 I'm not a computer actor. How many people are there? Eight. But only four were doing the work on that. She's wide. I'm starting to get that. I'm not a computer actor. I've never heard of a department that was using the channel. It was on YouTube. Oh, okay. It seems like it was on a search. We're all on a search. So I'm just a different channel. I feel something about what you do on YouTube is hard. There's something that I've heard that you watch on YouTube. Is there a whiteish trend that's just for that? And then these are receivers? So that's like a separate thing that's on the record. I'm not going to go there. I'm going to go there. I'm going to go there. I'm going to go there. Okay, maybe I overdid it. I would like to invite you into a few moments of centering silence. And now please remain seated and join us in singing our in-gathering hymn found in your order of service. Good morning. Welcome to 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 in each individual as together we seek to be a force for good in the world. My name is Tim Corden. And on behalf of the congregation, I would like to extend a special welcome to visitors. We are a welcoming congregation and whoever you are and wherever you are on life's journey, we celebrate your presence with us. Visitors are encouraged to stay for our fellowship hour after the service and look for people carrying teal stoneware mugs. These are FUS members who are knowledgeable about our programs and activities and community life. And they look forward to the chance to speak with you this morning. You can also stop by our information table outside the library where you can find more information about upcoming events and programs. In this lively, acoustical environment, it may become difficult for those in attendance to hear what is happening in our service. So we remind you that our child haven back there or the commons are excellent places to go when anyone needs to talk or move around. The service can still be seen and heard from those areas. We do have hearing assistance devices available. Please see one of our ushers if that would be helpful for you. This would be a good time to turn off electronic devices that may disrupt the service. Experience guides are generally available to give building tours after each service. So if you would like to learn more about this sustainably designed addition or our national landmark meeting house, please meet near the large glass windows at the left side of the auditorium after the service. I'd like to acknowledge those individuals who help our service run so smoothly and beautifully. Our sound operator is Mark Schultz. Our lay minister is Ann Smiley. Greeters are Hannah Pinkerton and Karen Hill. Usher's are Elizabeth Barrett, Doug Hill, and Ann Smiley. Hospitality is brought to you by Lois Evenson and Pete and Marion, I'm sorry, Pete and Marge Marion are out at our book table this morning. Please stop by and visit and look at the wonderful selection of books for sale. Please also note the announcements in the red floors insert in your order of service which describes upcoming events at the society and provides you with more information about today's activities. And then we have a special announcement. The Music Director Search Committee is beginning the process of finding our new music director and they would like to know your thoughts regarding the music program here at FUS and its role. There is a table set up for you after the service where you can stop by and discuss your thoughts or fill out a note sharing your ideas and wishes. Our pulpit guest this morning is Becky Siegel and she's no stranger to FUS having served here as our social justice coordinator for several years. Now the executive director of the Interfaith Coalition for Worker Justice, Becky says that she is passionate about connecting people to each other and the power we share when led by our own beliefs. She has found that people of all faiths and backgrounds share a commitment to fairness and dignity of all workers. Becky started working in restaurants at the age of 14 in her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. She managed a retail store before entering a career in social work and teaching. Ultimately her desire to work on the core causes of poverty rather than the symptoms led Becky to be trained in community organizing by the Interfaith Coalition for Worker Justice's National Affiliate Interfaith Worker Justice. Over the years Becky has held several roles with ICWJ including field organizer, acting director and board member. She has led a Black Friday Walmart rally and a successful fight to protect local living wage ordinances. After several years as the social justice coordinator here at FUS, Becky returned to ICWJ last January. She is the director of the Madison Workers' Rights Center as well and serves on the board of the Madison Area Urban Ministry and the Stewardship of Public Policy Committee of the Wisconsin Council of Churches. Becky has a spouse and two teenage children and the favorite thing about living in Madison is paddling in the Wisconsin rivers and lakes. I have one more special announcement which I forgot. If anyone would like to help Dan Broner with page turning for the postlude, please make your way over there. Otherwise he's going to have to do his amazing act and turn pages which I'm sure he can do. Alright and