 Does he want to Yeah I Please let's join together in a few minutes of moments of centering silence Please remain seated as we sing our in-gathering hymn which is number 1023 in your teal hymnals However the words appear in your order of service Good morning Welcome to the first Unitarian Society of Madison We're so glad you came to be with us on this great drizzly day So gold stars for everyone This is a community where curious seekers gather to explore a 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 entire congregation I want to extend a special welcome to any visitors who are with us today 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 Newcomers 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 people 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 building tours after each service If you would like to learn more about the sustainably designed addition or our national landmark meeting house across the parking lot there Please meet near the large glass windows on what is your left side of the auditorium after this service And I do show that we have a guide for this morning so please meet there 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 back in that corner and the commons behind the auditorium are excellent places to go If your child wants to talk, sing, dance, run around in circles, whatever normal childhood thing they want to do The service can still be seen and heard from those areas This would also be a good time to turn off all devices which might cause a disturbance during the hour Especially cell phone ringers I'd now like to acknowledge those individuals who are helping our service run smoothly We have Mary Manoring operating the sound system We have Tom Boykoff as a lay minister Upstairs you would have run into Carol Angel and Patty Whitty greeting today Our ushers are Marty Hollis, Paula Alt and Dan Bradley Sandy Plish is making coffee for us back in the kitchen We also want to thank Hannah Pinkerton for watering the palms and lilies this morning Thank you all The tour guide I'm showing is Michelle Mason So hopefully you'll see her after the service Now I'd like you to note the announcements in the red floors insert to our order of service Where you'll see descriptions of upcoming events at the society And see more information about what's going on today First I want to say I understand that it is 12 days to Oh sorry I didn't mean to do that Cabaret, Steve wants us to say that Also I have a couple of other special announcements The FUS Equity Ministry team invites you to an open conversation about today's reflections on white supremacy Folks will gather in the atrium auditorium at 12.30 following the 11 o'clock service Refreshments will be available and there will be a story time in the library for children Now for you folks it's great because you can just run out after this service Eat some brunch and then come back at 12.30 The second special announcement is this On Mother's Day weekend May 13 and 14 peace poles will once again be placed and decorated along the FUS property at University Bay Drive Between and after each of the two services these will be available to you If you would like to participate in this family friendly event Please sign up prior to the event so that we can make sure we have enough poles There will be a person with a sign up sheet in the commons after the service So hopefully many people will participate Those are really pretty out there every spring So now I'd like to say I hope you all feel welcome and I trust that today's service will stimulate your mind Touch your heart and stir your spirit Our opening words this morning come from the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes I dream a world where man no other man will scorn Where love will bless the earth and peace its paths adorn I dream a world where all will know sweet freedom's way Where greed no longer saps the soul nor avarice blights our day A world I dream where black or white or whatever race you be will share the bounties of the earth and everyone is free Where wretchedness will hang its head and joy like a pearl attend the needs of all humanity Our world I invite you to rise and body and spirit for the lighting of our chalice Our words of affirmation are responsive would you please join your voices in reading the bolded italicized sections For that which has been done to lift humankind to new levels of social order and health For that which we can do but have left undone For that which needs to be done but is as yet beyond our reach And now I do invite you on this chilly April morning to turn to your neighbor exchange with him a warm greeting Now I'd like to invite any children who are willing and eager to join me in the front for the message for all ages You got a shirt with all kinds of horses on it. You like horses? Yeah, I like horses too. And being loving. And we talk a lot about head and thinking. We talk about hands and what we can do with our hands and what we can do with our feet. But we don't spend a lot of time talking about the largest organ of our whole body. And what is that? Our skin. Our skin. That which covers us. That's right. And so this is a story about skin, okay? The skin you live in. We all live in skin, right? We don't? Ah, okay. Here we go. Some nice pictures up here too. Hey, look at your skin. The wonderful skin that you live in. The skin you're all day in. The skin that you play in. The skin you snuggle up and cuddle up and lay in. The skin that you beam in. The skin that you scream in. The skin that you dream about eating ice cream in. The skin you have fun in. The skin that you run in. The skin that you hop skip and jump in the sun in. The skin you laugh in. The skin you cry in. The skin you look up to the sky and ask, why in? It's baby born new skin and your family too skin and glows when it shows what it knows. We love you skin. It's face the rain. Bold skin. Snow angel cold skin and warm again. Let it in. Sunshine be hold skin. It's trembling fright skin. Get goosebumps and cringes at night skin. But turn off the lights to make birthday