 Today I'm joining us Bruce Jackson along with the worship team of Linda Warren, Drew Collins, Stephen Gregorius, Daniel Carnes, and of course our special musical guest today, the Solstice Harp Ensemble. We're so grateful you're with us this weekend. The vision of First Unitarian Society is growing souls, connecting with one another and embodying our Unitarian Universalist values in our lives, in our community, and in our world. If you're visiting us today, welcome. We're so very glad that you are with us. And if you would like more information about First Unitarian Society, our programs and activities, you can stop by the welcome table after service, which is through these doors and to my left, your right. Our Healthy Congregation team has begun hosting small group conversations during coffee hour on the first weekend of the month. So that is today. If you would like to join them during coffee hour for a smaller facilitated conversation, please do so in the library directly across from the center doors. And for those of you joining us virtually today, we're glad you are with us as well. We hope you'll be able to take a moment and watch the announcement slides after today's service to learn more about our upcoming programs and activities. And our holiday decorating party is later today at 1 p.m. here in the commons. Are you guys coming? Yes. Yay. Are you coming? Cookies, cocoa, music, crafts for all ages, decorating the tree, we're going to have so much fun. So we hope you can come back. It's from 1 to 3 this afternoon right out here in the commons. And now I invite you to join me in a moment of silence as we center ourselves and bring ourselves fully into this time as we join together once again in community. Out of depths unknown, the spark of life ignites and we are born. We enter a world, a universe not of our making. Our lives unfold in mystery and wonder, questions abound for which there are no definite answers. And so we gather in community to seek in one another assurance and recognition, compassion and strength. We gather in community to be reminded of what is most ultimate and what is most sacred in this spirit of searching and of reverence. Let us worship together this morning. And we invite you now to rise in all the ways we do joining together in the words of affirmation as we light our chalice. We light this flame reminding ourselves to treasure the magic in the mundane. The wonders of carbon dioxide, oxygen, nitrogen, rapid oxidation into light, heat and the dance of a flame. We light this chalice kindling remembering our innate sense of wonder at the very real magic of our world. So nice to see you today. I have a story for you today about a little green parrot. See there's two pictures on the screen. There's the picture of the eagles and then over in the corner, maybe you can't quite see it because it's so small, there's a picture of a green parrot, yes. So this green parrot lived in the jungle and she liked to fly all over the jungle and spend time with her other friends who lived in the jungle like the anteater and the snake and the frog and the monkey. What about the tiger in the other story? Yeah, there was a tiger in this jungle too, sure. And they were all friends. Yeah. And the chihuahua? Okay. And there was a chihuahua. We've just added to the story. And an orangutan. That's a very busy jungle. In conclusion, there were a lot of animals in the jungle and the parrot was friends with all of them. She was a very social animal, even the gorillas, all right, but she could fly unlike many of the other animals. Not there are animals in the jungle who could fly, but parrot was one of the ones that could. So sometimes she would hang out in the jungle and sometimes she would fly above the jungle and over the river and all. And she just looked at the beautiful place that was her home. And one day she did that. She flew up to the mountains where there were some eagles who were resting on the rocks, just kind of hanging out there. And she came down to rest beside one of the eagles. And she looked back down to the jungle and she saw a great pillar of smoke rising up out of the jungle because there was a fire. A fire. Well, you know, some of the trees were on, they were burning, they were on fire. So, so she was very concerned. And the eagle that was next to her said, yeah, it's a real shame, a lot of trees are going to burn, a lot of animals are going to lose their homes. But what are you going to do? Well, the parrot thought about how she was friends with all those animals who were going to lose their homes and she loved the forest very much. So she thought, well, what can I do? Well, what she could do, she figured out, was that she could fly down to the river and dunk herself in the river very fast, like swoop down and then back up. And there was just a little bit of water caught on her green feathers and she flew over to where the fire was and just sort of shook herself a little bit and a few droplets of water fell down on the fire. Now, do you think that did much of anything? No. No, it didn't. It didn't. The fire was still happening. All right. So the solution you think is an empty coconut shell, she's going to pick up the water. It's a very Gilligan's Island style solution because we're solving problems with coconuts. Ask your grandparents. It's all right. They'll explain it to you. So she did this and nothing happened. So she did it again and really nothing much happened. And she did it a third time and it still didn't seem to make much of a difference and eventually that eagle she'd been chatting with before swooped