 The podium is given. Please join me in a few moments of centering silence and now please remain seated as we sing our in-gathering hymn number 349. The words appear in your order of service to the first Unitarian Society of Madison. This is a community where curious seekers gather to explore spiritual, ethical and social issues in an accepting and nurturing environment. Unitarian universalism supports the freedom of conscience of each individual as together we seek to be a force for good in the world. My name is Karen Rose Gredler and on behalf of the congregation I would like to extend a special welcome to any visitors who are with us this morning. We are a welcoming congregation so whomever you are and wherever you happen to be on your life journey we celebrate your presence among us. New comers are encouraged to stay for our fellowship hour after the service and to visit the library which is directly across from the center doors of this auditorium. Bring your drinks and your questions. Members of our staff and lay ministry will be on hand to welcome you. You may also look for persons holding teal colored stoneware coffee mugs. These are FUS members knowledgeable about our faith community who would welcome visiting with you. Experienced guides are generally available to give a building tour after the 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 on your left side of the auditorium immediately after the service. We welcome children to stay for the duration of the service however because it is difficult for some in attendance to hear in this lively acoustical environment our child haven and commons in the back there are excellent places to retire if a child needs to talk or move around. The services can still be seen and heard from those areas. This would now be a great time to turn off all devices that might cause a disturbance during the hour especially those phone ringers please. I'd now like to acknowledge those individuals who are helping our service run smoothly. Maureen friend is handling our sound system. Tom Boykoff is our lay minister. Patty Witte is the greeter. Dick Goldberg and Ann Ostrom are the ushers. Marty Hollis has made or is making coffee and lemonade for everyone back in the kitchen area and I believe Pamela McMullen will be our tour guide so remember to look for her up there in the corner if you'd like a tour. Please note the announcements in the red floors insert in your order of service which describe upcoming events at our society and provide more information about today's activities. I do have one announcement to emphasize. This is from Leslie Ross our children's education coordinator. The children's religious education program is only two teachers shy of being fully staffed for the classes that begin next week. Wait a minute two more in the next seven days please. Please consider signing up to join a team of three other teachers to help bring our liberal religious education to our children. We need one compass post points sorry compass points class teacher at 9 a.m. and one Bibleonian Bibleonian teacher at 11 a.m. If you are interested please talk to Leslie following today's service. She'll be out and about and probably down at the end of the commons near the education table. Again welcome we hope today's service will stimulate your mind touch your heart and stir your spirit. Thank you. Hope we don't have to maintain that level of energy through the service. Big opening. From Annie Dillard teaching a stone to talk. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, even of silence by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and subtle way to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. I invite you to rise and body and spirit for the lighting of our chalice and if you will join me in reading the words of affirmation printed in today's program. The work of the world is as common as mud botched it smears the hands crumbles to dust but the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies clean and evident Greek emporers for wine or oil. Hopi vases that held corn are put in museums but we know they were made to be used. The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real and on this fine Labor Day weekend I invite you to turn to your neighbor in exchange with Emma warm greeting. Good morning Blaine. Good to see you. And at this time I would like to invite any children who are with us for this hour to come to the front for the message for all ages more than the last month and I guess that must be because school has started and next week the Sunday school classes start here and they're gonna be lots of fun but today is the last day of summer fun so after our brief story you get to go to summer fun and I think they may even be serving something really special you know what it is don't let out the secret anybody here in second grade anybody gonna be in set you are would you believe that at one time I was in second grade yeah I really was it was a long time ago when I was in second grade I was in my first play I was up on stage and I was an actor if you had it you get up on stage too no you don't have any lines I had to say in the second grade one now that play that I was in in second grade was about a man named John Chapman and John Chapman was a kind of a strange and remarkable person that lived almost 200 years ago and many people today don't know him by the name John Chapman they know him by his nickname and here is a hint what is this don't know what this is is it an orange banana apple it's an apple John Chapman was Johnny apple seed and the play I was in was about Johnny apple seed so Johnny apple seed and here is a picture of him probably not a real one because there weren't any cameras back then so that's kind of an imaginative picture of Johnny apple seed he wore a pan on his head and the pan was the same pan that he cooked his food in an open fire and so you wore it as a hat but he also used it to cook his food in now he was born in Massachusetts way out by the Atlantic Ocean and at the age of 18 at the age of 18 he left his home and he headed out west with his younger brother who was only 11 years old at the time and the two of them traveled and they traveled and they ended up in the state of Ohio that was just beginning to be