 Christmas. Welcome to the First Unitarian Society of Madison and this very special Christmas morning service. My name is Kelly Crocker and I am one of the ministers here. Today I'm joined by my colleague, the Reverend Kelly Aspreuth Jackson, along with the worship team of Linda Warren, Drew Collins, Heather Thorpe, Stephen Gregorius and Daniel Carnes. Today we are also joined by one FUS staff member who we don't normally see in worship, our social justice coordinator, Kristi Sprague. 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. This morning service is entirely virtual and we are glad that you have chosen to take the time to join us for it. Wherever you may be and whenever you may be, whomever you may be with or apart from at this moment, we are together in spirit and it is good to be together. And now I invite you to join me in a moment of silence as we center ourselves, bringing ourselves fully into this time as we join together once again in community. It is the winter season of the year, dark and chilly. Perhaps it is a winter season in your life, dark and chilly there too. Come into Christmas here. Let the light and warmth of Christmas brighten our lives and world. Let us find in the dark corners of our souls the light of hope, a vision of the extraordinary in the ordinary. Let us find rest in the quiet of a holy moment to find rest and renewal. Let us find the child in each of us, the new hope, the new light born in us. Then will Christmas come, then will magic return to the world. And we invite you now to light a candle or a chalice in your home as we light our chalice here. We light our chalice this morning with these words from Gordon McKieman. Christmas is not so much a matter of explanation and interpretation as it is a mood and a feeling. It is a time in the cycle of the year set apart by hope and fellowship and generosity. Christmas is the season of the heart. Our story this morning is Winter's Gift from Jane Monroe Donovan. It was December 24th and there had been a terrible blizzard north of the small town. Everything was calm now and covered in white. When the old man awoke that morning, his bones ached more than usual, which probably meant more snow was on its way. He headed outside to chop firewood. The old man lived on a small farm nestled in the woods at the edge of town. As he walked through the snow, he saw cardinals darting in and out of the trees, chickadees sitting on the wood pile, and deer tracks everywhere. The snow glistened all around him. As the old man worked, he began to daydream of the Christmases that had come before. Every year on this very day, the old man and his wife went into the woods to find the perfect Christmas tree. This usually took a while, but eventually they would find a tree that they were sure was the prettiest ever. Then they would bring the tree back to the house and begin decorating. He would put on the lights while she made hot tea and sandwiches. Then together they would hang the ornaments. Finally, when the tree was just right, his wife would take out a wooden box that held a beautiful star. The star is the most important part of the tree, she would always say. It's a symbol of hope and no matter how bad things get, you should always have hope. But the old man didn't have hope anymore. He had lost his wife in the spring and was alone. This year there would be no Christmas tree, no Christmas star. The old man finished stacking the wood and went inside to fix his dinner. Not far away from the old man's house, a mare wandered alone through the woods. During the blizzard she had become separated from her herd of wild horses. The swirling snow and blowing wind were so strong she had fallen behind and gotten lost. After the storm was over she wandered the woods trying to find her herd. She had never been alone before and was very frightened, but all she could do was keep walking. Now as this day ended and it grew dark, new snow started to fall. In the distance the mare could hear wolves howling. She needed to find a safe place for the night. The wind whistled and huge snowflakes swirled around her. She was growing weary and so cold as she struggled through the deep snow. The sound of howling seemed closer. Exhausted, the mare couldn't go any farther. She came to a clearing in the woods and then collapsed into the snow, letting out a small nicker. From his kitchen the old man thought he heard something outside. He put on his coat and his boots, grabbed a lantern and headed out the door. He walked behind the barn near the woods but didn't see anything. Just as he was about to turn back he saw the shape in the snow and heard a soft whinny. Using his scarf as a rope the old man gently coaxed the mare to her feet. He let her into the barn. The barn had not been used in years but it was still in good shape and would keep her warm and safe. The old man ran to his house and brought back blankets and carrots for the mare. He gave her water and dried her off. He made her as comfortable as he could. The barn felt warm and cozy and soon the old man drifted off to sleep. It was morning when he finally awoke. For a minute he forgot where he was, then he remembered and looked over to the mare. Snuggled against her side was a newborn foal. The foal struggled to its feet and looked up at the old man. He couldn't believe his eyes. There in the center of the little foal's forehead was a perfect white star. The mare gently nuzzled her foal. The old man smiled and realized he had been given a special gift and for the first time in a long while he looked forward to tomorrow. I invite you now into this time of giving and receiving where we give freely and generously to this offering which sustains and strengthens our community and benefits our outreach offering recipient. Our outreach offering recipient throughout the whole of the holiday season has been and is still today Just Dane's eviction prevention program. Sometimes the difference between a family being out on the street or staying in their home can be a little help with a rent. With your help Just Dane and Joining Forces for Families are helping people to prevent eviction and homelessness. You will see on the screen that you can donate directly from our website fussmattison.org and you will see the text to give information there as well. We thank you for your generosity and your faith in this life we create together. Hi my name is Christy Sprague and I'm the social justice coordinator at First Unitarian Society. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. My Christmas memory starts before Christmas. It starts with this idea I had to take guitar lessons as a fifth the grader and my mom and dad were on board with that. They knew how much I loved singers and songwriters and so they found a music teacher, a guitar teacher for me. Jerry Wei taught guitar lessons to groups of students in his basement after school. We would gather once a week around a table in his basement and we'd sing folk songs and every once in a while we'd get to play a pop song and that was really exciting. And for two years I played on this on a smaller size student guitar and I learned a lot. I practiced often and kept progressing. One day my mom and I were in a music store and she was off doing whatever she was doing I don't know and I walked over to the guitar section and I saw these beautiful guitars on the wall and they were sparkly. Mine wasn't sparkly. They were large. Mine wasn't too large and when I tentatively strummed it it had this rich bright full sound. My student guitar didn't sound bad but compared to the one on the wall it didn't sound great. So I told my mom about the guitar on the wall. I pointed it out to her. I believe I brought her over to that guitar and showed her and then we looked at the price tag. It was about six hundred dollars and she said oh we can't afford a six hundred dollar guitar. On the drive home she said maybe you could save your money for that guitar. Being in seventh grade I didn't have a huge income. My money was from babysitting and from my allowance which was just very small. But I did I saved my money and at Christmas time I remembered that guitar. I said hey I still really want that guitar and I've been working really hard at guitar lessons. I've been practicing and I said oh yeah you have you sound great and I said I think you know this is how much money I have and we counted it out and it was probably between 30 and 40 dollars. My own mom and dad said that guitar is still six hundred dollars. Yeah it's really too expensive and you know I was pretty downhearted about it and I didn't think I was going to see that guitar for a very long time. So Christmas morning came around and my sister and I came downstairs as usual and we went to open our stockings first and we started pulling things out for whatever reason I looked over at the tree and we had those big bright old-fashioned bulbs on our tree and when I glanced over I could see that they were shining off of something underneath the tree and so I looked closely and I could see that they were shining off the surface of something that was very shiny underneath the tree and my heart started racing faster and I looked really closely and there was that six hundred dollar guitar that I never thought I'd see and I cried. I never I don't know how my parents made that magic happen but they did and it's so meaningful because I have played that guitar from seventh grade until now. I've played it with groups of students in my classrooms as a classroom teacher. I've played it with students at Pre-Unitarian Society in the religious ed classes. I played it with friends in college as an adult. I play it for myself. It is singing and song sharing is a language that transcends boundaries and it is a way that I have connected with people that I otherwise wouldn't have been able to. So thanks mom and dad for that amazing Christmas magic and memory. Happy holidays everybody. This story titled A Village of Strangers comes from Laura Shea, a chaplain and a member of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Rockville, Maryland and Laura wrote this story one year ago in December of 2021. I'm fortunate to work in an inpatient hospice that permits family to be at the bedside during this pandemic even though the allotted number of family members has been markedly reduced. I'm grateful for the special presence only a loved one can bring. At times the small facility seems too quiet. I miss the way things were before and reminisce about a special week in 2018. For some families Christmas can bring out the worst in them as they gather together once a year. This was not the case with these families. They were not just tolerating each other for the sake of the loved one dying. They were there for each other in the truest sense. There were ex-wives who quietly sat by the bedside, estranged children from second marriages and grandchildren gathered in the common area by the fireplace. One crafty daughter chose to deal with the stress by teaching people how to make beautiful paper stars. Day by day each room had a new large beautiful star hanging from the window latch. Each star had a story infused by the memories that flowed from the mouths of the creators. The common area became a field of stars and an integrated sacred space. Lutherans, Catholics, Methodists, Jews and non-religious people sat in clusters, new connections, hearing wonderful stories for the first time, tears and laughter, tea time cookies and finger sandwiches, all