down to where she was and said, look, you're not going to change anything. You just waste your time. Why are you doing this? And she said, well, I'm doing what I can do. Is there anything that you can do? And the eagle thought about that. He thought, well, if the parrot could do it, then the eagle could too. And so the eagle started going back and forth with the parrot. Back to the river, back to the fire, back to the river, back to the fire. And eventually all those other eagles that were hanging out on the rocks far away, they were watching all that happen and at first they thought it was strange and then they thought it was silly and then they thought, well, I guess we could do it too. So they all swooped down to the river and back to the fire, down to the river and back to the fire. And eventually all of them working together, they were able to put out the forest fire. So the reason why I'm telling you this story is because each of us can't necessarily change everything but we do have it in our power to do something to change something. So does anyone know what this is? It's a box. You got that right. Absolutely. Does anyone recognize this box? It is a donation box. That's true. It's a donation box for a program called Guest at Your Table. I used to do this when I was your age with my family, the congregation that I grew up in. Guest at Your Table is a program from the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. They are the organization that is charged with doing good work in the world on behalf of our faith, on behalf of our religion. And they work by, oh, open it, well, currently it's empty. But that's fixable, right? Because they work by forming partnerships with people all over the world and in this country. Not to tell them what to do or to say, here's some money, we want you to do this with it. But to say, what do you need? What does your community already need help with? And then to help them and support them in doing what they already know needs doing. So this program works like this. I have one of these at home myself. I put it on my table and then each time that I sit down for a meal and I like this because it makes sure that I sit down to eat instead of eating over the sink. So each time that I sit down for a meal, I put a little bit of money in there. I'll be honest with you, not necessarily a lot, but a little bit. And that reminds me that I'm not eating alone, that I have some guests who are there with me in spirit, some guests all over the world, that I haven't necessarily met, but I do want to be in partnership with. I do want to help in the way that I can. So I put a little money in this box each time that I eat and then at the end of this month, I'm going to bring it back here and turn it in and we're going to send that money on to the service committee and to the people that they work with and help. So there are boxes, everyone take note, there are boxes at the social justice table out in the commons if you are interested in taking part in this program this year. And now, I hope you have a good time at your classes. You can make the world and to share your gifts and strength. A time of giving and receiving where we give freely and generously to this offering which sustains and strengthens our community here and also our outreach offering recipient who this week is Urban Triage Incorporated, a black led organization that was founded and rooted in the idea of for the people, by the people. They work to empower black families and children by developing and managing life changing programming and mobilizing community resources to distribute them to those most in need. There are multiple ways to share your gifts this morning. There are baskets at the exit to this room in which you may place cash or checks. And you'll also see on the screen that you can donate directly from our website, fusmattison.org, and find the text to give information there as well. We thank you for your generosity and your faith in this life we create together. And Joshua Heschel, the activist philosopher once wrote that we can never sneer at the stars. Mock the dawn or scoff at the totality of being. Sublime grandeur evokes unhesitating, unflinching awe. Away from the immense cloistered in our own concepts, we may scorn and revile everything. But standing between earth and sky, we are silenced by the sight, the sky. And in particular, the sky at night with its view of the moon and the stars, planets, comets, and other such lights is one of the oldest and most dependable sources of awe in the realm of human experience. Since long before our species could write and perhaps even before we could speak, human beings have been gazing upwards in wonder at the starry sky. It is an almost universally agreed upon example of sublime grandeur to use Heschel's phrase. Almost universally. But not quite. You see, on December 21, 1968, a rocket launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida. For only the third time ever, a Saturn V rocket, the most powerful means of explosive propulsion ever devised up to that point, sent a small capsule hurtling upwards into the sky and out into the space beyond it. And for the first time, the capsule had people inside it. The launch of NASA's Apollo 8 mission was a dramatic gamble, as all human spaceflight had been and to some degree still is. The first Apollo crew was tragically lost in a fire during pre-flight testing. Apollo missions two through six were all sent up as tests without any human crew members at all. Now Apollo 8 was sending three people to do something that no human being had ever done before. To leave behind the immediate orbit of the Earth and circle the Moon. Just going out beyond the limits of the atmosphere was still a new experience shared by only a handful of human beings. Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gurgarin had become the first person in space less than eight years before. And for most people who did get to share that particular experience, it was a wondrous thing. In interviews given beforehand and accounts written soon and long afterwards, astronauts talked about the wonder and majesty of the starry sky. They spoke with awe and reverence about the experience of space, the humbling vastness of it and the like. But the Apollo 8 mission was led by Commander Frank Borman, an astronaut with an unusual distinction. Frank, who is still alive today, has been in space twice. Apollo 8 was his second trip. And other than that already very select qualification, he is noteworthy for being one of the only people to have experienced going up into space and then to have pronounced it no big deal. Interviewed following the 50th anniversary of the flight in 2018, he expressed no wonder or even nostalgia for the experience or for nearly any of what he saw while on it. He was asked how he described the mission to his wife and children. He replied that they'd never really talked about it very much. In fact, he didn't recall them ever having asked. As he explained to the interviewer, all that science fiction stuff like Star Trek and the movie 2001, A Space Odyssey, always just bored him. It seemed as though he was including his own very real personal experience of circling the moon on his list of uninteresting science fiction stuff. The television series Star Trek, now a series of series as well as movies and books and numerous other things, is responsible for the well-famous phrase, space, the final frontier. That opening sentence at the beginning of the voiceover that started almost every episode was an acknowledgement of sorts. When the program first aired in 1966, Westerns still made up a large portion of the television market. Star Trek was originally pitched to studio executives as wagon trade. In space, a frontier is a place out beyond the boundaries of what is known, what is well understood, and often what is safe. In Western culture, there exists a tendency to pronounce many of our most problematic behaviors as universal human qualities. So I want to say clearly that the impulse to explore and then subsequently to dominate a frontier is absolutely not universal. There are plenty of people and plenty of societies for whom a frontier forms an important and accepted barrier. But the drive to conquer the frontier is also not unique to Christian Europeans and the nations that they made by colonizing lands and peoples they considered to belong to various frontiers over the last 500 years. It is much older than that. The ancient Romans pushed their frontier over the Alps through France, across the Channel to England, and all the way to the southern reaches of Scotland. Imperial China built walls to keep out the nomads on their frontier and then crossed those walls in years when they felt strong enough to claim more territory. And the Umayyad Caliphate, the first major Muslim political order, started out centered in Saudi Arabia and Syria and Iraq and expanded its frontiers both west and east until it stretched from Pakistan to Portugal. There is an awe and majesty associated with the frontier. Again, perhaps not everywhere where what is familiar to a given culture gives way to what is not, but in many of those places. In ancient Israel, the sea was the frontier. It was regarded with a reverent sort of fear for all the calamities it could bring, both in terms of storms and the arrival of invading ships. The western half of this country, the place probably most closely associated with the word frontier, is the site of terrible loss, suffering, death, and injustice precisely because of that association. The taming of the west was a rolling process of theft from native peoples by white settlers and our government through mass killings, forced migrations, and cultural annihilation. Nearly every physical frontier ever envisioned by any human culture has had other people on the other side of that invisible line. And however awestruck a spectator might be by the grandeur of an unfamiliar landscape or the differences of its little understood inhabitants, the wonderment of the colonizer never saved the colonized. The frontier of the stars is different if only in that so far as we have yet discovered it has no native inhabitants. Like any other frontier, human beings have long wondered at it, imagined things about it, and thought of what it might be like to cross the invisible line between here and there. The Pawnee people of what is now the state of Nebraska tell the story of the creator God Tirawa, setting the stars in the sky in order to hold it up. The largest ones he gave power over the winds and the rains in order to keep the earth fertile and green. The lesser lights resented this and when they tried to steal that power, they accidentally released all the storms into the world that Tirawa had meant to keep sealed up in a bag. In Hindu myth, the seven stars of the Big Dipper were seven sages, each of them married to one of seven sisters. But the sages were deceived and believed false rumors against their wives. Six of the seven divorced, and those six sisters left their original place in the sky and moved to become the stars of the Pleiades. The 19th Psalm describes the sky as constantly proclaiming the