last again, welcome. We hope that today's service will stimulate your mind, touch your heart and stir your spirit. Opening words this morning come from the late British novelist and social commentator George Orwell. A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive role. He does not act, he is acted upon. He feels himself the slave of some mysterious authority and he has a firm conviction that they will never allow him to do this and that and the other. Once when I was hop picking, I asked the sweaty pickers who earn something less than six pence an hour. I asked, why do you not form a union? I was immediately told that they would never allow it. Well who were they? I asked. Nobody seemed to know, but evidently they were omnipotent. I invite you to rise in body and spirit for the lighting of our chalice. Please join me in repeating the words of affirmation printed in program. We kindle this single flame as a symbol of unity in diversity to underscore the love and longing that make us one despite our many differences. We also kindle this light as a beacon of hope for those whose lives are darkened this day who suffer from uncertainty, poverty or sorrow. May this small flickering fire be for us an emblem of the divine spark which animates us in the pursuit of our noblest aspirations. And now on this fine Labor Day Sunday I invite you to turn to your neighbor in exchange with them a warm greeting. Please be seated. And I see that there are at least a few of the youngest generation among us and if you would like to join me for the message for all ages I would appreciate your support. Well welcome. I'm guessing that pretty much all of you are old enough to be going to school, right? Maybe just about everybody. You're there. You are here. So how many of you have already started school? Okay, but schools, kindergarten. In 4K, very good. Fourth grade. Oh good. And all of you like going to school, right? Yeah? Yeah. Well I know that the Madison schools start this week after Labor Day after Monday. So here I want to tell you something. Do you know that you are really very lucky to be going to school? Because 150 years ago a lot of kids couldn't go to school. They had to go to work instead. They had to go to work. And these children, maybe some of your own great-great-great grandparents, they probably had to do really hard work in factories or out in the fields. And they were paid very little, just pennies for the work that they did. And often their parents weren't paid much better than they were. And if any of them got sick or they got injured, they might lose their job and they would just go hungry until they could go back to work again. Well this was really pretty wrong. I mean this was not right. And the small number of people that owned the big farms and the factories, they were making lots and lots of money. They were getting rich. Yeah, they were getting rich because they were paying all these kids and their parents so little money. So as you might imagine, at some point the workers got really fed up with all this. They got mad about it. And so they started talking to each other, probably secretly at first. And they decided that they didn't get paid more money that they were going to stop working. They were all together going to stop working. It's what we call going out on strike until they got what they were deserved. And so if no work was being done and the crops weren't being picked, and things were not being made in the factories, what happens to the rich people? Well, they get poorer and poorer. They're not making any money either, right? So these workers formed what they called unions, groups of workers that could support each other in their efforts, right? And these early unions, these collections of workers were led by some very smart and very courageous people. And one of the most famous of all those labor leaders 150 years ago was a woman by the name of Mary Harris Jones. She was born in Ireland 180 years ago, but she came to Canada, the country of Canada when she was a teenager, and she went to college in Canada, and then she moved to the United States to Michigan, which is right across Lake Michigan from Wisconsin, so that she could teach. And she taught for a couple of years, but then she kind of thought, teaching's not really my bag. So she got married, and she and her husband moved to Memphis, Tennessee, another city, and she had four children. But then something really terrible happened to her family. There's this very bad disease that's called yellow fever. And in 1867, all the members of her family caught the yellow fever, and they didn't have medicines the way we do today, and all of her children and her husband died from the yellow fever. Now, her husband had been a labor... Wait a minute, and we'll get to you. Her husband had actually been a labor leader, and Mary was so impressed with what her husband did that she decided that rather than go back into teaching, she was going to become a labor leader. And so she joined a group called the Knights of Labor, and Mary Harris became this woman who was organizing strikes. And that was really hard to do back then, because the people who owned the factories and the fields, they had the police on their side. It was illegal for workers to walk out. And so oftentimes these strikers were arrested, or they were shot at, and some of them were even