cake bright skin. It's whatever you do skin. Be happy it's you skin. You can't live without it. It's glad that it's me too skin. And look at all the shades that it comes in. The shades of your colorful skin. Look at the shades of the skin. Your coffee, your cream skin. Your warm cocoa dream skin. Your chocolate chip double dip Sunday Supreme skin. Your marshmallow treat skin. Your sponge sugar sweet skin. Your cherry top candy drop frosting complete skin. Your pumpkin pie slice skin. Your caramel corn nice skin. Your toffee wrapped ginger snap cinnamon spice skin. Your butterscotch gold skin. Your lemon tart bold skin. Your mountain high apple skin. Your cookie dough rolled skin. Bet you didn't know skin could come in so many different flavors. So look again at your skin and the skin of all the people. All the skin that they live in. It's not tall skin. It's not short skin. It's not best in the sport skin or fat or thin skin. Or you lose and I win skin. Not sad skin or mad skin. You're naturally bad skin. I'm rich and you are poor and you'll never have more skin. It's not any of those kinds of skin is it? It's not dumb skin or smart skin or keep us apart skin. It's not weak skin or strong skin. I'm right and you're wrong skin. Nor she skin nor he skin or you're better than me skin. I'm lesser than your skin. It's me against you skin. It's not any of this because you are more than you see. All that you think and you hope and you dream. You're a gifted creation with imagination. You're a new day desire to reach even higher. Your feelings that start from deep down in your heart. You're the pride and the joy inside each girl and boy. So whenever you look at your beautiful skin from your wiggling toes to your giggling grin. Think of how lucky you are that the skin you live in so beautifully holds you within. They're like flowers in the fields that make wonderful views when we stand by side by side in our wonderful hues. We all make a beauty that is so wonderfully true. We are special and different and we are just the same too. Yes. Every page what? It does. There are a lot of skin words in there, aren't there? Yeah, that's right. It's kind of like a long, long poem that keeps repeating that word skin because the skin is really, really important to the story and it's really important to you. So having heard this little story, maybe you'll go back out and you'll think a little bit more about skin and what it means and what it doesn't mean as well. There's a ghost inside your body? Oh my goodness. I'm going to have to check that out. Okay, we're going to sing you all out with him number 120 and it's easy because it's the same tune as the one we sang when we came in here. Old 124th. Please be seated. One month ago today, on March 30th, the president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, Peter Morales, tendered his resignation. In so doing, he was but the second president of the UUA not to have completed his full term of office, the other person being Paul Carnes, who died of cancer after just more than a year of service. Morales, whose tenure would have ended on the 30th day of June, Morales jolted the denomination with his precipitous departure. Now the UUA presidency is a hard position to fill, and I know from conversations with colleagues and with Peter Morales himself that he has been no stranger to controversy. Nevertheless, he was elected to a second four-year term in 2013, and he subsequently presided over the relocation of our denomination's national offices to newer and more serviceable facilities. But clearly he was not able to weather the storm that was unleashed by a recent executive decision that was made at headquarters. In a letter to the Board of Trustees, Peter Morales conceded that I have obviously lost the trust of many people, and it is clear to me that I am not the right person to lead our association as we work together to address our shortcomings. We need space for healing. We need space for listening. Morales emphasized that the decision to step down was entirely his own, that no one even mentioned that he should resign. He simply felt that new developments had convinced him that it was time for someone else to assume the presidential mantle. Now the proximate cause for this leadership realignment was this. Denominational search committee, headed by Scott Taylor, the Director of Congregational Life. That search committee selected a white male to replace another retiring white male as leader of the UUA's southern region, a judicatory that stretches from Virginia in the east to Texas in the west. Now the UUA is made up of five regions. We belong to the mid-America region, and at present every one of the five is served either by a white man or a white woman. Although minority hires for positions in the UUA have increased, in the last decade, the decision to engage yet another white person for an upper level administrative position did not sit well with many of the people of color in our movement. And to make matters worse, another leading candidate to fill that vacancy was an accomplished woman of color, a Latina member of the UUA's Board of Trustees and Director of Administration and Finance for one of our southern region's more noteworthy congregations. In any case, reaction to the hire was swift. And in short order, the Director of Congregational Life and the UUA's Chief Operating Officer had also submitted their resignations. Presently three individuals, each with a different set of responsibilities are fulfilling the duties of the outgoing president. Now the issue at hand will not be resolved by a simple change of personnel or by revision of the association's hiring practices. The controversy has led persons of color and their white allies to call for some very serious soul searching, not just among the folks at headquarters in Boston, but throughout our movement. In effect, we are all being asked to confront directly a very challenging, very discomforting question. As a religious movement, are we consciously or unconsciously helping to perpetuate a culture of white supremacy? Over