 to start teaching these children. And then you go, whatever it is about. And it's not. We were made up of the U.S. and the U.N. and the U.N. and the U.N. and the U.N. and the U.N. and the U.N. and the U.N. and the U.N. and the U.N. Okay, so thank you. We'll be down right now. And once you pay attention to the corner. Okay, Versace. Are you coming? I'm here. And then I'm here. To tear the narcissist into a boot. To tear? Yes. This would be the system that they would therapy. He's trying to show us what he's been able to learn. He's been able to do the best around the world, that's what he says, right? Because, you know, it's all the parts of the world, and it's the comments we have from you on there, and it starts with, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like over my bed, it's so, I say it's like, do you see it? And that musical introduction is our way of saying good morning and welcome to another Sunday here at First Unitarian Society. We're independent thinkers, gather in a safe, nurturing environment to explore issues of social, spiritual, and ethical significance as we try to make a difference in this world. And speaking of things that are different in this world, I'm Steve Goldberg, a proud, enormously talented member of this congregation, and I would like to offer a warm welcome to any guests, visitors, and newcomers. If this is your first time at First Unitarian Society, I think you'll find it's a very special place. Pretty soon we'll enter into a moment of centering silence so we can be present with each other this morning. Before we do that, let me just mention that after the moment of centering silence, you'll have a chance to sit back or lean forward to enjoy today's service. I know it will touch your heart, stir your spirits, and trigger one or two new thoughts. We're glad you're here, and now please join in a moment of centering silence. And I'd like to invite you to join while you're standing to read the words aloud with me from your order of service for the lighting of our chalice. May the shining light of our chalice recall the inspiration and kind deeds that spread in ripples from each of us, making the world more beautiful in ways we may never know. And I invite you to join in a warm greeting with your neighbors as we continue our service. And if we have any young people who'd like to come forward, I have a special message for you, but for young people of any age, you are welcome to come up here and meet my friends. Young people of any age are welcome up here. This is a very special spot up here. Well, good morning. This is my very special friend, Fudgie Bear. You may not have met him or have heard of him, but he is notorious in this congregation. Fudgie Bear lives in the forests and caves of Baraboo with his mama bear and papa bear and grandpa bear and his brother and sister, Arabica and Espresso. So you know what the minister's thinking of on Sunday mornings, that's for sure. Well, it was gray and rainy all weekend and Fudgie Bear was so bored. He was bored, bored, bored, bored because he couldn't go outside and play because everything was wet and muddy and he had already done everything indoors except clean his room and he wasn't interested in that. And so he was so bored. So what Fudgie Bear did all weekend long was he spent the days playing games and sharing stories with grandpa bear, which was a really good deal because grandpa bear is actually Fudgie Bear's best friend. He knows so many stories and he knows the answer to any question it seems and so that actually turned out to be a pretty good deal. Now, Fudgie Bear sometimes forgets maybe you know how this is, he forgets that he's playing indoors and he gets a little out of hand. Well, he was helping grandpa bear get the honey down from the top shelf so that they could have sandwiches for lunch and he heard a loud crack. He jumped off the chair as quickly as he could just in time to keep from falling and he said, oh no, grandpa bear, come in here. Grandpa bear came in and he saw that Fudgie Bear had broken one of the legs off the chair. Fudgie bear felt so bad. He said, this was terrible. What a terrible thing to do. And grandpa bear said, well, might be bad, might be good. When you've lived as long as I have you know that sometimes you just have to wait and see. Well, after lunch Fudgie bear wanted to play with his favorite toy but they couldn't find it anywhere because he hadn't cleaned his room, right? So they looked and they looked and they looked but he couldn't find it and he got more and more upset until he thought he might even cry and he said, grandpa bear, this is terrible. We can't find my toy. Grandpa bear said, scratched his beard and said, well, might be bad, might be good. When you've lived as long as I have you know that sometimes you just have to wait and see. So they looked together. They didn't find the toy but they did find Fudgie bear's checkers set which he hadn't seen for months and so they spent the rest of the afternoon warm and dry indoors and playing checkers. Well, grandpa bear is super smart and super fun but sometimes he needs a nap