waiting, knowing that soon the members of this tiny village of strangers would be leaving. Who will be the first to go? Who will be the last to go? If only it could happen at the same time, not wanting to be first, hoping to be last, wanting one more day, determined to stay even if everyone else is gone. When I returned the following week, the tiny village of strangers was a thing of Christmas past. The common area was filled with new strangers. I missed that tiny village of strangers. Thankfully, the star made for the staff still hung prominently in the nurses station, reminding us of that special Christmas week when the world felt just a little more peaceful. This is my Christmas stocking. It was knit for me by my grandmother, my mother's mother. She knit it for me, well started it at least, before I was born. The family lore says that she was almost finished with it when she got the news that I had been born. And this is to explain the spacing at the top of the stocking that here it says Kelly and here are the exclamation points that she used to fill in the rest of the spacing across the top. I did not get to make many memories with my grandmother. She died when I was still very young, but I hold this stocking very precious. It's a tangible piece of something she did, of course. It's a sense of connection to her. And to the extent that the family story is true, I wasn't there, who can I say, it is it's concrete physical evidence of her joy at the news that I had just been born. Some of you know that my parents had been struggling and that the certainty of my arrival maybe wasn't something that my grandmother necessarily would have or should have taken for granted. So this stocking that she was working on it before I was born was in some ways an act of faith that I would arrive, that there would be a child to use this stocking. When we give a gift, we don't get to know what it's going to mean to the other person, how long they will keep it for or not, whether it will be returned for store credit, we don't get to know. But that I still have this 41 Christmases later that it is among the most precious items that I have means that this gift at least battered I hope as much as my grandmother meant for it to. Dear spirit, great mystery that has blessed us with life help us to feel grateful. We give thanks in this moment for lungs that breathe in and out, for hearts that beat, for bodies that work. We give thanks for this holiday however and with whomever we now spend it. We give thanks to be alive, to be able to mark the day in whatever way we choose. We give thanks for family, for friends, for those who gather around us in body or in spirit, in flesh or in memory. We give thanks for all those people who came before us, who flawed and damaged as they were, loved us into being, shaped us into who we are now. We remember with gratitude. We give thanks for mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers that did their best. We give thanks for wacky uncles and rebellious aunts, for rambunctious cousins and unexpected guests. We give thanks for long car rides, dashes through airports, and endless rounds of monopoly. We give thanks for the awkward conversation, the strained pause, even the slammed door. We give thanks for disagreements that forced us to grow and move and evolve. We give thanks for all of it, all of it, for all these wild and hungry people, our family, our friends, our congregation. People just as flawed as we, all dealing with more than we can see, all part of a larger whole, every last one doing their best. We give thanks for the glory of being alive. Amen. Two spirits of Christmas, each very different from the other, yet both deeply ingrained in our celebrations of the season. And I suspect most of us have more of both within us than we ordinarily recognize. The first, of course, is the one we usually talk about, the spirit of good will and peace. It is the spirit that bids us renew our hopes amid the gathering darkness that kindles our generosity and our concerns that attunes our ears to the ever renewed angelic chorus. But the second, equally inseparable from the observations of this season, is the spirit of Scrooge's baa humbug. We all know that hatred and distrust will not disappear from human relationships just because we say it ought to be so. We all know that peace on earth is a lot more complicated than it sounds in the Christmas hymns. We all know that if the wolf and the lamb and the leopard and the kid, the calf and the young lion all got along with one another as famously as Isaiah prophesied that they would, then some of these animals would die of starvation. What it comes down to is that we give voice at Christmas to extravagant hopes that are beyond the range of any possible fulfillment. They are, as we say in our more sober moments, unrealistic. But the real question is whether this is so bad. Perhaps the part of wisdom is to accept this reminder of the gap between the real and the ideal for what it is. A spur not only to our hopes, but to our imagination and energies. It would be foolish to ignore the element of wishful thinking in our Christmas hopes, but how unspeakably more foolish it would be if we were to accept present reality as the last word and to stop dreaming altogether. Our hopes are bound, of course, to be disappointed, at least in part. So long as time endures, we shall remain creatures in the making somewhere this side of perfection. Yet there is always hope for moving beyond the tragic failures of the past, if not all the way, at least a few steps farther. Our hopes are forever bound to fall to ashes, yet out of the ashes there can always emerge new hope again and again and yet again. Blessed be, go in peace, and a very Merry Christmas.