 It's going to be like a six-pack of coffee. Wow! Please join me, please join me in a few moments of centering silence. As we sing our in-gathering hymn, number 126, and the words appear right here in your order of service. 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 visitors. 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 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. Experienced guides are generally available to give a building tour after each service. So if you would like to learn more about this sustainably designed addition or our national landmark meeting house across the parking lot, please meet over this direction. You're left near the large glass window after the service. 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 all along behind the auditorium are excellent places to retire for child needs to talk, move around, dance, sing, whatever. The service can still be seen and heard from those areas and there is seating in both. This would also be a good time to turn off any devices that might cause a noise disturbance during the hour, especially cell phone ringers, please. I'd now like to acknowledge those folks who help our services run smoothly. For this service, we have David Briles, operating sound. We have Tom Boykoff as our lay minister. Our greeter is Joe Kramer and Sherine. We have Liza Monroe, Dick Goldberg, Gail Henslin and Brian Pannis. Hospitality, making coffee and whatever for us in the kitchen is sandy plush. Our orchid care person is John Twos and we do have John Powell signed up to be a tour guide. I'd now like you to notice the announcements in your red floor service inserted in your order of service. There are announcements in there regarding today and subsequent activities here and I need to call your attention to a couple of them. You'll see our intern Eric smiling face on the front of the red floors and I need to clarify that he will be speaking on December 3rd that Saturday and December 4th that Sunday will be our wonderful winter choral festival. So if you want to hear Eric, you need to be here Saturday and then of course you also or need to be here on Sunday for the choral festival. So thank you for that. As is our usual, we're having a Thanksgiving Day potluck this Thursday. Thanksgiving Day the 24th and you may look for a table in the commons where you can find out more information. This says this gathering will not be exactly like what we've held in the past. So please stop by or contact Jean Sears for more information. One more thing this Sunday after the 12 o'clock service at about 12.30 to 2 we will be holding parish form right here in the atrium auditorium. So hopefully you can attend that as well and the food haulers will be serving lunch at about 12.15. So thank you. Again, welcome. We hope today's service will stimulate your mind, touch your heart and stir your spirit. Thank you. The words of the poet Denise Levertoff. We have only begun to love the earth. We have only begun to imagine the fullness of life. How could we tire of hope? So much is in bud. How can desire fail? We've only begun to imagine justice and mercy. Only begun to imagine how it might be to live as siblings with beast and flower rather than as oppressors. Surely our river cannot already be hastening into the sea of non-being. Surely it cannot drag in the silt all that is innocent, not yet. Not yet. There is too much broken that must be mended. Too much hurt that we have done to one another that cannot yet be forgiven. We have only begun to know the power that is in us if we would join our solitudes in a common struggle. So much is unfolding that must complete its gesture. So much is in bud. I invite you to rise in body or in spirit for the lighting of our chalice. Our words of affirmation this morning are responsive. Would you please join your voices in reading the bolded sections? As we kindle the lamp of our heritage, we recall those who have gone before us. We dedicate ourselves to be parts of that stream of light. We come together to be lifted by the presence of each. We light our chalice to symbolize the light in each. And now I invite you to meet each other's lights in an exchange of friendly greetings. Please be seated. And I would like to invite any children who are willing and able to come to the front for the message for all ages. I need to sit there. So it's kind of cold out there this morning, isn't it? Yeah. So maybe this story will warm you up a little bit, because this story comes from a place that is a lot warmer than it is in Wisconsin right now. So I want to tell you a story about a family that comes from a place far, far, far away from here. Not quite China, but about halfway around the world to a country called Syria. Anybody ever heard of the country of Syria? Yeah. Okay, well the country of Syria is really very close to where a very famous guy named Jesus of Nazareth actually grew up 2,000 years ago. And this is about a woman named Mona and her husband and their five children. Now there's been a lot of fighting, a war that's been going on in Syria for many, many years. And different groups of people have been using guns and tanks and airplanes and bombs to try to get control of the country for themselves. And eventually all this fighting reached the city of Daria, which is where the Alamoor family lived. And so Mona, the mom and Allah, the dad, they needed to leave with their five children in order to find a safe place where they could live. And they were joining over 7 million other Syrians who were caught in the middle of all of this fighting. And all these people just wanted to live in peace. And so the family left their hometown with everything that they could carry while they were just walking. And they had to walk and walk and try to avoid all those fighting forces and be very careful with the food that they had with them so that it would last all the way to their destination. And their destination was another country right next door called the country