 and welcome to the First Unitarian Society of Madison. My name is Kelly Crocker, and I'm one of the ministers here. Today I'm joined by my colleague, the Reverend Kelly Asbruth Jackson, and the worship team of Linda Warren, Heather Thorpe, Drew Collins, and Daniel Carnes. The vision of First Unitarian Society is growing souls connecting with one another and embodying our Unitarian Universalist principles in our lives, our community, and our world. We're so glad to be able to connect with you virtually today, and we hope you will be able to join us for our virtual coffee hour immediately following our service. The information for joining can be found on the homepage of our website, fussMadison.org, as well as on the slide that will be seen again after the postlude. Our announcement slides will also be shown briefly after the service, and we encourage you to take a moment and learn about our upcoming programs and activities. And now I invite you to join me in a moment of silence to center ourselves and bring ourselves fully into this time as we join together once again in community. A diverse group of proudly kindred spirits, here not by coincidence, but because we choose to journey together. We are active and proactive. We care deeply. We live our love as best we can. We are one, working, eating, laughing, playing, singing, storytelling, sharing, and rejoicing, getting to know each other, taking risks, opening up, questioning, seeking, searching, trying to understand, struggling, making mistakes, paying attention, asking questions, listening, living our answers, learning to love our neighbors, learning to love ourselves, apologizing and forgiving with humility, being forgiven through grace, creating the beloved community together. We are one. Now I'll invite you to join me in the words of aspiration on your screen for the kindling of our chalice playing. We light this chalice knowing our congregation as a church dispersed across communities, not bound by walls, but connected through the web of life. Break not that circle. And singing him number 128 for all that is our love. There is a whole set of stories about a town called Helm. This is not to be confused with the actual real modern city of Helm. This is a mythical imaginary place. And in this imaginary town, everyone is a fool from the oldest, wisest elder to the newest newborn babe. Everyone in Helm consistently makes the silliest, most foolish choice you could possibly imagine a person making. So I wanna tell you a story about Helm today and you can play along at home if you like. Try to guess just what their solution to their problem is going to be in each instance. We'll see if you can find one quite as foolish as theirs. So this is a story actually about the beginning days of Helm when the village was first being founded. People came together and started building houses, of course, places for themselves to live. But one of the very first priorities had to be to build a synagogue. This was a Jewish community. They needed a place to meet together, to worship, to study, to hold meetings and events. So everybody got together to build a synagogue all as a group. And they realized that the first thing they were gonna need to do was to make a great big pit in the ground so they could put the foundation of the building down deep so it would be sturdy and stand up well to the test of time. So they started digging until they had a great wide rectangular pit large enough for a very generous synagogue space. But then someone asked the question, what are we gonna do with all this dirt? We can't just have a big pile of dirt sitting next to the synagogue. That doesn't seem right. So they started to talk about what it was be that they would do with this great pile of dirt. And there were many different solutions, but the one that everyone applauded when they heard it was a very elegant way to address the problem. They decided they'd build another pit, you see. They dig another pit out, same dimensions as the first one. They could put the dirt from that one, from the first one, into the second pit. There you go, problem solved. So they were digging the second pit. When someone said, wait a second, what are we gonna do with the dirt from this pit? That caused another conversation, as you can well imagine. And people were debating about this thing and that thing. And finally, someone came up with the answer that the whole village agreed was the wisest possible solution. They would dig a third pit, twice the size of the first or the second so that it was big enough to hold the dirt from both of them and just be done with it. And this they did. Now after the synagogue was completed, it was almost time for the winter. So people finished setting up their houses and they helped their neighbors hang their doors and get everything as secure as they possibly could before the winter came on. They came on early and it lasted late. It was cold the whole way through with snow piled up to the tips of the icicles hanging down. It was like yesterday, but for five months in a row. It got so cold that the people ran out of firewood and they had to start breaking up their chairs and their tables and bed frames, all the furniture in their houses until by the end, they were sitting on the floor. So when the winter finally did come to an end, they had a meeting in the synagogue. This was a terrible problem. They couldn't have another winter like this in hell and they wouldn't be able to get through it. They talked long into the night about what it would be that they should do. But finally someone came up with the solution that everyone agreed was the best possible plan. They would build a wall, a tall brick wall all around the city and in that way, they would keep the winter from ever coming back into town again. Now, there are many possible lessons you could take or not from a story about the foolish people of hell, but here's mine for this morning. There are a lot of different ways that you can fill in a pit, but there are some things that you can't keep out with a wall. I invite you now into a time of giving and receiving where we give freely and generously to this offering which sustains our community here and also supports the work of our outreach offering recipient. This week, our recipient is Centro Hispano which is a local nonprofit devoted to serving the Latino community of Dane County by empowering youth, strengthening families and engaging the community. Each year they reach more than 2,500 families with services including mentoring and tutoring for youth, immigration assistance, career training and health education. You will see on your screen that you can donate directly from our website, fussmedicine.org and you will see our text to give information there as well. We thank you for your generosity and your faith in this life we create together. And see that all what is a room without a door which sometimes locks or spends a jar. What is to keep out sight and sound from all? Something there is that doesn't love a wall that sends the frozen ground swell under it and spills the upper boulders in the sun