and today was one of those days. So he made Fudgie bear promise to be good while he went and lay down for just a little bit. Well, Fudgie bear kind of forgot his promise and he went out into the rain to try to find his toy. He and grandpa bear spent the rest of the afternoon playing checkers but by the end of the day Fudgie bear wasn't feeling very well and realized that he had caught a cold. So grandpa bear put him to bed and that was where mama bear and papa bear found him that evening and all tucked away under a quill. They said, poor Fudgie bear we're so sorry that you're feeling bad. Fudgie bear blew his little red nose and said, well mama bear might be bad and it might be good. When you've lived as long as I have you know that sometimes you just have to wait and see. Well thank you guys for being such good listeners. I'm so glad you got to meet Fudgie bear. It is so great to see you here today. And we're gonna sing our young people off to summer fun with the second hymn in your order. No, 108, thank you. Thank you, would you please be seated. Our first reading this morning is from this month's issue of Vanity Fair, an article titled The Man Who Created the Worldwide Web Has Some Regrets. British computer scientist and Unitarian Universalist Tim Berners-Lee is best known as the inventor of the Worldwide Web and it's no coincidence that his vision of the internet reflects the openness and freedom of our movement. He spoke to Vanity Fair this month to share his worries about how these values are being exploited and threatened online. For people who want to make sure the web serves humanity we have to concern ourselves with what people are building on top of it. Tim Berners-Lee told me one morning nearly three decades earlier Berners-Lee invented the Worldwide Web. On this morning he had come to Washington as part of his mission to save it. While Silicon Valley started rideshare apps and social media networks without profoundly considering the consequences Berners-Lee has spent the past three decades thinking about little else. He envisioned that his invention could in the wrong hands become a destroyer of worlds. His prophecy came to life most recently when revelations emerged that Russian hackers interfered with the 2016 presidential election and when Facebook admitted it exposed data on more than 80 million users to a political research firm, Cambridge Analytica, which worked for Donald Trump's campaign. I was devastated, Berners-Lee told me. We demonstrated that the web had failed instead of served humanity. The power of the web wasn't taken or stolen. We collectively, by the billions, gave it away with every user agreement and intimate moment shared with technology. Facebook, Google, and Amazon now monopolize almost everything that happens online from what we buy to the news we read to whom we like. Along with a handful of powerful government agencies, they are able to monitor, manipulate, and spy in once unimaginable ways. The forces that Berners-Lee unleashed nearly three decades ago are accelerating, moving in ways no one can fully predict. Are we headed toward an Orwellian future where a handful of corporations monitor and control our lives? Or are we on the verge of creating a better version of society online, one where the free flow of ideas and information helps cure disease, expose corruption, reverse injustices? Our second reading is from the memoir The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. In the year following her husband's sudden death and complicated by her daughter's critical illness and eventual death, journalist and novelist Joan Didion reflects on how denial and regret prevented her from grieving these losses. Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner, and life as you know it ends. I couldn't give away my husband's shoes. I could give away other things, but the shoes. How could he come back if they took his organs? How could he come back if I gave away his shoes? Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, believing that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. As I recall this, I realize how open we are to the persistent message that we can avert death and that if death catches us, we have only ourselves to blame. I do not believe in the resurrection of the body, but I still believed that given the right circumstances, he would come back. There's a joke that ministers make among ourselves that we each have only one sermon in us, and we find various ways to dress it up differently to deliver it each week. Of course, that's not really true, but the kernel of truth is that we each find certain ideas and certain phrases that express the heart of our journey, and it's hard not to use these all the time. I suspect that this morning's sermon is my one sermon. My late colleague Robbie Walsh published a collection of writings in 1992, the year I started seminary in Berkeley, and one of his poems has stuck with me ever since. In fact, when I announced my departure from First Unitarian Society in 2007 to pursue my doctorate, my letter to the congregation contained this very poem, titled