killed. But this didn't stop them, and it didn't stop Mary, because she believed that all working people deserved to have enough money to live on. And so she continued to organize these strikes, and she was particularly effective because she started organizing not just the workers, but their wives and their children to go out and demonstrate on the streets on behalf of these workers. It became a big public thing, and it was so successful that she became kind of threatening to a lot of people, and in West Virginia they put her on trial in 1902 for organizing this strike, and the prosecutor in the courtroom pointed to her and said to the jury, there sits the most dangerous woman in America. She crooks her finger and 20,000 contented men lay down their tools and walk off the job. So that's what she was accused of. And actually Mary Harris did spend some years in jail for the kind of work that she was doing. But here's the interesting thing for you all. In the year 1900, one out of every six children in the United States worked and did not go to school. They had to work rather than going to school. And this was very, very troubling to Mary Harris-Jones, and so she began organizing these young people all under the age of 16 who worked in the cloth mills in the state of Pennsylvania. And in 1903 she organized what was called a Children's Crusade, the United States Children's Crusade, and she was accompanied by hundreds and hundreds of children who walked all the way from Philadelphia to the president of the United States' home in upstate New York. And the children were all carrying these banners that said, We want to go to school, not to the mills. And they wanted the president to come out and to talk to them about what was right, what these children needed. And President Theodore Roosevelt, he refused. He wouldn't talk to any of them. But all the publicity about this Children's Crusade kind of turned the whole country to thinking about what it meant for children to work rather than go to school. And so it kind of changed everything. And we had all these labor laws that were created to protect children. I'll let you ask me a question in just a minute, okay? I'm almost done. You're going to Canada? Okay. Well, you know, Canada probably had better laws than we did in 1900. So I'm just about at the end here. So by this time, 1903, 1904, Mary Jones was presenting herself to the public as Mother Jones because she said that all of these men and these women and children that I'm serving, they are all my children. And I'm going to protect all of them. So she became known all over the country as Mother Jones. And although she looked like anybody's sweet old grandma, she was a fighter. And she kept on fighting until she was in her mid-80s. And she finally died at the age of 93. And if you go to a little town called Mount Olive, Illinois, in southern Illinois, there's this big monument to Mother Jones because she actually helped some of the miners in southern Illinois to organize. And every year in Mount Olive, Illinois, they have a festival, Mother Jones Day, that is held in her honor. So the fact that you all can go to school and that some of you don't have to work out in the fields and the factories, you can thank Mother Jones for that. Anybody else have a little question here before we? Okay, good. All right, well, thank you all for listening as patiently as you are capable of. We're going to sing you out with our next song. Hey, we've got ice cream out there, folks. You don't want to miss that. Yellow fever? What about it? You know, I don't really know, except that your skin gets really yellow because it affects your liver. Our next reading is from James Baldwin's book, The Fire Next Time, specifically the first essay, My Dungeon Shook, which was an open letter addressed to Baldwin's nephew primarily about racism. I hear the chorus of innocent screaming, no, this is not true. How bitter you are. But I am writing this letter to you to try to tell you something about how to handle them. For most of them do not yet really know that you exist. I know the conditions under which you were born, for I was there. Your countrymen were not there and haven't made it yet. Your grandmother was also there and no one has ever accused her of being bitter. I suggest that the innocents check with her she isn't hard to find. Your countrymen don't know that she exists either, though she has been working for them all their lives. And he continues later, these innocent people have no other hope. They are in effect still trapped in a history which they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years and for innumerable reasons that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them indeed know better, but as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed and to be committed is to be in danger. That letter first appeared here in the Progressive in 1962. And so our next reading is more contemporary by local poet Araceli Lopez Esparza. And it comes from this book. I didn't know there were Latinos in Wisconsin. And this is edited and there's more volumes of it, but by our local poet laureate Oscar Mireles, and I recommend it. So we're going to dedicate this reading to this woman behind me. And this is Ms. Esparza's grandmother, Zephyrina Lopez. And Senora Lopez turned 94 years old last week. She migrated here in 1924 as a child with