settled by people there was hardly anybody in Ohio much less than Wisconsin at that time now John Chapman at the age of 18 didn't have a real job to go to out in Ohio but he had studied with a nursery man who taught him how to plant and prune and care for trees that's what a nursery man does they take care of trees and especially this particular man taught him how to take care of apple trees now there are many stories and legends about Johnny apple seed and most people are under the impression today that he traveled about offering apple seeds to people in Ohio and Indiana and people could take the seeds and they could plant them in the yards and then they would have apples to eat sometime in the future but that's not what Johnny apple seed really did he went around and he found some land and cleared the land and he planted orchards of apple trees various locations and he would build fences around these orchards to protect the young trees from the deer and the rabbits and other creatures that would eat them and then he would find a farmer nearby who would look after those orchards until he came back a year or two later to see how the trees were growing and then he and his partner would sell the young saplings the young trees to farmers so that they could plant them in their own property and have apples to eat later on so Johnny apple seed actually owned all of these orchards and by the time that he died in 1847 he had 1200 acres of orchards in Ohio and Indiana and you know what he never picked a single apple from any of those orchards rather he sold those young trees to people that planted them themselves and then later on they are the ones that picked the apples now he was not your typical businessman even though he had 1200 acres of trees he lived a very simple life and he would walk through the countryside checking on his orchards starting new orchards in bare feet and like Francis of Assisi who was a very famous person too Johnny apple seed was a very sensitive soul who would never hurt a fly and so it's reported that one night as he was preparing to sleep outside under the stars and he had started a fire to keep himself warm he noticed that the moths and the mosquitoes and the lightning bugs that they were getting into the flames and that they were being all burned up by his fire and so he immediately put the fire out saying to himself God forbid that for the sake of my comfort that this fire should be the means of destroying so many small creatures and although the places that he traveled in in Ohio and Indiana were still inhabited by tribes of hostile Indians who really didn't like the settlers very much Johnny apple seed was unusual because he had a reputation of respecting the Native Americans way of life and so the Indians always left him alone and they would even help him sometimes because they said that Johnny apple seed had been touched by the great spirit here's a picture Johnny apple seed talking to one of the Indians now Johnny apple seed actually had another job besides growing apple trees that was just as important to him he was a preacher and he was very well known for being intelligent and a very very good speaker and over the course of several decades he converted many of the settlers and many of the Indians to a faith that was very very similar to our own universalism Johnny was what was known as a Sweden Borgian we thought that unitarian universalism was a hard word he was a Sweden Borgian and like the universalists Johnny apple seed believed that God is infinitely loving that he loves everybody and that salvation is available to people of all faiths it didn't make any difference what they believed but we grow lots of good apples here in Wisconsin we're already starting to see them in our farmers market so the next time you bite into a fresh juicy Macintosh or empire apple remember the story of Johnny apple seed because some of the apples from the trees here in Wisconsin may be the great-grandchildren of the trees that he first planted so that's the story of Johnny apple seed I hope you enjoyed it and now I invite you to take off for summer fun as we play a little music to see your way out the first of our two readings comes from Derek Thompson's essay a world without work according to Peter Fraze the author of a forthcoming book entitled for futures work has several meanings first work can be the means by which the economy produces goods second exp it can be the means by which people earn an income and then finally it can be an activity that lends meaning or purpose to many people's lives Fraze he says that we tend to conflate these three things because today we still need to pay people to keep the lights on so to speak but in a future of abundance he says you wouldn't need to do that and so we ought to begin thinking about ways to make it easier and better for us not to be employed Fraze belongs to a small group of writers and academics and economists who have been called post workists who welcome even root for the end of labor American society has this irrational belief in work for works sake says Benjamin Honeycutt another post workist and a historian at the University of Iowa even though he says most jobs are really not very uplifting a 2014 Gallup report of worker satisfaction found that as many as 70% of Americans do not feel engaged by their current job 70% Honeycutt says that if a cashier's job was a video game grab an item find the barcode scan it slide the item onward and repeat critics of video games would call it a mindless activity but when it's a job politicians praise its intrinsic dignity purpose meaning identity fulfillment creativity autonomy all these things that positive psychology has shown us to be necessary for well-being are absent in the average job and by contrast this from Scott Russell Sanders essay would work while never becoming a carpenter I learned a great deal about the meaning of good work from building houses and helping my father in his shop and I carried those lessons with me into the trade that I eventually did take up the trade of writing and I came to believe that a writer like a carpenter ought to make useful and durable things with a respect for materials and craft and with an eye for beauty as in carpentry so in writing one ought to make tight