Fault Line. Did you ever think that there might be a fault line passing underneath your living room, a place in which your life is lived in meeting and in separating, wondering and telling, unaware that just beneath you is the unseen seam of great plates that strain through time, and that your life already spilling over the brim could be invaded, sent off in a new direction, turned aside by forces you were warned about but not prepared for. Shelves could be spilled out, the level floor set at an angle in some seconds shaking. You would have to take your losses, do whatever must be done next. When the great plates slip and the earth shivers and the flaw is seen to lie in what you trusted most, look not to more solidity, to weighty slabs of concrete poured or strength of cantilevered beam to save the fractured order. Trust more the tensile strands of love that bend and stretch to hold you in the web of life that's often torn but always healing. There's your strength. The shifting plates, the rest of earth, your room, your precious life, they all proceed from love, the ground on which we walk together. Becoming a minister marked an enormous shift in my life, away from my training as a scientist, away from my work as a contractor for the space program, and into a life that demanded very different values and priorities. This poem encapsulates for me that decision and the many unforeseen consequences that followed, including my five years here as one of your ministers. You could also say that I started preparing this one sermon even earlier in the mid-1980s when I was an undergraduate majoring in physics. I had wanted to be a scientist ever since kindergarten so I could study things, I wrote in crayon, like bugs and dope. Apparently I was a pretty worldly five-year-old. Out of all the sciences I loved, I chose physics because it seemed the most likely to lead me to knowing and controlling my world. I was so attracted to the idea of nature as completely lawful and therefore entirely predictable, as philosophers had been in the 17th century when they imagined the universe as essentially an enormous clockwork machine. This understanding of our world flourished because it explained so much. Practically anything, it seemed, could be likened to simple collisions on a billiards table. Even living organisms, even humans, could be understood as essentially biological machines and reduced to the most basic mechanical principles. It wasn't long, however, before the holes began to show in our confidence of perfect knowledge. The natural philosopher Isaac Newton had mapped out the paths of our entire solar system with such precision that he realized that the movement of the planets was not perfect and predictable. The gravitational pull of each planet on its neighbors introduced irregularities, potentially large enough to pull the entire system apart unless some greater force were able to keep it all together. Newton concluded that this force was God's intervention in the clockwork universe to nudge it all back on track when necessary. This God of the gaps sounded like a cop-out even then, and Newton's rival, Gottfried Leibniz, ridiculed him for describing God as a craftsman incapable of building a clock that could run on its own. What was becoming clear even then was that the clockwork analogy was not enough, that even the laws of nature produced unexpected complexity and unpredictability. The work of modern physics has largely been about demonstrating that beneath the apparent regularity of our world, reality will always be more complicated than we can fully understand. The fields of quantum theory, mass theory and complexity theory demonstrated that no matter how closely we look at a complex system, its behaviors never smooth out to the simple game of billiards we want to expect. One of the most familiar places this unpredictability shows up is in weather forecasts. It's widely acknowledged that even the best computer models and the greatest computational power still involve enormous uncertainty looking more than a few days into the future. Even the tiniest variation in wind speed or direction can grow and multiply and significantly change the outcome a week later. Spandrels, in case you're still wondering, are another example of the unexpected consequences of earlier events. The dome is one of the most impressive of architectural forms and gives great psychological effect to many religious buildings, as well as in secular cathedrals, like our own spectacular state-capital building. The architectural problem is that placing a round dome onto a square base is not a perfect fit and creates extra spaces. In the capital Rotunda, these extra spaces are trapezoidal, as you see here. A simpler version of the spandrel appears when we place a rounded arch in a rectangular doorway. As you see in this close-up of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, architects and sculptors often fill these extra spaces with decorative elements. Yet another example is the fan-vaulted ceiling, which soars dramatically above each pillar, but looking upward, we see the problem of