and makes gaps even two can pass a breast. The work of hunters is another thing. I have come after them and made repair where they have left not one stone on stone but they would have the rabbit out of hiding to please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, no one has seen them made or heard them made but at spring mending time we find them there. I let my neighbor know beyond the hill and on a day we meet to walk the line and set the wall between us once again. And dwellers in each room should have the right to choose their own design and color schemes to suit their own. Though differing from mine each door has its own design to suit the owner's state of mind and those who'd want them all the same. Don't understand. We keep the wall between us as we go to each the boulders that have fallen to each and some are loaves and some so nearly balls we have to use a spell to make them balance. Stay where you are until our backs are turned. We wear our fingers rough with handling them. Oh, just another kind of outdoor game one on a side. It comes to little more. He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across and eat the cones under his pines. I tell him he only says good fences make good neighbors. Spring is the mischief in me and I wonder if I could put a notion in his head. Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it where there are cows but here there are no cows. The choice is ours to share this earth with all its many joys abound or to continue as we have and burn God's mansion down. My father's mansion has many room with room for all of his children and sees it all. Before I built a wall I'd asked to know what I was walling in or walling out and to whom I was like to give offense. Something there is that doesn't love a wall that wants it down. I could say elves to him but it's not elves exactly and I'd rather he said it for himself. I see him there bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top in each hand like an old stone savage armed. He moves in darkness as it seems to me not of woods only and the shade of trees. He will not go behind his father saying and he likes having thought of it so well. He says again good fences make good neighbors. About three years ago the artist Andy Goldsworthy began a major art installation at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. The project was simple enough he and a small team of workers were going to build a wall. They started by collecting stones for it hefty mostly flat hunks of limestone gathered from the prairie of Kansas's Flint Hills. Then they set to work placing those stones into a long slim wall with an even height of about four feet. They used no mortar instead just laying the stones into place carefully. The wall first took shape in a field adjacent to the museum campus and weaved and meandered back and forth so that it looked like the jagged lines of an EKG from overhead. But once they built the wall from one end of the field to another they'd only just begun the project because the purpose of their project was for the wall to move. The first step would be getting across the road taking stones away from the back of the wall they hauled them by hand and wheelbarrow to the front end inching the line forward until it extended into and eventually completely straddled two lanes of traffic. Obviously the road had to be closed while the wall made its migration across the asphalt that took about two weeks. Once on the grounds of the museum proper the wall continued to zig and zag cutting across lawn space winding in between buildings and working its way up to one of the museum entrances where it blocked the doors entirely for a little while. The next challenge was for the wall to descend a flight of outdoor stairs and this is where the stone workers had to break their rule about building only from the front forward to comply with gravity's restrictions they took stones from the rear of the wall as usual but brought them all the way to the base of the stairs building an essentially new section of wall upwards until it met the main body then they were able to continue on largely as before. The final stage of the project or at least where it stands today brought the wall to rest on the opposite side of the campus from where it started winding across a sloping lawn and tripping down a much smaller set of stairs to come right up against a large pane in the wall plain of glass in the wall of the museum. They set the stones with careful precision there and they kissed right against the glass then they took several last loads of stone inside of the building and built more wall two or three feet out from that same piece of glass on the inside. To anything other than the most up close inspection the wandering wall appears to be literally protruding into the museum a barrier of another wall in order to wind wherever it will the entire process took nine months in photographs the wall always appears static frozen in time but the process of constructing deconstructing and reconstructing it made clear what a fundamentally transient thing it was and is the signs at the museum today have to remind guests not to move or remove any of the stones something that someone with the necessary inclination and upper body strength could easily do because the stones have not been sealed with any sort of mortar they were put in place by human hands and they could be taken away by the same means tomorrow or the middle of next week on a more realistic work schedule the placement of the wall throughout its journey and still today feels variously playful arbitrary inconvenient or bizarre depending on the viewer's perspective and priorities and absolutely everything about this one wall its illusion of permanence its reality of transience its inconvenient placement and arbitrary layout even the way it sometimes appears to work with the landscape and other times against it all of these things are true on some level of every other wall that ever has been or ever will be some years ago I spent a week on a service a business trip to New Orleans it had then been almost two years since the storm that flooded, crushed, burned and drowned that city one of the many projects which our little group of volunteers were enlisted in was the gutting of houses it's a practice that on the face of it seems even more distasteful than the name gutting would imply the water that filled much of the city stayed high and still for days after the storm long enough to leave buildings drenched to their rafters walls and floods and ceilings no longer offered surety or support they were now simply crumbling derelicts left untended for months or years waiting for their owners to pull together enough money to return from wherever they had fled to for survival they soaked wood and drywall and became a breeding ground for hazardous mold the walls themselves had turned against their owners in cases like this the hope of saving even the bones of the structure lay in tearing out everything rotten and compromised in the building some folks managed to do it on their own many folks in New Orleans