glory of God, set with a wedding tent for the sun who possesses one end of it to the other like a groom at his wedding. And in the early silent film, A Trip to the Moon, a band of travelers reached the earth's satellite riding a gigantic bullet which strikes the eye of the man in the moon and there confront the strange insect creatures that lived there before returning home by crash-landing in the ocean. Frank Borman found nothing so wondrous or memorable in the course of being propelled by the largest rocket then in existence to get closer to the moon than anyone else had ever gone before. He remembered his two fellow crew members being very excited and mesmerized as he put it, but in the two days spent journeying through nothingness to reach the moon. The most significant detail Borman could remember was that he was sick and didn't quite manage to catch all of it in the bag. Waitlessness was interesting, he said, for about 30 seconds. Then it became accepted and the moon was just barren, cratered devastation. No color, just shades of gray. But there was one moment, one image from the trip that Frank Borman spoke of with appreciation and something that might be called wonder. The astronauts had been sent to take countless photographs of the moon's surface, in part so that NASA could pick out a place to land a lunar module later in the Apollo program. But while they were circling the moon and taking pictures out the window of their little capsule, Borman and his crewmates, James Lovell and William Anders, saw something else entirely, they saw the Earth. From their perspective, it was rising up over the surface of the moon. It seemed so obviously important that they all began taking pictures. The most famous of those images is called Earthrise. It shows the blue-white marble of the Earth, its lower third in shadow, hanging over the gray waste of a lunar surface against the inky blackness of space. In that interview, so much later in his life, this is what Frank Borman had to say about viewing the Earth from a distance greater than any human eye had ever seen it before. It's 240,000 miles away. It was small enough you could cover it with your thumbnail. The dearest things in life that were back on the Earth, my family, my wife, my parents, they were still alive then. That was for me the high point of the flight from an emotional standpoint. Because the capsule had an audio recorder that was constantly running, we know that the initial sighting of the Earth ran like this. William Anders, who went on to take that one incredibly famous picture, spotted it first and pointed out how beautiful it was, what a good image it would make. And Borman jokingly pointed out the limits of their instructions, hey, don't take pictures of that. It's not scheduled before they all started clicking away anyway. All rarely arrives on a set timetable, according to rules or regulations, and fitting neatly into clear parameters. In the 1960s, the American space program was laser focused on the moon. Before his death, President Kennedy had set a goal of sending human beings to the moon and returning them safely home by the end of the decade. He famously said, we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. It has now been approximately 50 years since the last human being stood on the surface of the moon. There is some talk of going back again. Even more though, there is talk of going further onto the next most logical destination in our solar system, the planet Mars. Mars fever may not be able to compete with the obsession with the moon that raged in the United States in the late 60s, but it is still a powerful force. And more than just visiting there, major voices in science and industry openly dream of settling there permanently, creating a lasting human presence on another planet from our own. The grandeur of bold, ambitious ideas can inspire people and groups and whole societies to do amazing things. But the barriers to actually colonizing Mars, to creating large, lasting, self-sustaining human settlements there, are enormous. It's not just the distance involved or the fact that the air is too thin to breathe, even if it were composed of something that human beings found breathable, it is also impossibly cold, with Antarctic caliber temperatures even in the warmest climes. And while there is water, there may not be enough of it, at least that is possible to access in the right areas. And the soil's toxic. And there's constant threat from radiation. And the lower gravity would slowly destroy human bones over time and might make it impossible for anyone to become pregnant or give birth there. Still, there are knowledgeable, talented people working towards this staggering ambition right now, despite not just long odds, but the literal reality that it is truly impossible as a project within the limits of our current scientific understandings. Wonder can drive the human will to attempt things it would never and could never do within any standard of reason or even of sanity. So the ways in which we channel our awe and our wonder into action matter very deeply. Beautiful things may be accomplished by people untethered from what is normal or reasonable or expected and terrible things as well. Augustine of Hippo, one of the early Christian luminaries given the title of Doctor of the Church, wrote, Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars, and then pass by themselves without wonder. It is possible to become lost in our awe and wonderment, lost from the immediacy of the here and now, from the mundane needs of the moment or of those around us, or simply