 Please join in a moment of centering silence so we can be fully present with each other this morning. And now let's get musically present with each other by turning to the words for our in-gathering hymn, which you'll find inside your order of service. Everybody and happy New Year. Let me be the 671st person to wish you a happy New Year. And welcome to the first Sunday of 2016 here at First Unitarian Society, where independent thinkers gather in a safe, nurturing environment to explore issues of social, spiritual, and ethical significance as we try to make a difference in this world. I'm Steve Goldberg, a proud, free-thinking member of this congregation, and it is a special pleasure to extend a happy hello to any guests, visitors, and newcomers. If this is your first time at First Unitarian Society, I think you'll find it's a special place, and if you'd like to learn more about our special buildings, we usually offer a guided tour after every service. Just meet over here at the windows after the service, and we'll take care of you. And speaking of taking care of each other today, this would be the perfect time, and I think you all know the drill, to silence those pesky electronic devices that you simply will not need for the next hour. And those of you at home, if you could do the same, your ring towns really annoy us. And if you are accompanied this morning by a youngster at today's service, and your youngster is concerned that you might get fidgety during the service, we offer some private spaces from which you can enjoy the service, including our child haven in the back corner of the auditorium, and some comfortable seating outside the doorway right in the commons. Today's service is brought to us as it is every weekend by a dedicated team of volunteers, whose names I will read to you now. They deserve our thanks, please give them a hug or a handshake or a happy New Year's greeting for their service. Handling the sound system, Maureen Friend, thank you Maureen. Our greeter upstairs with a smiley face was Hannah Pinkerton, and speaking of smiley faces and smiley is our lay minister today. Wally Brinkman, Doug Hill and Patricia Becker are handling the ushering duties today, and Jean Hills is hosting our hospitality and coffee after the service. John Heitman is making sure that the vegetation here on the stage is well watered, and Becky Smith generously donated the flowers that you see behind me. Just a couple of announcements before we continue with the service today. First of all, the high school youth group would like you to know about the following event, and they start with a listing of food, like chicken paprikaish, roasted vegetables, spring rolls, cherry cake, not to be confused with cherry coke, and macaroons. When you listen to that list of food, is your mouth watering? Maybe? Well, then join us Saturday, January 9 next weekend from 6.30 to 8.30 in the evening for our annual dinner and celebration of our international partnership. This special evening is created by our high school youth group, and it supports student scholarships and music programs of our partner church in Romania, as well as a UU high school student who is studying in the Philippines. All proceeds from the dinner support the work of these programs, and if you want to join us, you'll experience delicious food, music, and dancing. Check with Kelly in the Commons at a special information table after the service to sign up. And the other two announcements include some important dates. One is Sunday, January 24, three weeks from today. After the 11 o'clock service, the Board of Trustees will host a financial update for everybody. To get an update on the finances of the congregation, join us after the 11 o'clock service on Sunday, January 24, starting with a lunch served by the world-famous food haulers, and then followed by the financial update. And speaking of dates, it's 117 days until Cabaret on April 29, Friday evening right here, one of the most enjoyable, entertaining, and fun events on the FUS calendar again, Friday, April 29, 117 days from now. Looking forward to that. And speaking of things to look forward to, now is your chance to sit back or lean forward and enjoy today's service. I know it will touch your heart, stir your spirit, and trigger one or two new thoughts. We're really glad you're here. Happy New Year. Come as you are. You don't need to get your beliefs on straight first before you come. Come as you are. Come with your questions, your ambiguities, your doubts. Come and be welcome. Come here as you are. This morning, let us be together. Let us grow in free and open religious community. I invite you to stand in body and spirit for the lighting of our chalice. And if you will join me in the words of affirmation by reading the bold and italicized sections. Let religion be to us life and joy, an eye that glories in nature's majesty and beauty, and a heart that rejoices in deeds of kindness and courage. Let it be to us hope and purpose, and a discovering of opportunities to achieve excellence through daily tasks. Let it be a call to generous action. Now, in the spirit of that generosity, I invite you to turn to your neighbor and exchange with them a warm greeting. If there are any children that would like to join me in the front for the message for all ages, so that everybody have a good Christmas holiday, is Christmas fun? Yeah. So, who's the most important person at Christmas, other than your parents? Me. You? Who do you think? Jesus? Who's the guy with the big red suit? Santa Claus, that's right. So, what if I was to say something about Santa Claus that you didn't agree with, that you thought was wrong, and you raised your hand and said, no, I don't think that that's true. What would happen next? You know, would we get into a fight? Yeah, an argument? It sometimes happens, that doesn't it? I think here, I think here what would happen is that we would have a conversation, and hopefully it would be a very, very cordial conversation. It would be nice to each other, we'd ask each other questions, right? Why do you believe that, and why do I believe that? Would we try to do it that way? I think that that's probably what we try to do. We try to have a conversation about Santa Claus. Okay. Now, what I wanted to tell you is a little story that was 500 years old. Because 500 years ago, if I disagreed with someone about, maybe not Santa Claus, but about God or about Jesus, then they wouldn't necessarily be very nice to me. So, this is a story about a man named Sebastian, and he was born in 1515. Now, this is 2016, so that's over 500 years ago. And he was born in the country of France, and when he was going to school, we don't know a whole lot about him, but we do know that by the time he finished his grade school, he could speak three different languages. He could speak French, and Italian, and German. He couldn't speak English as far as we know. And then when he went to college, Sebastian learned how to speak and to write three other languages, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. So, he knew six different languages. You think he was smart? Yeah, he was pretty smart. And he also could play musical instruments, and he could write really beautiful poetry. Now, he was growing up in France, and France was a Roman Catholic country. Everybody basically went to the same church, the Roman Catholic church. But he noticed something when he was growing up. The people who disagreed with what the church was teaching and what the priest said, they didn't have conversations with the priests. The priests would oftentimes put them in jail, and then they might hurt them. Sometimes they hurt them very badly because they disagreed with what the church had to say. And Sebastian thought that was wrong. He said, I don't think that's the way we ought to treat each other, just because we disagree about things. And so, he decided to move from France to a country in Switzerland called Geneva, because he thought that people would be a lot nicer to each other in Geneva. And he had also read some books by a man named John Calvin, who lived in Geneva, and he was the head of the church there. And he thought, well, I'll go and I'll work with John Calvin, because I think that he's going to allow me to disagree with him sometimes, and it's going to be okay. So he went to Geneva, and everything was fine at first. John Calvin and Michael Servita, and Sebastian got along just fine. And I want to show you a picture. This is what Sebastian looked like. That's the way that people dressed 500 years ago. Yeah, really did. And it's like I say, he went to Geneva and he met this guy, John Calvin. And this was John Calvin. And so they got along pretty well at first. It is a picture. They painted it. That's right, it's a painting. They didn't have any cameras back then. So anyway, the two of them got along pretty well, and John Calvin really understood that Sebastian was a really smart guy, and he thought he can really be helpful here in Geneva. But then, Sebastian had an idea. He said, you know, all the Bibles here in Geneva are written in the Latin language. But there's a problem with that. Most people can't read Latin. Only a few people who are smart like me can read Latin. So why don't I translate the Bible from Latin into the French language? Because lots of people can read French. And then many more people will be able to read the Bible. That was a pretty good idea, except John Calvin didn't think it was such a great idea. Partly because it wasn't his idea, but also partly because if everybody starts reading the Bible, they might decide what it means, and it might not mean what John Calvin thought it would mean. So they would have more and more disagreements. And so John Calvin got mad at Sebastian, and Sebastian said, I'm out of here, I don't need this. And so he went to live in another Swiss city called Basel, and he got a job there teaching Greek and Latin, and he was perfectly happy. Until he heard that John Calvin back in Geneva arrested a man named Michael Servetus. And Michael Servetus was one of our Unitarian ancestors. And Michael Servetus did not agree with John Calvin about Jesus and about God, and he wrote a book about it. And John Calvin had read Servetus's book, and he said, this is bad, bad stuff. So he threw Michael Servetus into prison, and then in the end he ended up killing Michael Servetus. And when Sebastian heard about that, he said, I've got to do something. I'm going to write my own book. And so he began furiously writing this book. It was called Concerning Heretics. A heretic is someone who doesn't believe the way that you do. And in that book, Concerning Heretics, Sebastian said it is never, never right to hurt somebody because they disagree with your ideas, which is what happened with the Roman Catholics and it's what happened with John Calvin. And he sent a copy of the book to John Calvin. And what do you think John Calvin thought of the book? Bad, not so good. Exactly, not so good. And so John Calvin contacted the authorities, the important people in Basel, and said you need to arrest this Sebastian guy. You need to put him in jail for what he's written. But the people in Basel really liked Sebastian. They thought he was a good guy, and so they didn't hurt him and they did not put him in the prison. Well, it wasn't all that many years until Sebastian actually died and was kind of worn out from all this controversy. But after he died, he had left us a legacy because that book, Concerning Heretics, was the first book of its kind ever to be published, a defense of religious toleration that we should listen to each other respectfully and we should only try to do what Jesus taught in the Gospels, which is to be kind and good to each other. So that's Sebastian and his story and I hope you learned something from it and we'll sing you out now with our next hymn as you go to your classes. Sebastian's last name was Castelio and he did write the book entitled Concerning Heretics, which was a seminal work in the history of free thought, one of our free thought forebears. And another was Robert Green Ingersoll, an American who lived from 1833 to 1899 and was one of the most popular public speakers of the late 19th century. Every church that has a higher standard than human welfare is dangerous. True religion is not a theory, it is a practice, it is not a creed, it is a life. True religion is subordination of the passions to the perceptions of the intellect. Religion has not civilized man, man has civilized religion. And religion does not consist in worshiping gods, but in aiding the well-being and the happiness of humankind. No human being knows whether any god exists or not. All that has ever been said or written about our god or the gods of other people has no known fact or foundation. Words without thoughts, clouds without rain. Let us put theology out of religion. Religion and morality, they have nothing in common, and yet there is no religion except the practice of morality. What you call religion, that's merely superstition. Real religion means the doing of justice. Real religion consists in the duties of man to man, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, defending the innocent, and saying what you believe to be true. Now we do not pretend to have circumnavigated everything and to have solved all difficulties, but we do believe that it is better to love men than to fear gods, that it is grander and nobler to think and investigate for yourself than to repeat a creed. We are satisfied that there can be but little liberty on this our earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven. We do not expect to accomplish everything in our day, but we do want to do what we can, and to render all service possible to the holy cause of human freedom. We know that doing away with gods and supernatural persons and power, that is not an end in itself. It's a means to an end, the real end being the happiness of humankind. A religion that does not command the respect of the greatest minds will in a little while incite the mockery of all minds. In the second reading from Walter Littman's book, Preface to Morals, published in 1929, Walter Littman was a leading public intellectual of the early 20th century. Insofar as men have lost their belief in a heavenly king, they have to find some other ground for their moral choices than revelation of his will. It follows necessarily that they must find the tests of righteousness wholly within human experience. The difference between good and evil must be a difference which men themselves recognize and understand. And happiness cannot be the reward of virtue. It must be the intelligible consequence of it. It follows, too, that virtue cannot be commanded. It must be willed out of personal conviction and desire, and such a morality may properly be called humanism, for it is centered not in the superhuman, but in human nature. When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists. Now, it is evident that a morality of humanism presents far greater difficulties than a morality premised on theism. For one thing, it is immediately put to a much severer test. Humanism cannot claim all eternity in which its promises may be fulfilled, unless its wisdom in any sphere of life is demonstrated within a reasonable time in actual human experience. There is nothing to commend it. Teachers of theistic morality, when the audience is devout, have only to fortify the impression that the rules of conduct are certified by God, that invisible king. The ethical problem for the common man is to recognize the well-known credentials of his teachers. In practice, he may merely decide whether the priest or the prince or the elders are what they claim to be, but once he has done that, there are no more radical questions to be asked. But the teachers of humanism, they have no credentials. They have to prove their case by the test of mundane experience. They speak with no authority that can be scrutinized once and for all, and then forever after accepted. They can proclaim no rule of conduct with certainty for they have no inherent personal authority, and never be sure that they are altogether right. And so they cannot command, they cannot truly exhort, they can only inquire, infer and persuade. They have only human insight to guide them, and those to whom they speak must themselves accept in the end the full responsibility for the consequences of any advice that they choose to accept. And yet, with all of its difficulties, there is a morality of humanism that men must turn to when the ancient order of things dissolves, and when they find that they can no longer believe seriously and deeply that they are governed from heaven, there will be anarchy in their souls until, by conscious effort, they find a way to govern themselves. And after those heady readings for our period of meditation, we'll listen to Linda on the Dulce and the Harp. About 20 miles up the road from here, and a few blocks off of U.S. 12 in Sock City, there is a stately wood frame building known to local residents as Park Hall. Constructed in 1884, it is a listed U.S. historical site, and for the last 130 years, it has served as home to the free congregation of Sock County. But the roots of this particular community have even farther back to a group of German immigrants who settled on the banks of the Wisconsin River and established this their spiritual home in 1852. These were men and women known as 40ators. Refugees from Germany and Austria, whose dreams of democracy and religious freedom in their own countries had been dashed by a resurgence of authoritarianism after a heady period of revolution and reform over the years of the 19th century. In the decade leading up to the Civil War, many forward-thinking and progressive Germans settled in the Upper Midwest, bringing with them a unique perspective on religion. At one time, there were as many as 30 German-speaking free congregations in Wisconsin alone. And these pioneers, Jeff Strobel wrote in 1984, were discontented with the traditional doctrine of the established churches. And so they created a fellowship without doctrine or creed, with no minister, no hymns, no authorized version of the Holy Bible. In fact, nothing beyond the realm of scientific fact and rational thought was professed as true. And indeed, in their articles of incorporation, the founders of the Sock City Free Congregation listed among others these principles and objectives. A strict allegiance to reason, which is defamed by the priests of all revealed religion. Advancement of the intellectual and moral freedom of man and of his independence in thinking, deciding, and acting. The rejection of all creeds and dogmas, and the refusal to take a position on questions of God and immortality. The use of ritual and ceremony, as long as they are sensible, beautiful, and voluntary. Leadership in these free congregations was vested not in a minister or in a priest, but in a speaker, a speaker chosen by the congregation following an appraisal of his or her qualifications and, of course, his or her moral character. Sock City's first speaker was a man named Edvard Schrader, who served in this capacity for the first 36 years of its existence. Three dates stand out in the Free Congregation's liturgical calendar. There is a spring festival, which we all look forward to, Founders' Day celebrating the people who had established that congregation initially, and a third celebration, Pains Fest, a celebration of the life and legacy of Thomas Paine. I have reviewed this notable chapter in the history of American free thought for two reasons. First, because that congregation in Sock City is the last of its kind in the United States, the sole remnant of a once-thriving movement. As of 1955, it took on a dual identity, as both unitarian and a free thought institution, a step that probably assured that congregation's survival. And the second reason that I point all of this out is that this congregation represents one side of the American free thought movement, its institutional aspect. Over the years, however, historians and commentators have tended to focus mainly on a small coterie of outspoken, independent-minded individuals who also embraced this label, free thinker, and in so doing, achieved significant notoriety. So let's begin then with those free spirits, the latter that I just referred to. The man often recognized as the founder of American free thought was, in fact, Thomas Paine. He was regarded as a national hero for his revolutionary writing, and most notably for the widely distributed 1776 pamphlet, Common Sense. Thomas Paine fell from grace when his religious views came to light. Two decades after Common Sense, he published The Age of Reason, and in that particular book he delivered a broadside against the major religions in all of their varied forms. And although that book sold briskly, it also made the author a pariah, at least in this country. Paine pulled no punches in that book. Every national church, he wrote, has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain select individuals. And so he wrote, the Jews have their Moses, the Christians have their Jesus, the Turks have their Muhammad, as if God were not open to every man alike. Each of these churches accuses the other of unbelief, and I, for my part, I disbelieve them all. Although Thomas Jefferson, whose own perspective on religion resembled Paine's, continued to befriend him, the man that Teddy Roosevelt, once called a filthy little atheist, died ignominiously at the age of 72. The Quakers vetoed the burial of Paine in their cemetery in New Rochelle, New York, so Paine eventually was quietly interred under a walnut tree on his own farm. Still, Paine's ideas lived on, influencing such 19th century notables as the suffragettes Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Mark Twain, and Robert Green Ingersoll, and America's 16th president, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln, as is well known, never belonged to a church. Indeed, early in his political career, his opponents called Lincoln an infidel, an accusation that probably contributed to his defeat when he first ran for elective office. As a young man, Lincoln, red with approval, Paine's the age of reason, and his long-time law partner, William Herndon, later insisted that it was Lincoln's arguments that caused him, Herndon, to lose his faith. During his career, Lincoln seldom invoked the deity in his speeches, and when he did, as in the second inaugural address, the references to God were clouded and inconsistent. Susan Jacoby writes that he offered little comfort for those who, in every crisis or war, chant, God is on our side. Little comfort to folks like that. This period in American history, from the 1840s through the 1880s, was, Jacoby says, the golden age of American free thought. It was the era of Colonel Robert Green Ingersoll, a man known to the public as the great agnostic. A captivating public speaker, Ingersoll was an attorney by training a Civil War hero and a prominent political figure whose endorsement was sought after by candidates for high office, including the office of the presidency. His reputation and his talent assured Ingersoll a curious and oftentimes a receptive audience for his later speeches, in which he debunked religion. In his public lectures, often attended by thousands, Ingersoll would systematically and satirically dissect the propositions contained in the Bible. One of his most popular pieces was simply entitled Some Mistakes of Moses. And in another, The Gods, he argued that throughout history the gods had failed humankind because they were simply a product of human longing and of human projection. Jacoby says that he was the first American to lay out a coherent secular humanist alternative and to present the case for free thought to a broader public. There was no 20th century equivalent of Robert Green Ingersoll, Jacoby says, and there is no 21st century equivalent either. Now that's not to say that Ingersoll wasn't controversial in his own time, wasn't the target of severe criticism and disapproval. Two days after his death, The New York Times accused Ingersoll of depriving people of their religion without pretending to offer them anything in its stead. And thus, The Times concluded, his effect on the public could not have been otherwise than bad. But then there were others, like Wisconsin's own fighting Bob LaFollette, who rose to Ingersoll's defense. This man has helped to shape my own social conscience, LaFollette wrote. And he wants men to think boldly about all things. He demands intellectual and moral courage. He wants men to follow wherever the truth might lead them. He was a rare, bold, heroic figure, LaFollette concluded. And that same boldness defined Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who with Susan B. Anthony and Lucretia Mott led the charge for women's rights during the second half of the 19th century. All three of these women were religious free thinkers and nonconformists, Anthony a Unitarian, Mott a progressive Quaker, and Stanton an independent free spirit. This stay-at-home mother of seven children, Stanton wrote the speeches that the unencumbered Anthony subsequently delivered. It was a powerful collaboration for suffrage until, until the popular Stanton, like Thomas Paine, began to speak out on matters religious. She had let her views be known as early as 1848 at the First Women's Convention in Seneca Falls. But as time passed, she became increasingly outspoken. At the 1885 meeting of the National Women's Suffrage Association, Stanton offered a resolution that condemned all religions indiscriminately for teaching that woman is the afterthought in creation, her sex is a misfortune, marriage a condition of subordination, and maternity a curse. Ten years later, her thoroughly researched and highly controversial women's Bible was published. You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded women, she wrote. As long as ministers stand up and tell us that Christ is the head of the church, and so man is the head of the woman, how are we to break the chains which have held women down throughout the ages? Well, with this publication, the Women's Bible, this woman who had been affectionately dubbed as America's grandmother was now the subject of withering criticism. Stanton was repudiated not only by the devout, but by most of her co-workers in the Suffrage Movement as well. And so in 1897, the Suffrage Association itself passed a resolution disavowing the women's Bible and in effect disavowing the founder of the entire Suffrage Movement. Such is the power of religion. Within a couple of decades of Ingersoll's death and Stanton's fall from grace, the Freethought Movement ceased to be a distinct intellectual force in American life, Susan Jacobi writes. But while it is undoubtedly true that no one of the stature of Stanton or Ingersoll or Paine has risen to carry that banner forward, the cause that these men and women served was then and is now alive and well in institutional form. Organizations as various as the Society for Ethical Culture, the American Humanist Association, the Society of Friends, and very much in the spirit of Stanton and Ingersoll, Madison's Freedom from Religion Foundation, all of these have become Freethought Citadels. But our own movement, Unitarian Universalism, is without question the most prominent organization upholding and practicing the principles of Freethought today. And this has been true not just in recent decades, but for at least 200 years. So take William Bentley. William Bentley served the Unitarian Church in Salem, Massachusetts from 1783 until his death in 1819. He was known for his scholarly, undogmatic preaching and his skepticism regarding the divinity of Christ. And Bentley made such a positive impression on Thomas Jefferson that the latter offered him the presidency of the University of Virginia. Bentley demurred, telling Jefferson that he could not bear to leave his longtime parishioners in Salem. And yet, Susan Jacobi writes, Unitarianism moved religion itself into the camp of Enlightenment rationalism. At the core of a religion of a man like Bentley lay not an unquestioning faith, but a deep reverence for the power of the human mind and the value of human doubt. Now in subsequent decades, our denomination, Unitarianism, lurched toward orthodoxy. And in 1866, a conservative faction of the American Unitarian Association sought to impose a Christian creed on our member churches, which they succeeded in doing for two years. As a result, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, This church is no longer large enough for a man like me. And he and others subsequently left the association and they joined forces to establish a rival free religious association where free thinkers of all strikes would be welcome. On matters of belief, there was little unanimity among the ministers and the lay persons that belonged to this new association, but they were all of one mind in a rejecting dogmatic authority and