of Jordan. And eventually the Alamoors were able to get into Jordan and they were safe. And your name is Jordan, too, and that's the name of a country. That's right. It's a good name, isn't it? Yeah. So they got into Jordan, but in Jordan there were already hundreds of thousands of other people from Syria and they were all living in these huge refugee camps. And you can see a picture of that camp in back of me. Yeah. And for how many years do you think the Alamoors had to live in that big, big camp, all full of tents? Three years. They had to live there for three years. And all three years they could not become citizens of Jordan because the government wouldn't let them. And mom and dad couldn't get jobs because they were not allowed to work in the country of Jordan. And so they had to stay alive because people and other organizations like the United Nations made donations to keep everybody alive and to give them shelter. Well, Mona and Allah and the children, they all wanted desperately to go someplace else where it was safe and where they would have a better quality of life, where the children could actually go to a good school like the ones that all of you go to, where they would have a house or an apartment where there was actually a sink and a toilet indoors instead of a hundred yards away down a dusty road. Well, luckily enough, the Alamoors were allowed to come to the United States last year. Just a few Syrians were allowed to come into this country last year, and the Alamoors were lucky enough to be one of those families. But their problems didn't disappear just because they were in the United States because they needed all kinds of help to get started with their new life. Now fortunately, there's an organization called the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee that was able to help them out with job training for mom and dad and medical care and some basic information about how do you get along in the United States, which is so, so different from the country they came from, from Syria. Now the service committee, the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, has been helping refugees for many, many years, for over 70 years in fact. It's one of the most significant and important things that they do, but they can only continue to do this work if what happens. If people like all of us make contributions to help the service committee out with its work. And so that's why today we are asking everyone after the services or after your classes in the commons area to pick up one of these boxes. And some of you are old enough to know that we've passed these boxes out before. They're called guest at your table boxes, guest at your table boxes. And so just like the name says, you take this box and you put it on your table and when you eat a meal at home then you put some money, hopefully a $10 bill or so, or whatever you can afford into the box every time you have a meal. And gradually the box is going to fill up. If you put quarters in it, it's going to get heavy. If you put dollars in it, it's not going to be so heavy, but that's really, really good too. And then in about a month we'll ask you to bring these boxes back to First Unitarian Society and we're going to take all that money and we are going to send it to the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee so that they can help families like the ones that you just saw to find safety and to enjoy a life like the ones that we all enjoy today. So please remember to stop by after your classes. Remind your mom and dad if you don't remember. And until then we're inviting you to go to your classes and have a great time this morning. And we're going to sing you out with him, number 136. The first reading is a sampling from Eastern Wisdom. It comes to us from Jack Cornfield and it is called After the Ecstasy the Laundry. In the inevitable rising and falling, the cycles of expansion and contraction that come as we give birth to ourselves, there may be moments to push, to strive toward a spiritual goal, but more frequently the task is one of letting go, a finding a gracious heart that honors the changes of life. Suzuki Roshi once summed up all of Buddhist teaching in three simple words, not always so. Conditions may change. We come down from the summit. Mara returns. Honoring the truth of transience allows our experience of darkness and falling to be part of the greater whole. In all practices and traditions of freedom we find a heart's task to be quite simple. Life offers us just what it offers and our task is to bow to it, to meet it with understanding and compassion. There are no laurels to acquire. Charismatic teachers and spiritual attainments can become traps of striving in which we lose sight of our own Buddha nature here and now. Tibetan practices teach us that we each benefit by honoring and feeding the demons. When demons arrive, we must recognize that they are part of the dance of life itself. When they threaten, it is only our illusions that are in danger. The deeper our bow to the awesome changing powers of life, the wiser we will be. Only to the extent that we let go into change can we live in harmony with those around us and with our own true nature. No matter what the situation, awakening requires trust. Trust in the greater cycles of life, trust that something new eventually will be born, trust that whatever is, is perfect. Wise letting go is not detached removal from life. It is the heart's embrace of life itself, a willing opening to the full reality of the present. Thank you, Karen Rose. The second selection comes from the late historian Howard Zinn, perhaps best known for his people's history of the United States. In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power. In such a world, how do I manage to stay involved? How do I manage to be happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game until all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate because life is a gamble and