her family of migrant farmers. Her own children and grandchildren now include six college graduates. Senora Lopez is a lifelong devoted Christian, as well as a retiree of the UW Humanities Building janitorial crew. And here is Stained Glass Windows by Araceli Lopez Esparza. First, they destroyed our church to put up a new building. All they kept were the stained glass windows. I remember a time when I used to walk up Park Street to get to church each Sunday. And I asked our bolita, why do we have to walk? And she would tell the story of how she and Tia walked all the way from our hometown in Mexico to San Juan de los Lagos, and how she had to carry my fat baby cousin almost the whole way. If I was lucky, we would have donuts after church and go to the Eagle Store on the way back. La Iglesia, the church, was special for me. Sister and Padre always had a smile for me. The kitchen walls had Aztec drawings, paintings, and frames that held old pictures of those who came before me. In gym, I watched with envy and pride the Avila brothers do their dances. I had me Primera Comunon and Quince there. I would run and hold my breath when I passed the communion place, just in case un Espirito Malo wanted to come in. I remember hiding under the pews. So unless you are a person of color growing up Catholic in Madison, you might not understand, or maybe you do. But they aren't closing the doors on a building. They're closing the doors on our culture, our espacio, our space, our meeting place, my stained glass windows. So good morning. I think I know a lot of you here, but my name is Becky Shiegel, and I'm the Executive Director of the Interfaith Coalition for Worker Justice of South Central Wisconsin. First Unitarian Society is a long-time partner and leader in worker justice, and we thank you for that. And I also thank you to Michael and Kelly for inviting me into your pulpit. It's wonderful to be back here today. There are so many familiar faces in this room right now, and I have to tell you what a lovely gift it is to return to this sense of community with you here today. For the four years that I was blessed to serve this congregation as social justice coordinator, we journeyed and we learned together, and these words came up often, the inherent worth and dignity of every person. This is, of course, the Unitarian Universalist First Principle and a value we share at the Interfaith Coalition. So the worth of every person, this has been easy for me to say, but when I find myself deeply reflecting on it, I am profoundly struck by what a difficult concept it really is. Because implied here is a concept of equal worth or perhaps some baseline of what we're all worth. What does that mean in action, I wonder? Some regard, some respect, some modicum of decency or certain intrinsic rights? What am I worth? What are you worth? I am concerned these days when I increasingly hear and read public arguments solely in terms of the economic impact of any given decision. This week we waited for the end of DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. We waited to hear about the possible deportation of 800,000 young people who arrived in our country as children and with DACA have been able to work and go to school without hiding. So a group of elective officials pleaded their case with two numbers, $460 billion and $3.4 billion. Those numbers represent, respectively, first how much the dreamers have contributed to their communities in the last five years and then how much their employees would have to pay to replace them. So I'm thankful for those officials. I really am. I'm thankful that they stood up and I pray that they continue to do so, but still I wonder how did they add up how much those young people have contributed to all their communities, to our communities. And are we to measure our worth by what it would cost our employers to replace us? And this is the moment I've been struck today by saying that sentence when I am actually with my former employers. What's the dollar figure of what you have contributed to your community over the last five years? Earlier I read the poem Stained Glass and in it the poet grieves the loss of her church to her family and her community. To me that poem spoke of the worth of self-determination. We are reminded of how often certain communities do not get to choose what we as a whole tear down in their lives or rather what they might build up. And as it turns out in reaching out to that poem I was gifted with the story of Senora Lopez. And in fact I was gifted with a lesson because frankly I will admit that had you asked me to picture a janitor I was not picturing this elderly grandmother or a Sally's abuelita. Perhaps she was not this lovely wise woman of 94 when she was cleaning the humanities building. How much was she worth then? So here I want to add some language to that question and I'm going to do this two ways for equal opportunity mysticism. First in my own tradition we are told that we cannot see the face of God directly. Moses had to have a chat with the burning bush because he couldn't just look at God. We cannot take in the hugeness of the Creator but we can look at creation to get a glimpse and we know the rest is there. Okay, now the pop science version. There's been a lot of excitement about the sun lately, right? And you know we can't look at it directly we have to have those