joints clean lines avoiding showy ornamentation and cheap tricks no matter how polished the surface of your work there ought to be substance underneath what you build ought to last bearing up under rough weather and the abrasions of time and you ought to give to that work the best that you have without holding back and the work ought to give you in turn the pleasure of exercising your full strength and knowledge and skill if work is going to fill our souls and not merely our bank accounts then it should serve some real human need it should offer nourishment or shelter knowledge or consolation instead of gimmicks or gadgets or sops for our vanity good work leaves the world enriched and not diminished good work allows us to express our beliefs as well as our talents and this to play our small part in sustaining the creation and I invite you now to rise once more in body or in spirit as we sing together him number 312 Amazon is a highly successful company a behemoth in the retail economy whose market value has now surpassed that of Walmart's according to Forbes most recent listing Amazon's founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is now the fifth wealthiest man in the entire planet but for Amazon employees life at work can be brutal nearly every person I worked with I saw cry at their desk Bo Wilson says who worked in book marketing from what the Times reported many Amazonians labor in an atmosphere of perpetual fear the company employees a strategy described as purposeful Darwinism with low performers cast aside in annual cullings of the staff and some of those terminated the authors wrote suffered from cancer miscarriages other personal crises and they were edged out rather than given time to recover the Amazon workplace is incredibly competitive even cutthroat many of those interviewed called it quote a river of intrigue and scheming as individuals conspired with others to undermine a coworker or to boost their own stock with their superiors more than a few described being sabotaged by negative comments from unidentified colleagues with whom they could not argue needless to say turnout at Amazon is high there is a pattern of burn and churn with a five-year retention rate of only 15 percent Amazon is okay with moving through a lot of people in order to identify the superstars to whom they offer incredible opportunities VJ run within draft a high-level manager explains now Amazon may be exceptionally demanding and stressful as an environment to work in but in America today work is not for many a pleasant or fulfilling experience a gallop survey conducted last year found that almost 90 percent of the world's workers were either not engaged with or actively disengaged from their jobs 90 percent and as you heard earlier despite their oft-praised work ethic 70 percent of Americans don't feel satisfied with the work that they are paid to do either from a qualitative standpoint work is for many a disappointing experience Barry Schwartz says that you enter an occupation with a variety of aspirations aside from receiving your pay but then you discover that your work is structured so that most of those aspirations can never be met and so pretty soon you lose those lofty aspirations and with them a significant chunk of your motivation as conditions in many workplaces have deteriorated and as compensation in real dollars has declined collegiality has suffered as well since 1998 reports of rude treatment received in a typical week at work have risen from 25 percent to more than 50 percent and according to a 2013 John Templeton Foundation survey Americans are less likely to express gratitude at work than at any place else in their lives of course if one is unhappy with their present circumstances he or she can always explore alternatives Robert Markowitz he was a successful young criminal attorney working out of a well-appointed office in Palo Alto California but the stress after a few years was taking a terrific toll both physically and psychologically on this young man and so then to the surprise of his admiring friends and his proud parents he just up and quit you know you are ruining your life Robert's mother told him but then after a period of discernment Markowitz discovered that he really liked entertaining young children and so he learned to be a clown and then he pulled out his old Gibson guitar and he became a singer-songwriter who for the last two decades has performed at parties in schools and in other kid-friendly venues I wear jeans I do not frequent Nordstrom he says but most of the time I really like waking up in the morning as a successful attorney Robert Markowitz had a lot going for him social status professional stature a high income and in terms of today's prevailing cultural standards Robert Markowitz he had it made but ultimately those rewards didn't mean much to him Markowitz was depressed with his life he was disillusioned with his profession the longing to act meaningfully in our work is as stubborn a part of our makeup as any appetite we have for status or money Elaine de Baton says and it's because we are meaning focused animals he continues rather than simply materialistic ones that we can at times reasonably contemplate surrendering security for a career helping to bring drinking water to people in rural Malawi or we might quit a job in consumer goods for one in cardiac nursing stories like that of Robert Markowitz aren't exceptional but I do believe they are relatively rare a lot of people just don't have the versatility the wherewithal or the courage to make a leap into an entirely different kind of livelihood so most of us must come to terms with the work that we already are doing which may be rather difficult and what can help is the realization that with practice that same work can become for us a vehicle of our spiritual growth and personal development in a world of work there is no guarantee that high status high paying jobs will reliably produce sustainable satisfaction or provide a rewarding life experience for us and in fact those payoffs can inhibit our ability to find meaning and purpose in and through our work the perks and premiums of those high-level jobs may become what they call golden handcuffs that keep us trapped in a role even as our dissatisfaction with that