the past several years and in our own congregation here in Madison, we have forthrightly addressed such topics as the mass incarceration of African Americans, our nation's sordid history of discrimination which continues to handicap people of color, the problem of unacknowledged white privilege, the phenomena of implicit bias and how it affects white's perceptions of people of color and the importance of engaging with communities of color on their terms rather than our own. We have dealt with all those issues at considerable length. At the same time, First Unitarian Society has established ongoing working relationships with a predominantly African American congregation on the east side of Madison and with Latino organizations like Centro Hispano and Vosay's De La Frontera and with Young Gifted and Black. We have hosted community forums on Dane County's appalling equity gap. We have offered adult education classes on white privilege, sessions for parents on talking to children about race. There's another one to be held this afternoon. We've established vibrant ministry teams that are devoted to these very issues. But after all is said and done. Can we? Can we as one of Dane County's most progressive and socially active faith communities can we be justly accused of maintaining a culture of white supremacy? You know, it kind of depends on how you define white supremacy. And when this phrase was used initially to describe the UUA and its hiring practices, Peter Morales himself, the son of Mexican immigrant, said, if you call us that, then what do you call the Aryan nation? It's a loaded term. And it is one that sits uneasily on our tongues. But it's being invoked for a reason. First, because of its shock value, with the hope that it just might open our eyes to a deeply entrenched and unrecognized reality. And second, it's being invoked so that perhaps we can begin to appreciate how supremacy manifests itself in a wide variety of ways. And that's why we're interested to hate mongers. 25 years ago, Jake Lamar, a black Harvard graduate and a journalist who has worked for Time Magazine among other national publications, Jake Lamar called out an important liberal office holder in the state of New York who had exposed his racism with a subtle comment that he made to Lamar during the course of a political function. And so Lamar later wrote, liberals like us aren't racists, but this allows you to make easy calls against the David Dukes of the world while rarely questioning anything racial in your own enlightened sphere. You suffer from cognitive dissonance, Lamar said. You consider yourself astute on race issues, and yet you cannot acknowledge presumptions that you make solely on the basis of race. And so you steadfastly refuse to confront the mystery of your own manners. The mystery of your own manners. And that's what our brothers and sisters of color are alluding to when they use the expression white supremacy. As the current moderator of the UUA, Jim Key recently explained, it refers to a culture or a social narrative that places the needs, the desires, the stories, the well-being, the very lives of white people over and above those of people of color. And it is, he says, the water that we all swim in. We'll return to that definition and its relevance to Unitarian Universalism and to us here at FUS in part three of these reflections. The centuries, Unitarianism and Universalism have accumulated a fair amount of race-related baggage. And so if we are now challenged to examine some of our racially conditioned cultural assumptions, it is at least in part because we have not come fully to terms with our past. We remember with pride, on the one hand, notables such as Senator Charles Sumner, the Reverend's Theodore Parker, Charles Fohlen, Samuel May, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Lydia Maria Child, Mary Livermore. These early 19th century figures fought long and hard sometimes at great personal risk for the abolition of slavery. Both Parker and May harbored fugitive slaves and used a variety of means to prevent them from being returned to their southern masters. While serving in Congress, John Quincy Adams defended the mutineers who had taken over the slave ship Amistad, and ultimately he won their freedom. For their part, the Universalists adopted a strong anti-slavery platform at their very first national convention in 1790. And those Universalists who already held slaves were urged to free them and subsequently to educate their children. Dr. Benjamin Rush was a founding father. He was also a Universalist, and he assisted Richard Allen in organizing the first black congregation in America, which then grew into the African Methodist Episcopal or AME denomination. After the Civil War, Laura Matilda Town, a Philadelphia Unitarian, she carried her ideals and her skills to South Carolina, where she established the first school for freed slaves at Penn Center on St. Helena Island. Early in the 20th century, John Haynes Holmes, minister of New York City's Church of the Messiah, he co-founded the NAACP. He was a tireless opponent of Jim Crow and of racial inequality. The erection of a foolish prejudice into a condition of social organization, he wrote in 1923, that is bound to reduce the Negro to a level of inferiority where he simply does not belong. Unitarian Universalists were among some of the most fervent supporters of integration and civil rights during the turbulent 1960s. Hundreds of ministers and laypersons marched with Dr. King at Selma, Washington, D.C., Cicero, Illinois, and two white UU civil rights activists, James Reeb and Viola Liuso, joined dozens of African-Americans as martyrs for that cause. These are a few of the highlights that we proudly point to as proof of our progressive credentials. The good karma, as it were. But the other side of the ledger, that has to be considered as well. So a few brave abolitionists aside, the American Unitarian Association as a whole refused to take a stand on the issue of slavery right up to the Civil War. This was at least in part because some of Unitarianism's