little glasses, right? Okay, but even if we can peek at it we aren't really seeing what the actual sun looks like, right? But we can Google it so we can see NASA's version. It's so much more beautiful. Well I believe that our poet's beloved grandmother was there to see in that younger version of herself and that when you or I interact with anyone today we can't possibly see their whole worth though imagining that we are seeing a piece of all creation or perhaps all the life connected to them might help. Okay, so let's look at doing worker justice on this Labor Day weekend. Michael gave us an excellent history about the movement which is great. So I'm wondering if I can get you right now to try out a little vowel with me for Labor Day? Let's try it. Repeat after me. It goes like this. The next time I am in a conversation about great injustice I will not put the blame nor the solution on the presidency. That's right. This year for Labor Day, unlike last Thanksgiving I do not wish for you to get out that placement that teaches you how to talk to your relatives about he who wants us to talk about him. If you want to do something about honoring the worth of every worker then I want you to move on to talking about three things in all conversations about economic justice. Wages, safety and unions. These are the basic protections that we have at work that we've been losing for some time. Wages, safety and the right to collective activity. We need to talk about wage theft more. Wages are stolen when a worker isn't paid at all or less than the legal minimum, isn't paid overtime, is misclassified in their work or has to work part of an unbrake or just isn't given a check. Regardless of why a worker walks into our Madison Workers Rights Center right now, they are overwhelmingly likely to be found to be experiencing wage theft. And people I talk to are overwhelmingly likely to underestimate how much this happens and to overestimate how much we're doing about it. Now, assuming someone is being legally paid how do we determine how much to pay them? At the minimum. Should we set the low bar on wages on the lowest that a business can afford? That's what we're often told, but many of us say no. We've developed some language around what makes the difference between slavery and employment. And so we consider the ability to pay for things like food, housing, clothing. We call this a living wage. And overall in Wisconsin this is calculated to be around $10.50. Over $23 if that adult is supporting one child. But our minimum wage in Wisconsin and nationally is $7.25. So you might say we are $3 or $15 short of the difference between pay and actual basic human worth. I want to repeat that. This idea because we see it all the time that the minimum wage is to be set at the lowest a business can afford. Please challenge that narrative. Put it this way. As a whole as a congregation you employ if I'm remembering correctly about 20 people. Okay, let's say Michael announces that the new policy is all of them have to have one leg chained to their cubicle at all times. It's absurd, right? But would you accept that? No. What if Michael said, but wait, wait, you know, we're really struggling for funds this year and we found that this makes them more productive. And this is the only way we can afford them. Do we accept it? Right, it's silly. So I want you to bring that silly outrage to the idea that we accept that people can be paid that which doesn't allow them housing and food. Minimum wage also has a color. Nationally black and Latino people are much more likely to earn less than $15 an hour. And then there's incarceration. And right here is where I just say if you have not watched the documentary 13th, go do that. Just ask Tim. He'll set you up. In a recent online conversation, I gotta tell you this, this was an online conversation of non-profit professionals asked about using prison labor for her organization to save money. And then when there was pushback about how the actual workers in that scenario would be making about $1.15 an hour, another non-profit professional actually said that the pay for the prisoner would be equivalent to minimum wage if you took into account room and board and the cost of security. So we have to ask what is the worth of an incarcerated worker? And that's where it starts to get hard, right? Sometimes? Okay. So that's wages. What about safety? Worker health and safety is something I fear that many of us just take for granted. The Department of Labor has long relied on the education of employers and even more so on the education of employees to spot, fix, and or report health and safety hazards. The grants that support that education are being cut drastically. And then this year, Congress reversed two things. One was the requirement for businesses that were applying for the largest federal contracts to have to disclose and correct their serious safety violations. That's gone. The other one is that Congress rolled back the health and safety record-keeping requirements for all businesses. So meanwhile, the national minimum is still $7.25. And so jobs that are nine, ten, maybe $12 an hour are considered the good-paying jobs for workers of any color. And these jobs are often in warehouses and are what used to be the union jobs. And they're important because now more often than not are temporary or what they call supply jobs