not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act is to create at least the possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue indefinitely and we forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed inevitable. Looking at this catalog of huge surprises, it's clear that the struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in their determination to hold on to these things. That apparent power has, again and again and again, proven vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars, qualities such as moral fervor, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience, whether by blacks in Alabama and South Africa or workers and intellectuals in Poland and in Hungary. No cold calculation of the balance of power need deter people who are persuaded that their cause is just. Revolutionary change does not come about in one cataclysmic moment. Beware of such moments. But as an endless succession of surprises moving zigzag toward a more decent society and we don't have to engage in grand heroic actions to participate in this process of change, small acts when multiplied by millions of people can transform the world. And even if we don't win, there is fun and there is fulfillment in the fact that we have been involved with other good people in something ultimately worthwhile. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage and kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history is what will determine our lives. Transcription Thank you for that spirited rendition of that Edgar Guest poem. Two interesting characters recently caught my attention, both of whom were featured in stories in recent issues of the New Yorker magazine. The first was Yvonne Chauhanard. He's co-founder of the outdoor clothing and equipment company Patagonia. Chauhanard is now 77 years old. He's been described by one of his close associates as just about the most pessimistic person I've ever known. He has a tendency to regale his traveling companions with stories of species extinctions and dire threats to the world's ecosystems. But although he may be a pessimist, Chauhanard is by no means a defeatist. Having remarked that as a species we are screwed, he will then break into this bemused laugh. Now, under his guidance, Patagonia has arguably become the world's most socially and ecologically conscious clothing company. And Chauhanard himself continues to throw himself into the causes that are close to his heart. The man is remarkably free of illusions or of any trace of personal ambition, and he stresses the importance of effort regardless of the outcome. Now, sometimes Chauhanard is pleasantly surprised, as when he and an independent filmmaker collaborated on a documentary about the Susitna River in Alaska, which is an important spawning ground for wild salmon. The Alaskan government had already approved a dam on that untamed river. But when the conservative Alaskan governor saw the documentary, he immediately killed the project because of its impact on the salmon. You don't get clear-cut victories like that very often, Chauhanard remarked. But sometimes all it takes is one or two determined people. The second individual to pique my interest was Russell Moore. Russell Moore is a former professor of theology and currently serves as president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. This commission is perhaps the most influential body in that 14 million-member denomination. And the role of the commission is to determine where Southern Baptist should stand in relation to the great issues of our time. Now, the Southern Baptist Church traces its origins back to the 1840s when its adherents in the deep south broke away from the national movement over the slavery question. And for most of its history, the SBC was an exclusively white church, fiercely resistant to integration both internally and within Southern society more broadly. Although it now welcomes people of color, the Southern Baptist Convention remains a bastion of conservative Christian values. Women cannot serve as ministers. Same-sex relationships are anathema. Non-Christians are regarded as lost souls. Abortion is considered to be murder. Russell Moore is, in many respects, a standard issue Southern Baptist. But what makes him interesting, what makes him a unique leader, are certain positions that he has taken that put him at odds with most of the members of his denomination. Now, 81% of evangelical Christians cast their ballot for Donald Trump. But Russell Moore was outspoken in his criticism of the candidate, a stance that clearly did not endear him to other powerful figures in the denomination. Moore has also insisted that it is one's Christian duty to exercise compassion toward immigrants, including Syrian refugees. He has expressed concern over the police shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. For African Americans, he told his followers, such incidents reverberate with a history of state-sanctioned violence in a way that white Americans, including white evangelicals, simply don't understand. Describing himself as a little guy who looks like a cricket, Moore brushes off criticism from the rag and file. He is determined to use whatever moral leverage he has while acknowledging that in the short term, it's unlikely that the SBC is going to be moving very far in his direction. But he knows where he stands, and he knows why he stands there. I want Southern Baptists to grow better, he says, even if we are not growing bigger. He says that he claims that he would be quite satisfied as the leader of a moral minority. Now, you know, it's one thing to take the lead among unitary universalists on some of these issues. It's quite another thing when your constituency is overwhelmingly comprised of staunch conservative evangelicals. Imagine maintaining your poise and your sense of humor as a Southern Baptist in the midst of that struggle. But perhaps as a conservative, scripturally oriented Christian, Russell Moore is better prepared to take