. The making of the illusions which flood our experience has become the business of America. Some of it's most honest and most necessary and most respectable business. I'm thinking, Borstein says, not only of advertising and public relations and political rhetoric, but of all the activities which should purport to inform and comfort and improve and educate and elevate us. The work of our best journalists, our most enterprising book publishers, our most energetic manufacturers and merchandisers, our most successful entertainers, our best guides to world travel, our most influential leaders in foreign relations, our every effort to satisfy our extravagant expectations Borstein continues simply makes them more extravagant and makes our illusions more attractive. The story of the making of our illusions, the news behind the news, has become the most appealing news in the world. Well, by the way, Borstein published these thoughts in 1962, over 60 years ago. They still sound familiar. These observations from a man who, despite his vast learning, knew nothing of the internet, the smartphone, Facebook, Twitter, friending and unfriendly. What of that? And what about the expectations they create? We're talking here suddenly of the social media. I'm guessing it started with email, exploded with Facebook, became worldwide with Twitter, it became quicker and more M&S with Snapchat and it's fractionated with multiple e-services far beyond my knowledge. And I am left, of course, pondering the question, is Pokemon Go a social medium? I don't have the answer here. I must admit that I'm not the best source of information here. I do have a smart-ish phone, but it's a lot smarter than I am or cared to be. I have a Facebook account that says, it tells me that I have 294 friends, but I have no idea who most of them are or how they got to be my friends. I suppose I could go through that list and unfriend them. That seems harsh. And besides, they might buy my book. Why are these social media so attractive? They're personal and instant. They give the illusion of connection and the illusion of control, safety, distance. We hear frequent stories of the emptiness of that illusion, not merely of pathological behaviors like the slender man stabbings, but the repeated reports of internet bullying among adolescents leading to breakdown, social withdrawal, and sharp increase in suicides. And only adolescents? What about workplace bullying? Bullying of people perceived as different for whatever reason, way beyond adolescence. You don't grow out of bullying if it keeps working for you. How strong an attraction do these social media have? Well, can you imagine the powerful appeal of a martyrdom? You ask yourself, how did these young Islamic radicals strap arms to themselves and want to kill innocent people? Would you die for a cell phone message? Would you kill for it? People do every day. They answer the phone while driving. They make the urgent call while driving. They text while driving. They crash and sometimes die and sometimes kill. I'm not trying to take any kind of righteous stance here. I've done a lot of distracted driving myself without the benefit of a cell phone. I'm only trying to show how intense is the urge to be connected in the incident and the occasional but growing cost of that intensity. This is the time for a person of my age to go off on a rant about the pace of modern life. Such rants go back a long way in Western civilization, at least to the ancient Greek philosophers. But I have news for them and myself and all of us. The pace of modern life is not going away. And it's not going to slow down unless comes the great catastrophe, the apocalypse. My old colleague, Marshall McLuhan, used to say, the medium is the message. The social media are here. They are multiplying and there is no going back from them. And those new media inevitably change society. How will they change us? Political blogger Andrew Sullivan cites Plato's Republic to the effect that democracies, as they become more democratic, become more and more vulnerable to the appeal of a shameless demagogue. Fill in the blank yourself. Republic was written some 2,500 years ago, but founding fathers of America were well aware of Plato's warnings when they crafted the elaborate system of checks and balances which we call American government. They feared such a tyranny and they guarded against it. Consequently, the government works slowly, laboriously, often taking one step forward and two back to the frustration of many and satisfaction of others. As Churchill observed, democracy is the worst of governing systems except for all the others. Sullivan points out what the 21st century added to this tendency toward tyranny in democratic political systems was media democracy. In a truly revolutionary form. If late stage political democracy had taken two centuries to mature in America, the social media equivalent of about two decades, swiftly erasing almost any elite moderation or control of our democratic discourse. Sullivan suggests that the process has its origins in partisan talk radio at the end of the past century. The rise of the internet and events so swift and pervasive in its political effect is now only beginning to be understood. Further democratizing every source of information, dramatically expanding each outlet's readership and giving anyone and everyone a platform. For example, Sullivan