role gradually increases but if as Elaine de Baton argues we are as much meaning focused as we are materialistic beings we are wise still to look to our work to satisfy that hunger for meaning people who are employed full-time spend more of their waking hours at work than doing anything else and as Americans we spend more hours as Americans in harness than the citizens of any other nation of the world and so yes there is meaning to be had in family life in friendship in community service in child rearing in creative hobbies but why should that meaning be so lacking in the workplace why should work not provide us with the same kinds of opportunities and the kind of work that we perform may not matter that much although the average individual may imagine that certain callings like teaching or healing are more likely to produce meaning and purpose than other lines of work but then here's Jean Kinkeid Martin she worked in an office but often dreamed of doing something that would be more interesting and more fulfilling but then at the same time as she was dreaming Martin knew that her approach to her current job did leave something to be desired and so one day she recalled something that the novelist Henry James once said take what there is and use it without waiting in vain for something else and so she told herself to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that this doubtless is the right way to live dig deep into the actual get something out of that and so Martin begins to practice I would call it a spiritual practice she attends to her business moment by moment day by day failing often starting over again and again but determined to make out of this ordinary office work something extraordinary something as Scott Russell Sanders wrote has substance underneath that leaves the world enriched and not diminished Martin was beginning to work with what we might call intention a very valuable concept in in this particular context when we begin our workday what exactly is our intention what is it that our heart wants us to do says that we ought to be doing and if as we step into the workplace we set aside a few minutes to set our intention and then to resolve for the next eight or ten hours to act on that intention our efforts are likely to be more fruitful and they are likely to end up being more personally meaningful and so for example 15 years ago researchers at Yale University interviewed custodians in a major hospital to see how those custodians those blue collar workers felt about their job janitorial work is messy the pay is modest and the position status is on a par with orderlies and kitchen staff and yet when they were queried many of these custodians in that hospital reported a high level of satisfaction with what they were doing why was that because they saw themselves as part of a healing and caregiving team they were not required to do so but they would routinely help patients and their families find their way around this complicated hospital they strove to calm patients before stressful procedures with jokes and casual banter in other ways they sought routinely to comfort the afflicted and the custodians assume these responsibilities freely and without any extra compensation but as one man said this is what gets me out of bed every morning this is what I enjoy the most about my job remember your core intention and shape its expression to the real circumstances that you find yourself in my ador founder of the liberation life project councils if you want to be a healer as these custodians but if you work in a supermarket greet each customer with kindness and compassion and bring that healing energy to the job that you have if you do your job using the right frame of mind and you focus on that positive intention you can be a healer she says while you are working in a food store and this intern will make the work more purposeful and it will make the work more fulfilling all work contains drudgery Wendell Berry says the issue is does it contain meaning or not and as for the drudgery at least some of that can be relieved if not completely eliminated by the practice of mindfulness in her book real happiness at work Sharon Salzburg co-founder of the insight meditation society she identifies a few of the more prevalent work related maladies that make our jobs less pleasant and less fulfilling than they really need to be first she says there is mind wandering that inability to maintain focus on the task at hand feeling good about what we are doing for a living she says depends more on our moment-to-moment experience than on any amount of prestige or pay so it's important to stay on task longer and to be less distracted by the surrounding environment and this is where a meditation practice can help mark Lesser is a Zen teacher and a CEO of an executive coaching firm and he recommends to maintain your focus take small mindfulness breaks from time to time in order to support the intense effort and to keep distractions at bay try a minute or two of walking meditation down the hallway or mindfully nibbling on a snack short moments many times is the way one Tibetan teacher puts it short moments many times throughout the day a second and related hindrance that Salisbury identifies is attention deficit trait or ADT which has become more and more prevalent in workplaces like Amazon where employees must cope with the constant relentless input of information never in history has the human brain been asked to track so many data points Salisbury says smart phones tablets computers that for many of us function as electronic umbilical cords exacerbate that problem but information overload compromises our ability to focus and to attend but many workers tell themselves that's not a problem for me because I'm really good at multitasking unfortunately a growing body of evidence disputes this according to Salisbury multitasking can stimulate us into mindlessness giving the illusion of productivity while stealing our focus and harming our performance realizing this one executive of a multi-billion-dollar consumer products marketing company tested this thesis in his own workplace he was frustrated with all the multitasking that occurred during their weekly planning meetings and so the executive placed a box at the entrance