what to do with the space where the fans meet imperfectly. The point is that these extra spaces are not part of the original intent of the design, but an unavoidable byproduct of combining forms that don't join perfectly. I've been puzzling for many months over how the spandrel illuminates something about the larger world around us, and only recently found that I wasn't the first person to make this connection. Biologist Stephen Jay Gould beat me to it in his use of the spandrel to explain the side effects of evolutionary adaptation. The amazing success of evolutionary theory has tempted us to assume that every feature exists because it evolved for some specific purpose. However, our own bodies help us recognize how the side effects of evolution can sometimes be less than optimally successful. The human appendix, for example, is a part of the large intestine that seems to have shrunk as it became less important to digestion, but it causes a potential health risk in the form of appendicitis or cancerous tumors. The eye is an even more famous example because the earliest vertebrates developed an eye with the optic fibers passing through the retina. All vertebrates today have a small blind spot here. However, cephalopods have their optic fibers exiting the eye behind the retina, and so an octopus eye has no such blind spot. Gould recognized that features like an appendix or a blind spot didn't evolve to serve a particular purpose but are simply a byproduct of some other adaptation. Choices made long ago leave us with unforeseeable consequences today. I thought you'd like that. Another situation where I'm so aware of these surprising outcomes is in the introduction of new technologies into our lives. In our first reading, computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee regrets the way that the internet has made it possible for destructive values and behaviors to find new expression. I was also reading this week about the legacy of the first sustained nuclear reaction and the dismay of the scientists at the later consequences of their discovery. Volney Wilson, one physicist working on the experiment, later reflected, sadly, I would have thought that the development of this horrible weapon would have been more of a force to bring the world together. The unpredictable nature of our lives interests not only the scientist in me but also the minister. Two common responses to this reality that worry me are hypervigilance and pathological regret. Hypervigilance is an anxiety response out of proportion to the actual risk of a situation and the belief that extreme levels of care and control can eliminate danger entirely. One place in particular where hypervigilance is tempting is in parenting where the daunting task of raising another human being creates unreasonable expectations. The New York Times this week featured an article about the destructive effects of hypervigilance on mothering in particular. Writer Kim Brooks reflected on not her own cautiousness but that of her neighbors when she was reported to the police for letting her son wait in the car while she went into a store. Brooks laments, statistically speaking, a child is far more likely to be killed in a car on the way to a store than waiting in one that is parked. But we've decided that such reasoning is beyond the point, beside the point. We've decided to do whatever we have to do to feel safe from such horrors no matter how rare they might be. And so now children do not walk to school or play in a park on their own. They do not wait in cars. They do not take long walks through the woods or ride bikes along paths or build secret forts while we are inside working or cooking or leading our lives. Not all spandrels are beautiful. When I hear someone explain their actions as being for safety's sake or just to be sure, I listen further for the possibility that they are in the trap of hypervigilance. When I was still working here at First Unitarian, a parent of an adult daughter asked me, how are you going to guarantee that something you say from the pulpit won't trigger her post-traumatic stress disorder? I couldn't promise him that, of course. I couldn't promise that nothing I said would ever distress her and that everything would be all right because how could I possibly guarantee that? Instead, I explained how we would respond as best we could when we needed to. But I understood our temptation to pursue the appearance of safety at any cost. Joan Didion's reflections in our second reading trace her evolving grief over the year that followed her husband's death and her daughter's lingering decline. Realizing that she could not possibly keep her family safe from all harm, Didion regularly found herself being pulled into what she called the vortex, a cycle of debilitating confusion and regret that she had not been able to foresee her husband's heart attack or her daughter's hemorrhages. She wrote, I did not believe in the resurrection of the body, but I still believed that, given the right circumstances, he would come back. Obsessively, she relived every memory for signs of their impending deaths. What