where a temporary agency is actually the employer. So temporary workers allow for our fast-paced economy coupled with varied and on-call scheduling that we have now even for low-wage workers. They allow restaurants, retail, manufacturing, construction to bring in more people when they need more and not have them when they don't. And what's wrong with that? We don't want to pay people for sitting around idle. Well, what's wrong is that they invest nothing in these folks. And by nothing, I do mean the kind of kindnesses that make you loyal to your employer, but also benefits, and maybe most importantly, proper training. The kind of training that saves lives. Temporary workers are literally dying more on the job. Either because they weren't trained on equipment or because they have no leverage in complaining about the lack of safety equipment. They're expendable. And sadly, they know it. So recently, last week, I got to meet with a room full of such workers in a church basement in rural Wisconsin, or 25 of them, representing a few hundred workers. I don't mean technically representing, I meant that's who they work with. They talk to us about how they're inadequately trained and they have high production standards that are absolutely uniform, regardless of physical ability. They work long shifts and they are told when they can go to the bathroom, even though there aren't enough bathrooms to go around. Give it a shot and you need to be back on the clock in ten minutes. They are told they'll get raises that don't come. If someone quits, they're told to do the job of two. And if you don't like it, you can leave. This last part is said to them so regularly that they laugh about it. They have to laugh, because then they tell us that they know they are not humans to their employers. We're going to be meeting with those workers again in that church basement, and I have to say that's an awesome use of a church. So sometimes these problems are greed on the part of the owners or the shareholders, right? But sometimes I think this is our fault. For example, Amazon, welcome to the neighborhood, Amazon, right? Is notorious for using temp workers also in its warehouses and running them ragged. Its own recruitment brochures say that you will be walking 12 miles in every shift at brisk paces around large warehouses, and people die there also. Not because of safety violations, but because many are not in the kind of shape you'd need to work like this, and temp workers don't have healthcare or sick time. Meanwhile, we all need to do some of what you guys do best right here. I think one of the antidotes to this is that we need to keep promoting mindful intentional living as a sustainable, desirable way to do life, so that we aren't promoting that speedy capitalism at all cost life that fuels this way of being. And we can change the narrative one act at a time. The next time that we hear or read a news story in which individual worth is not considered, we call or we write in. I recently read an article that horrified me. It lumped freelancers in with temporary workers in something called the contingent workforce. By lumping thusly, the article was able to quote millennials as enjoying the flexibility and work-life balance of their flexible schedules. Compare this with the workers I met this week who don't even have control of going to the bathroom. Are both types of workers worth the same dignity? Change the narrative. Immigration is tied in with both wages and safety. Undocumented immigrants overwhelmingly work in low-wage activities, and in particular farming and other food production, construction, and the maintenance of our buildings and lawns. At least half of all U.S. farm workers are undocumented, by the way. Now many of them have been here for many years. All of these low-wage workplaces are where wage theft, the unsafe workplace conditions, and other labor law violations are commonplace. Undocumented workers are less likely to report hazards, file complaints, or even to report injuries. This then emboldens oppressive bosses who simply threaten to call immigration, and we hear this story every day in the Workers' Rights Center. A fearful workplace is a danger to us all. We must help everyone we know to connect these dots. So wages, safety, and that brings me to unions. Because Labor Day is, after all, a celebration of the labor movement. I want to tell you that I'm happy to say that for the first time, ICWJ now lives in the Madison Labor Temple. We are getting closer in our relationship to labor unions than ever before. We know that we must not let go of unions, though we will certainly continue to shape and redefine them. Today, the growing face of unions is more ethnically engendered, diverse than ever. And whether we call it unions, co-ops, or something else, collective worker action is responsible for the rights we have today, and collective worker action still matters. Consider another member of our national network, the Coalition for Immocally Workers. Some of you have been with them out on picketing, maybe, downtown. This organization of farm workers in Florida has developed a fair food program that's transformed what they had, which were slave-like conditions. And now, because of their actions, major national grocery stores and fast food chains are signing on, paying the resulting cents on a pound of tomatoes, for example, to