wealthiest and most influential members were mill owners and exporters and bankers who had a financial stake in the slave-produced cotton that came from the deep south. When the notorious Fugitive Slave Act was passed by Congress in 1850, a Unitarian president, Millard Fillmore, signed it into law. The Unitarian senator from Massachusetts, Daniel Webster, defended its enforcement in his home state. South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun was one of the leading apologists for the institution of slavery. He was a member of the Unitarian Church of Charleston. In Boston, the Reverend Ezra Stiles Gannett, who served the prestigious Federal Street Church, he urged his parishioners to comply with the Fugitive Slave Act, causing Theodore Parker to comment, Gannett is urging members of his congregation to kidnap members of mine. Parker's church was one among the few that were integrated at the time. And despite his own dismay over slavery, Reverend Theodore Parker held deeply racist views. No doubt, he said, that the African race is greatly inferior to that of the Caucasian in general intellectual power, and also in that instinct for liberty, which is so strong among members of the Teutonic family. Such prejudice continued to inform Unitarian and Universalist culture once slavery had ended. Black aspirants to our ministry, to our professional ministry, were treated poorly, never really given the chance to serve established Unitarian congregations. In assessing the capabilities of one such minister, the Jamaican-born Ethel Red Brown, AUA President Lewis Cornish had this to say about Brown in 1932. I am told that this man shows the emotional temperament of his race and perhaps a weakness of judgment. I have lived much among Negroes, and I am inclined to be very sympathetic to their temperamental peculiarities. They are very lovable people and often very childlike. It would at once be unjust and misleading to judge Mr. Brown as you would an Anglo-Saxon. Finally, finally in the year 1961, and as the Unitarians and the Universalists merged to become one denomination, finally a black man, Lewis McGee, was called to serve as the lead minister for a predominantly white man. Now the minority presence in our movement grew during the 1960s, at least in part because of our involvement in the civil rights movement, only then to collapse in the face of a black empowerment controversy that erupted in the last years of that decade. By the end of the 1960s, many UU blacks wished to establish a separate stand-alone organization for themselves, for people of color, within the greater UU community. The integrationists in our midst, on the other hand, had other ideas, and they pushed back hard against the separatists. A clumsy and inconsistent response by the UUA led to a confusion over priorities, a sense of betrayal on the part of those who wished to create this separate black caucus and a subsequent exodus of many people of color from our movement. Much has been written about this turbulent era and its lasting impact on our efforts to foster greater diversity within the movement. Today, we do have more ministers of color serving congregations. We do have more administrators of color in leadership positions. Anti-oppression and anti-racism trainings are conducted at all levels and are freely available to all of our congregations. Defending black lives, protecting the interests of undocumented immigrants, these have become denominational priorities, and yet, as Leslie Mack, a black activist as she recently lamented, just when I think the UU faith has made some strides, I feel the pull of white supremacy in the faith and it snaps the back of my neck. It feels like whiplash. I now would invite you to participate in the giving and the receiving of our offering, and it will be shared this week with the Moses organization, which is doing incredible work statewide to end mass incarceration and to reform our criminal justice program. In responding to these complaints that the Unitarian Universalist Association has not done enough to address and to reform its inbred culture of white supremacy, in response to these complaints, the executive director of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association, a man by the name of the Reverend Don Southworth, he wrote, In a privileged and powerful position, I realized that for some, anything that I have to say must be filtered through the identities and the culture that I embody. And Don Southworth's comment holds equally true for me, and perhaps for all of those who operate out of what Joel Fegan has called the white racial frame that is our culture's long-standing default position. Honest self-scrutiny is hard to achieve, which makes it all the more important as Southworth acknowledges to seek counsel and wisdom from those who occupy a space outside of the prevailing frame. So let's try to bring the discussion home at this point. The First Unitarian Society of Madison is a substantial congregation. We are one of three or four of the largest in the association. The notoriety of our facility and our active involvement in the greater Madison community, this means that we do attract a fair amount of attention. And because of the distinctiveness of our non-doctrinal inclusive message, membership has remained stable in this congregation while most of the more conventional churches are suffering from significant membership attrition. The attributes that we possess have proven attractive to wide assortment of people, young and old, gay and straight, mystics and scientists, poets and philosophers. But when it comes to race and class, ours, like most UU congregations throughout the country, our congregation is pretty darn homogenous, isn't it? Blue and pink color folk are poorly represented as are persons of color. Mark Morrison Reid is an African-American minister who was raised as a UU in Chicago. He says that these two categories of race and class often intersect because many blacks, Latinos and even Asian-Americans are working class and they would not find our approach to