if I had said something then? What if I had done something then? All in the desperate desire to maintain the illusion that her world was fully knowable and controllable. Ultimately, Didion found herself unable to grieve because she was so consumed with trying to rewrite the past. My one sermon has taught me this. The point of the spiritual life is not to prevent the unexpected from ever happening to us. It is to help us respond in life-giving ways when the unforeseeable inevitably happens to us. So many of us are haunted, as Didion was, by the reality that spandrels appear everywhere in our lives. The consequences of millions of tiny factors but not always something we can foresee or control. Our own religious movement is itself the product of unintended consequences. The wheels set in motion 501 years ago by German priest Martin Luther, urging seekers to take control of their own faith, have produced spiritual communities today that he would scarcely recognize. And as much as Unitarian Universalists love the idea of being a religion that evolves, it has been a rocky road becoming something different from who we were. Our spoken ideal of racial equality, for example, has been a real struggle in practice as the people of color and our congregations demand that we walk the walk on issues like systemic racism and white supremacy. We can never truly know where our choices will take us but must deal with the consequences as best we can. And it is possible to prepare ourselves for this work. Many of you know that one of the jobs I'm working while I finish my dissertation is at the Department of Transportation just west of here. The Hill Farms Building, which was older than I am, is now being demolished as we watch from our new building next door. It's an amazing sight to see the wrecking ball carefully breaking away pieces interrupted every so often by an avalanche of debris. I was struck this week by exactly how a building comes down. The rigid concrete crumbles easily under the wrecking ball but the building persists thanks to a tangled spaghetti of flexible steel rebar holding it together long after we would expect it to fall. Look not to more solidity, my colleague Robbie Walsh writes, to weighty slabs of concrete poured to save the fractured order. Trust more the tensile strands of love that bend and stretch to hold you in the web of life that's often torn but always healing. There's your strength. I keep coming back to this sermon and this poem not because I've mastered it but because I have to keep relearning it. Sharing the world with the unexpected means making peace with the reality that we always have to make choices with too little information and with incomplete control over the outcome. When our path swerves in an unexpected way either because of a major crisis such as death, illness or injury or the less dramatic everyday changes that pull the rug out from under us, may you find your strength in flexibility, suppleness and softness rather than in brittle rigidity. The spandrels that appear in our lives are blank spaces waiting for our response. May we seek together for ways to fill them that are life-giving and beautiful. May it be so. And now our ushers will pass the basket for the giving and receiving of our offering. All that you see around you and all that this community does is possible because of your generosity. What you give makes such a difference and we are grateful. Thank you. We appreciate the many ways in which people give to the operation of this community and in particular we like to hold up the gifts of our volunteers who have helped with our service this morning. Our greeters were Patty Witte and Claire Box. Our ushers were Liza Monroe, Michael Lossy and Dick Goldberg. On sound was Marine Friend. Hospitality is being provided by Sandy Plisch and Pamela McMullen. Our lay minister is Lois Evenson and John Powell is the tour guide after the 9 o'clock service. If you would like a tour of our spectacular building today after the service, please meet John here by the ramp. We join together each week a community that gathers with joys and sorrows written on our hearts. In this place we love and are loved. We give and we receive in return. We come together to find strength and common purpose turning our minds and hearts toward one another seeking to bring into our circle of concern all who need our love and support. This week we hold with special thoughts Terry Pepper and Rachel Avery as they head to Indiana to mourn the loss and celebrate the life of Terry's grandmother who passed away on Friday morning. Now I'd like to invite you to rise and body your spirit for our closing hymn number six in your gray hymn books just as long as I have breath. The dancer, the willow, the calming breath, the gentle hand, all of these find their strength in flexibility rather than rigidity. May your journey to be such a dance that your power comes in being able to respond heartfully when life throws you for a loop. Most of all, may we live at peace with our world and with ourselves. Blessed be and amen. Would you please be seated for the postlude.