on that struggle than some of the rest of us. After all, when the Almighty banished our putative first parents from paradise, it was into a world of toil, a world of travail. Human existence, once so free of care, henceforth would be characterized by endless struggle. And so from a Christian perspective, this is what we were born for. So better accepted with a magic of grace. Now, although he was far from being a Christian and was in fact a secular Jew, Sigmund Freud somehow reached a similar conclusion. In his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the father of psychoanalysis proposed that from the moment of our birth, these two powerful instincts are contending with each other. And one of those instincts, Freud identified with Eros, which he defined broadly as the life force. This is the impulse that lifts up, binds together, vitalizes matter in its perpetual struggle with Thanatos, the death instinct. The goal of Thanatos is quiescence, a return to an earlier state of things characterized by a complete absence of tension. So in other words, according to Freud, to be alive is to be in a state of tension, a tension born of struggle. And we can retreat from it, we can seek to escape its claim on us, but to do so is, he would say, to court death, to surrender to Thanatos. In telling the story of his years as a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, Primo Levi offers firsthand testimony of how these two opposing forces play out, or played out in the lives of his fellow prisoners. As inmates, he observes, we all could be placed in just one of two categories, the saved or the drowned. Life in these camps was rigorously controlled, identical for all, inadequate to all needs. The conditions, Levi recalls, were more rigorous than any experimenter could have set up to establish what is essential to the conduct of the human animal in the struggle for life. And such an environment, in such an environment to sink was the easiest of matters. And the vast majority drowned within three months of entering those camps. They just followed a downward slope to the bottom, like streams that run to the sea. These were non-men, Levi writes, who march and labor in silence. The divine spark, dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living, one hesitates to call their death, death, in the face of which they have no fear, because they are just too tired to understand. Reading this grim account, I was reminded of the tales that survivors tell of being lost in a winter wilderness, as the cold intensifies, as the fatigue begins to overtake them. A person wants nothing more than just to give up the struggle, just lie down, let sleep, and hypothermia carry you away. We struggle. We struggle in order to stay alive. But the impulse to let go, to give up, it manifests itself in these extreme situations, but also in other ways as well. Because when any of us are world weary, when we feel overwhelmed by the challenges that the future holds in store, it is oh so tempting once again to cease and to desist. We lose confidence in ourselves, along with our faith in the world, and we become lethargic. We become indifferent. The Canadian novelist Robertson Davies once said, there's only one kind of failure that really breaks the spirit. It's the failure which manifests itself in a loss of interest in really important things. And indeed, there are some really important things at stake right now in our world. Climate change, threats to civil liberties, reproductive freedom, Medicare, social security, economic insecurity, consumer rights, universal suffrage, race relations, religious freedom to name just a few. It is a daunting list, and the necessity of defending each item on that list will become even greater as the next few years pass. As time passes, many of us will find it very tempting to retreat and try to find some measure of solace by tending our own gardens. In the most recent issue of the Unitarian Universalist world, former UUA President Bill Sinkford issued a challenge to his co-religionists. He said, in the past, too many UUs, and he was speaking mainly of white UUs, have opted for this vision of love rather than struggle. We clung to what we might describe as a kumbaya outlook, imagining that by being passively open and affirming that this multiracial, multicultural paradise would somehow come into being. And so the prophetic invitation to witness and to act, the invitation extended by Dr. Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez and others went largely unheeded. As a black American, Bill Sinkford knows something about the necessity of struggle. Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in a similar vein, when he reminds his young son that to be black in this country is to accept the necessity of struggle. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels, he declares. Now, to varying degrees, this is true of all of life. The difference, he tells his son, is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of that essential fact. And perhaps this is now true for all of us who cling to our progressive values. We, too, can no longer afford to ignore that essential fact, the fact that we are locked in a real struggle. If that was not clear before, it certainly ought to be by now. He reminds his son that success is by no means assured that victories, if any, will be small, that progress will be incremental, and the potential for disappointment will be significant. But he says, you are called to struggle not because it assures you of victory, but because it assures you of an honorable and sane life. Again, struggle is what keeps us vital, connected, engaged. It is arrows. It is what makes our love efficacious. I need to interject an important note of caution here. With all of the concerns that many of us have for our country and for the world, it's easy to lose focus. Because as individuals, each one of us has only so much time and energy and so many resources at our disposal. And