make sure these workers are paid decently, have access to bathroom and shade, and are able to leave their jobs, if they wish. By the way, for those that are following this cause, Wendy's has still not signed on, and you can find out all about that on the Unitarian Universalist Association's website. And so that brings us back once again to self-determination. Self-identified groups are people facing oppression. Self-identified groups of people facing oppression, including groups of workers, are telling us what they need and want. We can hear, follow, and learn what is needed of us. So let us recall my other reading from earlier. James Baldwin's words to be committed is to be in danger. What are we being called to risk when we profess that we are committed to seeing, truly seeing the worth in everyone? Are we being called to risk being arrested, perhaps having less money ourselves, living less comfortably? Or are we being called to risk being wrong, to risk being ineffective? Who is worth that risk to us? I know it's easy to feel hopeless, but there is hope, in fact, in taking that risk and committing deeply to each other. Have you noticed this week that it's those young folks at risk of deportation, the very dreamers themselves, that continue to speak out? Their courage, their stories inspired many of you to make calls, yeah, this week about DACA? And I want to tell you that we've seen some turnaround in one important way, one notable example that struck me. When the Tennessee Attorney General announced that his office was dropping its support of ending DACA and that they actually prefer legislation to protect these young people, he said the human element of the program should not be ignored. Change the narrative. So before I leave you, let's do just this one thing today for Labor Day. Breathe deep. Let today's words and your responses, right, because as I'm talking, you're responding, you're feeling, you're thinking, let all of that just sink into your body. And think this, how much am I worth? And hear this, whatever I have done today, or last year, or whatever I'll produce next week, that is not my worth. And then look around you and think of all these beautiful people around you and this community and think, what are these people worth? And then I ask that you think the same of your employees, that be here or outside in the rest of your lives. And then I want you to think of all the people whose work you have encountered this week, all the people who you will encounter today and tomorrow. Let us carry this one question into all our encounters this week. As we eat the food, drive the highway, open the package, let us think, how much is every worker worth? Thank you so much for being with me today. In consideration of a care that we have all shared these past 8 or 10 days, I would offer the following meditation composed by Melissa Carville-Zimmer, the president of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association. With the deluges in Texas and Louisiana, and in India and Nepal and Bangladesh, we ourselves are deluged. Deluged by stories of death and loss, fear and trembling, devastation and suffering falling upon so many, and especially the most vulnerable. In the name of all that is sacred and holy, may we hold in our thoughts the rescued and the rescuers, the dead and the bereaved, the people and the pets and the wild creatures struggling to survive in those troubled waters. May aid and comfort be sent and received by those in such desperate need. And may we come to understand that we are part of this story as well. That in this moment our part is to enact love in whatever way we can, as volunteers, as benefactors, as people who refuse to turn away or retreat into our own safe and untroubled spaces. We are one people sharing one earth with choices to make about the chapters yet to come. May we choose the way of love, compassion and justice. May it be so. Many of you have already contributed to the relief efforts in the Gulf States, and if you have not yet done so, our Unitarian Universal Service Committee is doing great work in providing relief dollars to various organizations, particularly those that serve the dispossessed in the marginalized communities. You can visit our website for a direct link to UUSC where T.K. Browning, our intern minister, is in the commons after the service and you can donate directly with the laptop that he has at his disposal. Please be generous. I invite you to join me now in our closing hymn, number 112. Please be seated for the benediction and the postlude. We close with these words from the late Irish poet and spiritual writer John O'Donohue. May the light of your soul bless your work with love and with warmth of the heart. May you see in what you do the beauty of your soul. May the sacredness of your work bring light and renewal to those who work with you and to those who receive your work. May your work never exhaust you. May it release wellsprings of refreshment and inspiration and excitement. May you never become lost in bland absence. May the day never burden. May dawn find hope in your heart approaching your new day with dreams, possibilities, and promises. May evening find you gracious and fulfilled. May you go into the night blessed, sheltered, and protected. May you find your soul calm, consoled, and renewed by your work. Blessed be the end of that.