lost from ourselves. In that interview again, the person recording Frank Borman had a particular curiosity about something. Why did he quit? Apollo 8 was Borman's last mission as an astronaut. He could have stayed on, provided that he remained healthy. He was almost guaranteed to be scheduled for another flight, this time perhaps getting to walk on the moon itself. Instead, he left the program entirely. As he explained, once the first Americans actually reached the moon, fulfilling Kennedy's promise and beating the Soviet Union there, something that mattered a lot to Borman at the time, him and countless other Americans, once that race was won, he didn't feel a need to contribute to it any longer. He had other priorities. He said, somebody else wanted to do it. Let them take my place. I love my family more than anything in the world. I would have never subjected them to the dangers simply for me to be an explorer. Forgoing those risks, Frank survived to be today the oldest living astronaut. He was able to raise his children and then into their 90s, he was present to care for his wife, Susan, who lived with Alzheimer's disease for roughly a dozen years until her death in 2021. In their last years together, she could not walk or feed herself, so he was the one who took care of those things for her as best he could. When I look up at the night sky, I think about the complex physical facts that make up what I am seeing, how the earth I am standing on spins and circles a gigantic nuclear furnace, how the points of light above me are mostly more of those same sorts of furnaces, burning so bright that I can see them with my unassisted eye, across a gulf so vast that I am just now seeing the light they first cast years ago. I feel ennobled by these thoughts, a fragment of a fragment of a fragment, but connected to something impossibly beautiful and enormous beyond my ability to truly comprehend. One of my best friends thinks the same thoughts and has exactly the opposite reaction. He feels small, inconsequential, arbitrary. As a result, he doesn't like to think about it much. Two people may not necessarily find the same awe in the same thing or in the same way, but it abides in us and in the world. And the surest sign of it is in the good we do, the love that wonder engenders in us for each other, for the universe, and for ourselves. Richard Feynman, the theoretical physicist, once remarked, the vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination. Stuck on this carousel, my little eye can catch one million-year-old light, a vast pattern of which I am apart. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to mystery to know a little bit about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artist of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent, you and I, and all of us, reside on a spinning sphere of mostly oxygen and nitrogen, silicon, magnesium, aluminum, and iron. The same sphere that Frank Borman saw out the window of his capsule so small and distant that he could have covered it with his thumb and some little specks of the matter of this earth long ago gained the power to look out on the distant fires that dot the universe and to wonder about them. Yet, for all our wondering and searching, one conclusion remains so far repeating. We have a home, and it is here. We gather, carrying in our hearts the joys and the losses of our days. We hold our own pains and celebrations as well as those of the ones we love. We share these here knowing they are held gently in care and in support and in love. This morning we light a candle of love and memory for Jeremy Jenke, whose father passed away from Louis-Body dementia. We send our love and prayers for healing to Jeremy as he grieves his father's passing and honors his life. And we light a candle in solidarity with the people of Ukraine, both in their suffering and in their struggle. Together we yearn for peace, for them and for all people, for an end to all wars of conquest anywhere and everywhere on earth. And if you'll join me now in a moment of meditation with these words from Leif Seligman. We pause in the stillness to rest for a moment, to quiet ourselves so that we can feel what stirs within us. Each breath draws us closer to the pulse of life, and with each exhalation we make room for something new. May we find in this gathering the comfort of those who care. May we encounter patience along our growing edges and compassion for our most tender spots. Here may we find the inspiration and encouragement we need to face our challenges and nurture ourselves. And in the presence of suffering across the globe, may we redouble our efforts to practice kindness where we are. With the hope that the light of our actions travels like the light of far away stars. May our gestures of compassion and generosity cede possibility. May we travel humbly with one another, choosing reconciliation over resentment as we try to live right sized. When life presses in and shifts us off balance, when pain assails us, when frustration mounts, may the rhythm of our breath steady us and bring us back to a place of gratitude. May we rest for a moment together, holding all that lives within our hearts. Blessed be and amen. Celestial voices, the beloved is full of rapture, dancing into being, passion and filling the heavens with song. Do not sit alone in the dark while creation sings three part harmony. Dance my friends, dance wildly, sing joyfully, fill your heart with the beauty of the beloved as the beloved turns your soul into light. Blessed be, go in peace and please be seated for the postlude.