church all that attractive or in the long run all that practical in terms of their own lives. Where does all this thinking you do lead, they might ask? What are you doing with all this on a practical level? It's not that we don't care about such things. Unitarian Universalists in Madison have been meaningfully engaged in the struggle for racial and economic justice for three quarters of a century. So for instance, in defiance of fraternization restrictions that were imposed by the armed services during World War II, Unitarians here in Madison held racially integrated USO parties in this facility for soldiers who were stationed at the air base out on the east side. After the war, the society fought against restrictive real estate covenants by opening a house on campus that welcomed students of all races. A few years later, FUS members helped to secure a passage of Madison's first fair housing ordinance. During the 1960s, our congregants enthusiastically supported the Civil Rights Movement both locally and in the deep south. Minister Emeritus Max Gabler writes that we established a close relationship with the civil rights effort in Sunflower County, Mississippi, a truck left Madison almost monthly with supplies for those who were active in the movement. And that remarkable lady, Fannie Lou Hamer, visited us twice in Madison and several of our young people participated in the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. This is an admirable track record that we are certainly not allowed to rest on our laurels. White supremacy is, again, the brew that we are steeped in. And so it behooves us to understand how it affects us. And it's really not a matter, folks, of being guilty of white supremacy or not guilty, because it exists on a continuum with hate groups like the KKK at one end and well-meaning, conscientious organizations like the Sierra Club or the Summit Credit Union or FUS somewhere in between the extremes. As we can plainly see, FUS does suffer from a dearth of racial and ethnic diversity. Just look around. This is true of our staff. It is true of our congregation as a whole. One can cite several reasons for this. Our rather homogenous Near West Side location, a remarkable facility that fairly shouts elitism, a Eurocentric style of worship, a departure from Christian norms and nomenclature, even our long-standing support for marriage equality in the LGBTQ community. Some of the foregoing does reflect white upper-class norms. And thus there are plenty of persons of color in Dane County who are more than willing to partner with us, but not necessarily to be a part of us. I wonder how we might go about changing that. Well, some have suggested that we could change our style of worship, reshape our Sunday celebrations. We could make them less programmatic, more spontaneous, change the tenor and the tone of the sermons, music that gets the congregation moving in their seats, pray more often. Because nothing requires that we maintain the liturgical traditions that have served us these past 140 years. As Hassan, the Indian chef that was featured in the film The Hundred-Foot Journey, as he said to his boss after he had altered a venerable French recipe, perhaps 200 years is long enough to prepare a dish in the same way. In any event, it is now a time of transition for this congregation. Perhaps it's a conversation worth continuing. But a faith community is more than its worship. The traditions on this subject of white supremacy say that many of the practices associated with it are much more covert. And thus they say that when an institution values quantifiable results over process values, when it's defensive about its norms and seeks to avoid controversy, when it opts for linear, logical problem solving while discounting other ways of thinking and knowing, when there is competition rather than collaboration, then it is manifesting in all these ways clear signs of white supremacy. So again, I'm a white guy and I'm still in the early stages of unpacking all of this stuff. And I have not gotten far enough along in my own discernment process to assess the validity of all of these critiques that I have been reading about. And yet I do think the questions that are being raised here are legitimate questions and they are questions that we ought to be dealing with. In her reflections of last week, my colleague Kelly Crocker spoke of the importance of belonging and of the need for us to try to widen our welcome in order to make FUS a more hospitable place for all people. An open discussion of white supremacy could very well help us to do that. And Kelly also noted that people always feel more at home in a place when you're trying to resolve the inconsistencies between your walk and your talk. And that she says is what we mean by striving for integrity, striving for wholeness to bring our walk and our talk closer together. And ultimately this is a question of what kind of faith community we want to be. Today is just the very beginning of this conversation. And I urge you to let it continue because to paraphrase the early 20th century Unitarian activist Fanny Barrier Williams, the hope of the dark races in America depends on how far whites can assimilate their own religion. Blessed be and amen. I invite you now to lift your voices in song once more. Our closing hymn is number 120, which is in your teal hymnals. Please be seated for the benediction and the postlude. If we have been unsettled by this time together then perhaps it is good for tranquility due to a lack of awareness brings only a false and precarious piece. If we have learned something new in our time together then this is good for new light must be ever breaking in upon us to dispel the clouds of darkness. And if we are leaving still unsure of where the truth lies this still is good as well because the truth is never all in. The quest for wisdom and understanding must be open-ended. If we are going out inspired to change our world or ourselves just a bit for the better then this too is good and a blessing for the brief time that we have spent together today.