if we spread ourselves too thin, we will not be as productive if we committed ourselves to the service of a single cause for which we felt a real, deep, essential passion. So if our greatest concern today is for refugees, Muslims of Middle Eastern extraction, undocumented aliens, we can put our energy to good use in the emerging sanctuary movement. If we feel that this new administration will renege on climate change, we can enlist with 350.org or the Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood has been struggling mightily for years to protect women's reproductive rights. Today they need more help than ever to serve low-income clients and create this wall of resistance to restrictive state and national legislation. Let your passion guide you and trust that others will contribute in their own chosen ways. There is an inherent risk in trying to attend to too many issues. In her book, The Rhythm of Compassion, Gail Strauby recalls how earlier in her life she threw herself into just about every good cause imaginable. And after a couple of decades, she succumbed to burnout, broke down completely. I lost the original joy that had inspired my work, she conceded. She'd been pushing herself relentlessly, but through the kind ministrations of a dear friend, she was able to get in touch with the underlying source of all of that drivenness. And it turned out, hey, it was a secret desire for status, the need to be admired, and a belief that she knew better than anybody else how to solve the world's problems. And these underlying hidden feelings were what kept Strauby at the center of this whirlwind as she sought to convince herself and others of her exceptional worthiness and virtue. In the end, it cost her her passion. This kind of shadow, she says, leads eventually to apathy and to indifference. And so she had to learn how to back off, to develop a healthy rhythm of care for others and care for herself and how to become much more focused in her efforts. None of us has the capacity to solve the world's problems, better to be guided by the wise and appropriately humble Dr. Who. In one episode of that perennially popular British program, Dr. Who's adversary says, do you really think that your puny efforts will change the course of destiny? With a canny wink, Dr. Who replies, no, but I just might tamper with it a bit. The scientific community can also help us, I think, to keep things in perspective. Several years ago, the renowned Harvard entomologist E. O. Wilson summed up 60 years of research and teaching experience in a little book entitled Letters to a Young Scientist. Wilson, too, emphasizes passion in that book because only a deep, enduring interest in your field can sustain a scientist for his or her entire career. And Wilson events real skepticism about the role that IQ plays in the scientific enterprise. He admitted that he himself, E. O. Wilson, topped out at 123. Extreme brightness may be a detriment, he says. It could be that IQ geniuses have it too easy in their early training. They don't have to sweat the science courses that they take in college. They find little reward in the necessarily tedious chores of data gathering and analysis. There must be the ability to pass long hours in study and research with pleasure, even though some of the effort will inevitably lead to a dead end. Such is the price of admission to the first rank of research scientists. Like the cause of social reform and environmental protection, the pursuit of scientific truth is a struggle. But it makes all the difference in the world if we can see and accept it as a joyful struggle. There are no laurels to be acquired, Jack Cornfield said. So our task is just to bow to life what it has to offer and meet it with understanding and compassion. Struggle we must. So let us embrace it and recognize it as nothing more and nothing less than love turned to action. And even if you don't win, Howard Zinn said, there is fun, there is fulfillment in the fact that we have been involved with other good people in something that is ultimately worthwhile. May this be true for all of us in the months and the years ahead. Blessed be that man. And now I invite you to participate in the giving and the receiving of our offering and in the spirit of giving. Your gifts will be shared with the river food, pantry, Dane County's busiest food pantry. Please be generous. We gather each week as a community of memory and of hope and to this time and place we bring our whole and sometimes our broken selves. We carry with us the joys and sorrows of the recent past, seeking here a place where they might be received and shared and celebrated. There was one entry in our Cares of the Congregation book today from Jody Weldon, and she invites us to send healing and love to her friend, Sherry, and her family as she recovers and mends. In addition to that concern just mentioned, we would also acknowledge any unexpressed joys or sorrows that occurred to you. We hold those with equal concern in our hearts. Let us now sit silently for just a few moments in the spirit of empathy and hope. By virtue of our time together this morning may our burdens be lightened and our joys expanded. And now I invite you to turn to our closing hymn and once again rise in body or in spirit. Please be seated for the benediction and the postlude. To the blessings of this season may our senses be alert, may our hearts take heed. For in a busy and sometimes tragic world beauty is often the comfort most sure. To the blessings of warm accepting human relationships may our hearts be open, may our minds take heed. For in this lonely and sometimes frightening world friendship is our support and it upholds us. To the blessings of high ideals and noble aspirations may our minds be open, may our hands take heed. For in a troubled and sometimes dangerous world justice is often the hope that sustains us. Blessed be the life that comforts, sustains and upholds us. And blessed be we who are awakened to its grace. Amen.