notes, political organizing, calling a meeting, formatting a rally to advance a cause used to be extremely laborious. Now you could bring together a virtual mass movement with a single webpage. It would take you a few seconds to set up. The distinction between politics and entertainment becomes fuzzier. Election coverage becomes even more modeled on sports casting. Political speeches are crafted to produce a 10 second sound wake for the evening news. What this fuel, Sullivan thinks, is what the founding fathers feared about democratic culture. The valorizing of feeling, emotion, and narcissism in place of reason, empiricism, and public spirits. I'm earnestly attempting not to get into the political campaign here. But the most obvious evidence available suggests that there is widespread anger, disillusionment, frustration, hopelessness, even despair in American culture. And it has certainly reached a boiling point in the contemporary election. Political liberals traced this back to Ronald Reagan's famous slogan, government is not the solution to the problem. Government is the problem. But Reagan only said that because a lot of people already believed it. So they elected Ronald Reagan, who for some reason did not dismantle the government since he was the head of it. The cohort which embraced this slogan, the Tea Party, represented only a small, fairly coherent slice of the political spectrum. But the political pollsters have been finding that many of the people animated today by the political campaign have been largely indifferent to party affiliations and reach across a wide range of political attitudes. Of course, older political liberals, shall remain nameless, traced this back to the disillusionment with the Vietnam conflict and the Watergate scandal, or perhaps even to the collapse in the early 70s of the social revolutions of the 60s. But who remembers that? Certainly not me. But it is the responsibility, function, and faith of the government in power to be blamed for the contemporary situation, whatever its political strength. And the blame game is always momentarily satisfying, completely ineffective, and ultimately frustrating. We are totally a democracy that people have power. But when we don't see the change we extravagantly expect, we are frustrated again, and we want to express it. The social media have given anyone a voice. President Obama loved his Twitter account. The Pope has a Twitter account and uses it. Beyonce, well, I won't go through the full list. Is this a good thing? It sounds like a good thing, a democratic thing. Don't we all have a right to our opinion? Don't we all have a right to express it? Isn't belief in the democratic process one of our UU principles? Or do the flood of social media segments emerge from a thoughtful, insightful consideration of the issue? Or are they reactive, knee-jerk, gut-driven brain flows? Not to characterize them in any way. Borstein would say that we have extravagant expectations for quick results, from a system designed to work slowly and cautiously. We hear candidate say, on day one of my administration, but that's just not the way it works, not for any new president. Well, what can we do? We can start with what spiritual guides call discernment, a power to distinguish, discern, judge, or appraise a person or situation. For example, what do we expect of ourselves, our spouses, our children, our schools, our church, our nation? Are our expectations reasonable? Are they based on righteousness or cynicism? Do they produce euphoria or bitterness? Do they lead us to action or discourage us from action? Borstein thinks that what we need is to disillusion ourselves. What ails us most is not what we have done in America, but what we have substituted for America. We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted not by reality, but by the images we have put in the place of reality. To discern our illusions will not solve the problems of the world, but if we do not discern them, we will never discover our real problems. To dispel the ghosts which populate the world of our making will not give us the power to conquer the real enemies of the real world or to remake the real world. But it may help us discover that we cannot make the world in our image. It will liberate us and sharpen our vision. We hope it will clear away the fog so we can face the world we share with all mankind. Let's get started on that right now. It's time for our offering. Noise and sorrows received, celebrated, and shared. We pause now and smiley and says, my son Will has been doing archival research in Istanbul, Turkey. At this, for the entire past month, he is well and his flight home is scheduled for Wednesday. So we'll all hold him and the entire family in our hearts for him to be back where his mother can hug him and thank the universe for his safety as we will all. May we silently, in the spirit of empathy and hope, hold in our hearts and hands the unspoken joys and concerns of this community, of the mourning French people, and of our entire wounded world. Let us please take a moment of silence. Because of this time shared, may our burdens be lightened and our joys expanded. And now please rise as you are able for our closing hymn, number 151, I wish I knew how. Be content with yourself, just the way you are. Let this knowledge settle into your bones and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance.