 Let's please all join in a few moments of centering silence. Please remain seated as we sing our in-gathering hymn, number 300, and the words are also located 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 for each individual, as together we seek to be a force for good in the world. My name is Karen Rose Grevler, and on behalf of the congregation, I want 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's 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 drinks and your questions. Members of our staff and lay ministry will be on hand to welcome you. Please also look for people 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 building tours after each service. If you would like to learn more about this sustainably designed addition or our National Landmark Meeting House across the parking lot there, please meet near the large glass windows on what's your left side of the auditorium after this service. We welcome children to stay for the duration of the service, however, because it's sometimes difficult for some in attendance to hear in this lively acoustical environment. Our child haven right back in that corner and the commons outside are excellent places to go. If your child wants to talk, sing, dance, run around any normal childhood things. This service can still be seen and heard well from those areas. This would also be an excellent time to turn off any devices that might cause a disturbance during the service, especially cell phone ringers, please. And I'd now like to acknowledge those individuals who help our services run smoothly. Maureen Friend is on sound today and Smiley is our lay minister. Penny Mori is our greeter and ushers include Doug Hill and Smiley and Karen Jagger. Jeannie Sears is filling in back in the kitchen because Jeannie Hills is not well today, so if anyone else can please join Jeannie after the service to help back in the kitchen that would be excellent and thank you very much for that. Please note the announcements in the red floor insert of your order of service, which includes upcoming events at the society and provides more information about today's activities. I have some to highlight right now. Those include Capitol Times editor and FUS member Paul Fanlin would like to extend an invitation to attend the Cap Times idea fest next weekend to any of us as his guest. Anyone associated with FUS can go to captimesideafest.com and use his code, which is Paul Fanlin as your guest as your code for free admission that's very generous thank you. So see Michael after the service if you have any questions. The music department search committee, be still my heart, has begun the task of finding our new music director and they are interested in knowing your thoughts regarding our music program and the role it plays here at FUS. There is a table set up out in the commons for you to visit after today's service. It's over by coffee. Please do stop by, discuss your thoughts, fill out a note or complete the prepared survey sharing your ideas and wishes. Another one here. As a founding congregation of the Dane Sanctuary Coalition all members of FUS are invited to attend the first coalition meeting. It will take place next Sunday, September 17 at 7 p.m. at the Madison Christian Community on Old Sock Road. And one more thing, nope that one's not good anymore, that was just for nine o'clock, so never mind, geez, again welcome. You trust today's service will stimulate your mind, touch your heart and stir your spirit. My name is T.K. Browning. I'm the new ministerial intern here at FUS. You might remember me and my family up there in the balcony. We were members here from 2012 to 2014 while my partner was getting her master's degree at UW. We've been the last three years in Austin, Texas where I went to seminary and my partner began her PhD work and now I'm here and I'm super excited I'll be here for this academic year and hopefully get to know a lot of you. I have the opening words today, the opening words are by Vern Barnett. On the cusp of autumn we gather as members of the great congregation whose membership embraces all humanity, whose temple is the world, the world of nature, of history, of inner self. Our faith is to proclaim the sacred presence of life. For every person is a child of the universe. Beyond all barriers of age, race, nation, class, creed, gender, ableness or loyalty, we arise within each other, rely upon each other, and are secure in ourselves only when all are secure and free. Our covenant is to lift the burden of every oppression, open the locks of every captivity, heal grief and anger, and live in communion with all persons. Thus we do resolve to honor the planet, each person, and our own capacity to shape a better future. And on this day we hold in our thoughts the people of Houston in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, the Caribbean islands, and Florida as Hurricane Irma continues her approach. We now have the lighting of the chalice, if you can all please stand and join me in the words found in your order of service with the help of Karen. Ours is a faith in people, hope for tomorrow's child, events in a continuity that spans all time. It looks not to a perfect heaven, but toward a good earth. It is respectful of the past, but not limited to it. It is trust in growing and conspiracy with change. It is spiritual responsibility for a moral tomorrow. We're about to sing him 347 Gather the Spirit, but first I ask you to turn to your neighbor and greet the good people next to you. Good to see you. Matt here, excited for classes to start today? You don't have to be, but you can be if you want. The story today is Good People Everywhere by Linnea Gellin. Today in neighborhoods all over the world, millions and millions of people are doing very good things. You got a picture up here if you want to take a look. Today carpenters are building fences and houses and repairing homes that have been damaged by storms like the hurricane in Texas and in Florida. Today moms and dads are cooking dinners for their families. And cooks are working in kitchens, making meals for people who don't have homes. Doctors and midwives are delivering babies and gently passing them into the eager arms of their parents. Teachers are teaching math, spelling, and reading skills. Musicians are opening their hearts and playing beautiful music. And dancers are leaping across dance floors, practicing performances that will bring joy to their friends and families and their communities. Today people are planting seeds, picking fruits and vegetables, and driving them to grocery stores all around the world so you can have a ripe, juicy orange in your lunch. Who likes oranges? Oh, I want orange vans. Today a child is trying her very best to do well on her science test. And a teenage boy is helping a young child who is sad and lonely. Today a first grade boy, who's a first grader? Anybody a first grader? A couple over there? A couple over here? A first grade boy is helping a friend who has a skin knee. Who's ever had a skin knee? And a big sister, who's a big sister? Anybody here a big sister? A few of those? She's holding her baby brother while her mother runs across the street to help a neighbor. Today millions and millions of people will do very good things. And so will you. I wonder, what will you do? Can anyone tell me something good that they've done or that they're planning to do to help somebody? You fix somebody's home or you're planning on it? Anybody else? No good ideas? Lula? No? All right. Oh, you got one? Okay. What's that? Ah, giving some treats to your chickens. That's nice. All right. It's time to go to class. We're going to sing him 182, A Beauty in a Life, while you guys head off to classes through these back doors back here. Hey man. I'll come with you. We continue our service with the first of two readings. This is drawn from Herman Melville's novelette, Billy Budd. And for those of you who remember your high school literature classes, Billy Budd is a sailor serving in the British Royal Navy, and he has been falsely accused of conspiring to mutiny by the ship's jealous and abusive master at arms, John Claggert. Billy is enraged by this false accusation, and he strikes Claggert in the forehead inadvertently killing him. The crew and even the captain personally believe that Billy's act was justified, and yet protocol does demand that a court-martial be held aboard the ship. So here in this particular passage, the captain, Captain Veer, addresses his crew. Your scruples, do they move as in the dusk? Challenge them. Make them advance and declare themselves. Come now. Do they import something like this? If mindless of palliating circumstances, we are bound to regard the death of the master at arms as the prisoner's deed, then does this constitute a capital crime whereof the penalty is a mortal one? But in natural justice is nothing but the prisoner's overt act to be considered. How can we adjudge to summary and shameful death a fellow creature innocent before God and whom we feel to be so? Does that state the matter aright? You sign your sad assent. Well, I too feel that, the full force of that. It is natural. But do these brass buttons that we wear attest that our allegiance is to nature? No, to the king. Though the ocean which is in violent nature primeval, though this be the element where we move and have our being as sailors, yet as the king's officers lies our duty in a sphere that is correspondingly natural, so little is this true that in receiving our commissions, we in the most important regards cease to be natural free agents. When war is declared, are we the commissioned fighters previously consulted? No, we fight at command. If our judgments approve of the war, well, that is but coincidence. So too in other particulars, and so too now. For suppose condemnation to follow these present proceedings? Would it be so much we ourselves that should condemn as it would be martial law that is operating through us? For that law and the rigor of it, we are not responsible. Our vowed responsibility is this, that however pitilessly the law may operate in any instance, we nevertheless must adhere to it and we must administer it. The second reading in a somewhat different vein but related to the overarching theme that we'll be following this morning comes from Harvey Cox's essay, The Market as God that was first published in 1999. Cox taught at the Harvard Divinity School for many years. He is the author of many books on the interface between religion and culture. He writes, since the earliest stages of human history there have been bazaars and rialtoes and trading posts, all markets. But the market was never God because there were other centers of value and meaning. There were other gods. The market operated within a plethora of other institutions that restrained it. As Carl Polanyi has demonstrated in his classic work The Great Transformation, only in the past two centuries has the market risen above these demagogues, these phonic spirits to become today's first cause. Initially, the market's rise to Olympian supremacy replicated the gradual ascent of Zeus, above all the other deities in the ancient Greek pantheon. But that ascent was never quite secure. Zeus, it will be recalled, had to keep storming down from Olympus to Quell, this or that dire threat to his sovereignty. Recently, the market is becoming more like the Yahweh of the Old Testament, not just one superior deity contending with others, but the supreme deity, the only true God whose reign must now be universally accepted and who allows for no rivals. Divine omnipotence. That means the capacity to define what is real. It is the power to make something out of nothing and nothing out of something. The will but not yet achieved omnipotence of the market means that there is no conceivable limit to its inexorable ability to convert creation into commodities. But again, this is hardly a new idea, although it does have a new twist to it. In Catholic theology, through so-called transubstantiation, ordinary bread and wine become vehicles of the holy. In the mass of the marketplace, a reverse process occurs. Things that had been held sacred transmute into interchangeable items for sale. Land is a good example. For millennia, land has held various meanings, many of them numinous. It has been Mother Earth, ancestral resting place, holy mountain, enchanted forest, tribal homeland, aesthetic inspiration, sacred turf, and much, much more. But when the market's sanctus bell rings and the elements are elevated, all these complex meanings of land meld into one, real estate. At the right price, no land is not for sale. And this includes everything from burial grounds to the cove of a local fertility sprite. The radical desacralization dramatically alters the human relationship to the land, and the same thing happens with our water, our air, our space, and perhaps eventually the heavenly spheres. And as your program notes, at two o'clock today, Marilyn and the rest of the Oakwood Chamber players will be holding a concert at Oakwood Village West. And we hope maybe some of you will take advantage of their lovely music. So it appears that the Wisconsin legislature is poised to pass legislation opening the door and rolling out the red carpet for the Taiwanese tech manufacturer Foxconn. This is touted as the opportunity of a lifetime for a state that has been hemorrhaging factory jobs for quite some time now, and the governor and other supporters of this initiative claim that it's going to be a really great deal for Wisconsin workers, and that perhaps it will motivate other manufacturers to relocate in or to expand here in the state of Wisconsin. All a good thing. There are, of course, drawbacks. A percentage of Foxconn's workers in the state's southeastern counties will undoubtedly commute here from Illinois. The $3 billion worth of inducements offered to the company by state officials that translates into a $230,000 public subsidy for each job created, ensuring that Wisconsin residents will be paying higher taxes for at least a quarter of a century. The deal also sets an unhealthy precedent by relaxing environmental protections for wetlands and groundwater and the Great Lakes in order to reduce the cost of building and operating this massive facility. But as that phrase that was added to the border crossing signs of welcoming people to Wisconsin in 2010, as it says, Wisconsin is open for business. Really, really open. Now, of course, no one wants to say openly that we are doing the Foxconn corporation itself a huge favor, instead, job creation. That has long been the mantra repeated by conservative politicians to rally support for proposals such as this. That prospect has been trotted out to promote massive strip mines in the Northwoods and confined animal feeding operations in the state's midsection. I find it somewhat ironic that while state leaders emphasize the importance of greater employment in the private sector, even if heavily subsidized, they argue that thousands of decent paying public sector jobs are dispensable and unnecessary burden borne by hardworking Wisconsin families. All of this is, of course, completely consistent with the near sacred principle of free enterprise and market-based solutions. Or as President Calvin Coolidge famously put it just before the Great Depression, the business of America is business. Degree of commitment its proponents have made to this idea is, I think, rather extraordinary. Some religious conservatives even claim that free enterprise is supported by biblical teachings and is therefore blessed by God. Others argue that since public sector jobs are largely sheltered from market-driven forces, they create these unwelcome distortions in the self-regulating system called the market. While others are convinced that concerns about the environment, concerns about climate change expressed by environmentalists, these are designed merely to paper over their inherent hostility toward free enterprise. And all of the foregoing lends weight to Harvey Cox's thesis that the free market in certain key respects now resembles a deity, and in particular the God of the Bible. Thou shalt have no other gods before me, the Almighty declares in the book of Exodus. Or as Cox puts it, the market is not just one superior deity contending with others, it is the only true God whose reign must be universally accepted and who allows for no rivals. Since 1999, when Cox's essay first appeared, the trends that he describes have accelerated. In the book of Exodus, there are many other lobbyists, organizations like Alec increasingly shaped public policy at all levels of government, the privatization of education, of prisons and even the defense establishment continues apace. In former times, as Cox notes, there were other centers of value and meaning, other gods that restrained the market's activities, but that is less and less the case. In the Atlantic, Franklin Four, the former editor of the New Republic magazine, describes how this has even affected journalism, the vaunted fourth estate, the bulwark of our democracy. In this digital age, he says, competition for clicks, around your mouse, around your computer, that provides evidence of market share, and it thus plays a decisive role in determining journalistic content. The rise of Donald Trump is a case in point, Four says. He understood how, more than at any other moment in history, the media need to give the public the circus it desires. Stories about Trump yielded the sort of traffic that pleased the data gods and benefited the bottom line. Or as Leslie Moonves, president of CBS, put it during the presidential primaries, Donald Trump may not be good for America, but he sure is damn good for CBS. Now I focused on the free enterprise system and the degree to which it has come to monopolize our thinking and our behavior around values, because it does lead to a point that we would all do well to consider. That when we elevate a single principle, even an ostensibly good and useful one to a position of ultimacy, evil often follows in its wake. Now we usually think of principles in positive terms, don't we? They reflect the bottom line standard to which we appeal in making important life decisions or in crafting social policies. And so we will speak admirably of those who will take a principled stand or who adopt a course of action as a matter of principle. And we are not entirely wrong to hold such people in high regard, but only if they have engaged in a thoughtful process of discernment and if they have made an honest attempt to consider the full implications of their choices. Mindlessly applying a principle simply because we are convinced that it's good and right is liable to result in considerable harm. For instance, in our market driven free enterprise system, pretty much any object or any human activity can be and is commodified. Things that have been held sacred transmute into interchangeable items for sale, Harvey Cox writes. And typically this is not the result of any kind of conscious decision on people's part, it's just our society's and our economy's default position. Now in his essay, The Two Economies, Wendell Berry reaches much the same conclusion as Harvey Cox. Berry contrasts the industrial economy, which exists to serve as human needs and to create wealth exclusively. He contrasts this with the much more comprehensive great economy, but he worries that the latter, the great economy, will not survive the former, the industrial economy. Unfortunately, he says, the industrial economy does not see itself as the little economy, it sees itself as the only economy. It makes itself thus exclusive by the expedient value of valuing only what it can use, that is, what it can regard as raw material to be transformed into something else. The industrial economy is based, he says, on the invasion and the pillage of the great economy. It's a grave error to suppose that we can prescribe the terms of our own success and live in ignorance of the great economy, for we are all ultimately dependent on the great economy for our survival. This dilemma that Wendell Berry describes was already impacting Native Americans in the early 17th century as William Cronin's careful study of the New England landscape makes clear. Now unlike the Indians, in considering this their new home, European settlers thought about the landscape purely in terms of commodities. And thus they tended to ignore many of the constraints, the competing values and principles that govern the Indians more considerate use of the land. And as a result, Cronin says, capitalism and environmental degradation went hand in hand, a trend that has continued unabated to this very day. Way back in 1642, when they're against an Indian leader had this to say, our fathers had plenty of deer, plenty of skins, our planes were full of deer and also our woods and also of turkeys, our coves were full of fish and fowl, but these English, they have gotten our land with sides they cut down the grass, with axes they fell the trees, their cows and their horses eat the grass, their hogs spoil the clam banks and we shall all be starved. 1642, free market absolutism. But we can point to any number of other principles, instances in which the single devotion to a value to this less than comprehensive principle has proven unwise. So let's go back to the trial of Billy Budd, as imagined by Herman Melville. Everybody on that ship likes and admires this young sailor. Everybody knows that the master at arms, John Claggart, resents the popular Billy and wishes him harm. Captain Vera and his crew believe in their hearts that Billy did not mean to kill Claggart and they probably feel that the man had it coming. And yet the king is the king. His law is the law. Circumstances, palliatives, do not matter a bit. Billy Budd must have. So here Melville offers a telling example of what can happen when we place a single principle over the welfare and the justice due to a person. It happens all too often. Consider those arbiters of criminal justice in today's world who adamantly defend the death penalty, even when they know full well that some unjustly convicted men and women are going to also be put to death. Or consider those who would prohibit minors from obtaining birth control because of their moral objection to premarital sex and unwanted pregnancy just a penalty that a girl must pay for her moral laxity. And what about those folks who would preference the Second Amendment over every other provision contained in the U.S. Constitution? For them, nothing is more important than supporting those who believe that they have the right to carry at any time and to any place the weapon or weapons of their choice. Second Amendment absolutism. Now these are kind of controversial and I suspect that most of you who are listening to me would not agree necessarily with those principles or grant them that kind of ultimacy. But there are other less controversial principles that also become problematic if we invest them with too much authority. First, do no harm. That is often cited as a foundational principle of medical practice. It is attributed to the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates and so this injunction carries with it the weight of many centuries. And so many people regard it as axiomatic. We invoke it thoughtlessly. First, do no harm. But that's one of the problems. We don't bother to think through such a venerable principle and consider that it might have limitations. The editor of Harvard University's health publications, a man named Robert Schmerling, is himself a physician and he has taken on the challenge of examining that particular principle. And he doubts that standing alone, it really works very well in practice. He says if physicians took it literally, no one would have surgery even if it's life-saving. We might stop ordering mammograms because they could lead to a biopsy for a non-cancerous lump. In fact, we might not even request blood tests because the pain, the bruising, the bleeding required to draw blood clearly is an avoidable harm. The fact is, he said, when difficult life real-time decisions must be made, it's hard to apply this principle. First, do no harm because estimates of risk and benefit are so uncertain and so prone to error. And so Schmerling recommends a more nuanced approach to medical treatment, one requiring considerably more forethought and an exercise in risk assessment. But he would not abandon completely do no harm because as he puts it, it is a reminder that doctors should neither overestimate their capacity to heal nor underestimate their capacity to harm. What about the golden rule? That's another pertinent example. Many people, Christian or not, invoke the golden rule as the principle they would first appeal to in making an important moral decision. But do unto others as you would have them do unto you, it presumes that our own personal preferences have universal validity. It could be argued that do unto others what they would have you do unto them that it makes a lot more sense because it forces us to consider their perspective on what is right and good and not just our own. But if you think about it for very long, the alternative version runs into problems as well which is why the ancient Greek philosopher Confucius insisted that a principle like the golden rule should not be treated as a shortcut eliminating the need for moral reasoning but only as a starting point for serious deliberation. Which brings us at last to our own Unitarian Universalist principles of which there are seven and you can find them printed on the back of today's program as they typically are on Sunday mornings. These principles vary in age but the collection as a whole is a little over half a century old and as a denomination, we revisit these principles from time to time to see if they really are still working for us. Now they are quite general as you see but that is intentional because then they provide leeway for individuals and communities to be open and creative in developing strategies to accomplish them. Now personally, I'm not altogether happy with describing these as principles. I would rather call them precepts. Neither beliefs that we are required to uphold nor rules that we are obliged to obey, they can serve us rather as aspirational statements similar to Albert Schweitzer's reverence for life, aspirational statements that we strive to live up to knowing that we are always going to fall short. This approach has more in common with an Eastern faith like Buddhism than with the Abrahamic religions in which principles are often accorded this transcendent status that makes them pretty much non-negotiable. Regarded as precepts, we can better understand and appreciate how taken together these statements qualify and yet compliment each other. And so the first, the first speaks to the inherent dignity and worth of human beings. Good thing. But it confines itself to matters of human concern. And so by itself, it would seem to prioritize our species' interests over those of other sentient creatures. But this anthropocentrism is complimented by the biocentric seventh principle which draws our attention to the web of life, Wendell Berry's great economy, which is also worthy of our concern and to which we owe our existence. And there's the fourth principle. It calls on us to engage in a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. Its focus is inward and personal rather than outward and social. But the fourth is balanced by the second, a principle that encourages us to promote justice, equity, and compassion. Principle three, it extols congregational life, the life we share within First Unitarian society. But number six stresses the need to move beyond all parochialisms and further the goal of world community. And so it goes, these seven intersecting principles are not arranged in some kind of rank order. And so there will always be occasions when one of them might take precedence over the other. Taken as a whole, they are meant to serve as Confucius maintained as merely a starting point for more serious moral discernment. Now in conclusion, the environmental advocate and founder of 350.org, Bill McKibben. McKibben stresses the need for us to remain flexible in the way that we understand and apply our principles, even the principles that are most dear to us. And addressing the cause that he has adopted as his own, climate change, he reports that he's had conversations with many colleagues, many movement purists as it were. And these people sometimes question whether it's appropriate to burn gasoline in order to attend a climate rally. Isn't that hypocritical? McKibben disagrees. He says, it's the best gas that you will burn in the course of a year. We live in a world that we want to change, he says. And so some hypocrisy is the price of admission to that fight. Now whether we call it hypocrisy or compromise, the point is that in matters of principle we cannot evade the responsibility of making some hard personal choices. Like a physician, we must ponder whether the benefits of a course of action outweigh the risk of harm. And let us always remember, it's not the principle that we are meant to serve, only the persons that it's meant to support. Blessed be and amen. It is now time for the giving and receiving of our offering. And throughout the church year we do share our offerings with other worthy community organizations. And today and next week that organization is G-Safe and you can read about their good work in your program today. Please be generous. This week is a community of memory and a community of hope. To this time and this place we bring our whole and occasionally 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. In our cares of the congregation book today we have several notices. We've led a candle today for Kelly Radford who had surgery last Thursday and we sent her and her husband our best wishes. And then there is a thank you here to Rob Gerke for the lovely and efficient new book cabinet that is in our commons area. And if you go over to where we sell a wonderful selection of books you will note that there is this incredibly handsome cabinet that Rob made for us and so we appreciate that very much. David Zend Schrankler is a familiar face here at FUS but he is facing presently some legal hardship and he would benefit from our well wishes and our prayers. So these go with him. And of course our thoughts today are with those people who are preparing for a hurricane in the state of Florida. I've talked to many people who have relatives in Florida particularly on the west coast where the eye of the storm is right now hitting and that includes some members of my own family as well as members of Dan family and others in our community. So we are wishing them safety today. And so now I'll let us sit silently for just a moment or two in the spirit of empathy and of hope. So by virtue of our brief time together today may our burdens be lightened and our joys expanded. Our closing hymn is number 293. And so now may the peace of the deep lakes, the peace of the meandering rivers be with us. May our spirits soar as weightless as the September clouds and may the warmth of companionship reassure us into our journeys beyond the golden sunset. May the lure of truth yet to be known draw us onward even unto the autumn of our days. Please be seated for the postlude.