in maintaining an open mind with respect to basic theological questions such as the existence of God or the likelihood of immortality. One Unitarian minister of that era described the free religious association as a spiritual anti-slavery society. Now although he never joined this particular association, Jenkins Lloyd-Jones, the uncle of Frank Lloyd Wright and an influential minister who helped establish Unitarianism right here in Madison, Jenkins Lloyd-Jones carried the free thought torch throughout his long and illustrious career. While he was serving our church in Jamesville in the 1870s, Jenkins Lloyd-Jones began publishing a small periodical called the Sunday School and it was unique for its time because of its objectivity and its inclusiveness. One issue focused on a topic called Leaves from God's Book of Revelation. Leaves from God's Book of Revelation. And it offered a series of lessons completely unique for its time on the world of nature, lessons drawn not from the Bible but from the life sciences themselves. Another series was called Great Teachers and it introduced readers to the thought of Zoroaster and Buddha and Confucius and Socrates as well as the Hebrew prophets and Jesus of Nazareth. Jenkins Lloyd-Jones once described his ideal Unitarian church in these words. It will be a free Congress of independent souls. It is to lead in the campaign for more truth rather than stand guard over some petty fragment of acquired truth. It will be the thinker's home and over its portals no dogmatic test will be written to ward off honest thought or an earnest seeker. This church must emphasize universal brotherhood. It will stand upon the grand emphasis of the greatest word of our century, the word unity. Thus it will seek out and welcome rich and poor, high and low, unbeliever and believer alike. This 19th century description of a Unitarian church comes close to what our own congregation as well as the one in Sock City stands for today both in theory and in practice. And it is wholly in keeping with our original 1879 Bond of Union which holds before us a spiritual ideal that we still strive to live up to. A movement such as ours is vitally important in today's media-driven world where religious iconoclasm and free thought are either disparaged or completely ignored. A world in which public figures try to outdo each other in proclaiming their orthodoxy. And then at the other end of the ideological spectrum we find vociferous critics of religion like Bill Maher, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett whose ideological rigidity sometimes seems antithetical to the spirit of genuine free thought that these people represented. And then there are the nearly 20% of Americans today who identify as nuns. They have no religious affiliation. They are undogmatic, doubtful souls who perhaps could benefit from a companionable spiritual home like this one. Young nuns now outnumber young evangelicals by three to two. And in explaining their disaffection many say that they are simply turned off by the intolerance, the homophobia and hypocrisy that they have witnessed in America's established churches. Most of these men and women are not religiously indifferent but they are disillusioned. Are they prospective candidates for membership in a non-cretal free thought community such as ours? As we enter a new year I would encourage you to think about your own friends, family members, colleagues, the nuns that you know who may very well share your own religious values. Invite them to join you at FUS some Saturday evening or Sunday morning for if we don't keep this all-American tradition alive and strong no one else will. Blessed be I don't know. Our offering today will be shared equally with the Madison Area Rehabilitation Center that is doing, I understand, very, very good work with at least 600 of our local citizens with developmental disabilities. 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 celebrated and shared. We take a moment now to share the following. Gordon Olson tells us that his father passed away last month at the ripe old age of 90 so that he was buried in western Minnesota but he lived a very long and fruitful and meaningful life. So our condolence go to Gordon and his family. And then a few weeks ago FUS member Cease Bollard asked for our concern and our prayers for a niece of hers who had been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. And then Cease found out just recently that her niece's mother, her sister-in-law was also recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. So it's a very troubled star struck family right now and we wish Cease and her family our best wishes. And then lastly, we were asked to please hold Sarah and Ron in our hearts because they lost their beloved dog Quincy on New Year's Day two days ago. And as someone who has an almost 16 year old dog I can certainly appreciate the gravity of that loss as well. And for any joys and sorrows that have remained unarticulated in our midst, we hold those with equal concern in our hearts. Let us join together for just a moment or two of silent meditation in the spirit of empathy and hope. And so may our coming together for this brief time today may it serve to lighten our burdens and expand our joys. And so may our closing hymn, if you will rise and bite your spirit once more, is number 113 Where is our Holy Church? Going forth from here may we find the courage to live our faith, to speak our truth and to strive together for a world where freedom abounds peace prevails and justice is done. May we know the fullness of love without fear and security without oppression. May we hold one another in the deep and tender places of compassion and know that the divine spark within makes soul mates of us all. Blessed be an Amen. Please be seated for the postlude.