of the conference room into which participants in the conference were required to place all of their electronic devices they could have them back when the session was over the change he says was a challenge initially the employees were like crack addicts as the box was buzzing with incoming messages but then almost immediately says our meetings became more productive and within a month the time that we spending together doing business was cut in half there was more presence there was more participation throughout the group and as the culture shifted we began to have more fun together boredom that's another problem that sullies our work experience but most of the time boredom does not arise from having too little to do but from disinterest in and disengagement from our activities and so the antidote to boredom isn't always to find some new or novel project to work on rather as gene kinkade martin discovered at her office job the solution is to dig deep into the actual and to get something out of that or as the founder of gestalt therapy fritz pearls once put it if you are bored you just aren't paying attention the more we learn to attend to what is before us regarding that work with fresh eyes with what the Buddhist called beginners mind the more interested in and curious about our work we will become and it is impossible to be curious and to be bored at the same time and then finally our work experience can be tainted by communication patterns that sabotage collaboration and collegiality studies have shown that the workplace climate has gotten considerably worse in recent years christine porath a business professor at georgetown says that incidents of incivility have noticeably increased with over half of employees reporting at least one instance of incivility in the course of a typical week incivility is not a minor problem there is good medical evidence that rudeness incivility and abusiveness will cause employees to lose their focus and it will weaken their problem solving ability and over the long term workers in difficult social environments will suffer from higher levels of obesity cardiovascular disease diabetes and ulcers exposed to too much incivility in the workplace porath believes people contribute less and they lose their conviction about their work the importance of skillful sensitive communication cannot be overestimated and this requires that we develop habits that promote civility and trust and greater self-awareness is key to this in a one study indicates that in our face-to-face interactions 55% of the emotional meaning of a message is expressed is communicated through facial postural and gestural means 55% how our body is communicating 38% of the message is communicated through our tone of voice and only 7% of the message is communicated through the words that we actually speak so if you are not aware of your physical response to someone when you're communicating it's so much harder to gauge your verbal response and here too a spiritual practice can be beneficial as we become more adept at identifying and setting our intention more skillful at monitoring our emotions then we will be more able to hit the pause button before catching before criticizing before complaining and we may also begin to employ certain strategies that will serve to combat in civility are we tempted to send a scathing self-righteous email to a co-worker Michael Carroll says send that message to yourself first and then put yourself in the place of the eventual recipient and see how you feel and always remember Sharon Salisbury says that with each email sent with each call that you ignore with every negative water cooler conversation or on better days with every pat on the back every supportive smile every task undertaken to help someone else every action that we take with every action we send love or suffering into the web that connects us all because so many of us do spend much of the day gainfully employed or if we retired perhaps in volunteer roles it behooves us to put our spiritual practices to good use in the workplace and as we do we may well find that our non-work life begins to improve as well when Matthew Fox asks when are we happier than when our work is a joy to us and a joy to others when indeed blessed be and today as we give and receive our offering please be aware that a portion of your gifts will be directed to the interfaith coalition for worker justice that helps to improve conditions in today's workplaces please be generous as a community of memory and of hope and to this time and this place we bring our whole and occasionally our broken selves we carry with us the joys and sorrows of the recent past and we seek here a place where they might be received and celebrated and shared we pause now to acknowledge Han Wong and Kerry Earhart to members of the congregation Kerry is a member of our board of trustees who celebrated their marriage last month and we also celebrated on Wednesday my wife and I and we will be celebrating again this evening my mother's 92nd birthday we also remember on a sadder note two of our members who passed away this week Steve Anderson after recurrence of cancer and Angie Volcker there was a memorial gathering for Steve at Gunderson funeral home this past week we hold the friends and families of both of these individuals in our hearts today in addition to those just mentioned we would also acknowledge all of those unarticulated joys and sorrows that remain among us as a community and we hold those with equal concern in our hearts but it's said silently for just a moment or two in the spirit of empathy and hope and so by virtue of our brief time together today our burdens be lightened and our joys expanded for closing him is number 289 may the light of your soul bless your work with love may you see in what you do the beauty of your soul and may the sacredness of your work bring light and renewal to those who work with you and to those who see and 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 absences may the day never become a burden may dawn find hope in your heart approaching your new day with dreams and possibilities and promises may evening find you gracious and fulfilled you go into the night blessed sheltered and protected your soul calm and renewed blessed be