even watching their own house be gutted was too painful and too raw it was a scene of violence against something they loved but just like the violence of a life-saving surgery hope motivated the work when the worst of the rot and the mold were gone the work of healing the house could begin again ceilings and floors and walls could be rebuilt and rooms filled with new belongings as much as the insurance might cover or the kindness of friends and strangers would allow the water that scoured New Orleans swept over the levees in some places and broke through them entirely in others it poisoned the walls of the city so that they had to be torn down but in the breaking of those walls new possibility also came through I don't mean this in a rose-colored glasses sort of way it was an apocalyptic loss for poorer and majority black segments of the city it is a wound that has hardly even had time to scar over for a huge number of people and families but also life persists in that great city and it has done so by cutting out some of the worst of the rot in its wounded body and beginning to grow anew as painful as it sometimes is as inconvenient as it almost always is we need the barriers that we live with and depend on to be impermanent and breakable because the line between the security we need to flourish and grow and the comfortable complacency we crave but do not need is very hard for us to see on our own the walls we build to keep us safe too easily become battlements strung with barbed wire and set with watch posts and spotlights we become afraid to ever step beyond them and paranoid about anyone else who might cross the same lines inside the walls that encircle our identities the pieces of ourselves that matter most to us that sneaking, dangerous, mistaken idea that whatever I happen to be is the best sort of way to be begins to creep in and woe to anyone who lives beyond our walls and even more so to any who would enter or leave our hollowed ground if the self-appointed gatekeeper does not feel that their papers are in order we need our walls to crack sometimes so that we can see through to the other side and be shown the barriers and the blockades that are holding back life rather than protecting it there's a story in the Quran about the Prophet Moses and how in order to serve his community he sought wisdom from a great mystic called al-Qidr the green one in the story the two go on a journey in which Moses sees Qidr do some strange things the trip begins when they board a ship to set off across the sea and the green one breaks a hole in the side of the boat later their journey ends during a visit to a foreign town they receive no hospitality and are treated very poorly by the people there and yet Qidr takes the time to repair a wall in the village that was beginning to crumble with age his companion is bewildered and dismayed by all of this until the green one finally explains the ship belonged to a kind hearted man al-Qidr broke its hull to save the vessel if it had sailed on towards its original destination it would have been seized by a wicked king and its owner left with much less than a damaged ship the crumbling wall belongs to no one but buried underneath it was a great treasure which rightfully belonged to two orphans they were so young and vulnerable now they suddenly came into a great sum of money the unkind villagers would surely swindle them out of it but because the wall had been repaired their treasure would not be found for several years enough time for the children to grow to maturity and be ready to defend their birthright we cannot always see for ourselves which of the lines that shape our lives need to be reinforced which need to be washed away the mental and sometimes the physical wall that constitutes the border between this nation and all other nations has been a national mania for some time now that line cuts through towns and hearts and families it has been used to divide people and communities against each other and to reduce millions of human beings whose lives and work benefit this country to the level of disposable abstractions and the obsession with that line has also inspired some wonderfully creative methods of protest in one that has been going on at least since the 1970s games of volleyball periodically break out between teams on opposite sides of the 21-foot border wall between the state of California in the U.S. and Baja California in Mexico no matter how we divide ourselves one from another our natural curiosity and interest in one another will eventually reveal itself we humans have an innate understanding of our connectedness even when something appears to be in the way it is not that good fences make good neighbors as Robert Frost's neighbor beyond the hill would claim it is rather that good neighbors make good fences when a relationship of trust and compassion exists between two people or two groups or two nations they build only the barriers that they truly need between themselves the wall that is just as strong as it needs to be to keep your cows from wandering into my orchard and tripping over the roots or the fence that is just as tall as it needs to be to keep my dog from digging up your bushes but not so strong that we cannot take it down together if its purpose is ever through and not so tall that we cannot meet on either side of it some spring day and chat about the weather and the news in town and how has your mother been lately I will keep her and you in my prayers in the year 105 of the common era the Roman Emperor Trajan ordered that a bridge be built over the Danube River near what is today the city of Kledovil in Serbia the Danube is one of the earth's great rivers and it is both very wide and very deep building a stable structure across it was almost unprecedented in the history of human bridge building up to that point so far as we know and Trajan's bridge remained one of the top five or so longest bridges in world history for at least a thousand years after it was decommissioned late in the third century less than two decades after Trajan's bridge was built the very next emperor of Rome, Hadrian ordered that a wall be built across a narrow section of the island of Britain running from the North Sea on one end to the Irish Sea on the other ultimately both of these were military projects Trajan wanted to make it easier for his legions to invade and occupy Dacia the region across the Danube and Hadrian determined that there wasn't much value in further conquest of the northern end of Britain and so ordered his forces to make a clear line between Roman holdings and the world beyond there's a popular slogan from recent years that declares build bridges, not walls but this small anecdote from Roman history reminds us that empires are always in the business of building they build bridges where they are advancing and walls where they are in decline so more important than any moral value we might assign to the constructs themselves is the purpose for which each particular wall or bridge is intended when we are constantly on guard caught up in our personal walls as though we are lost and amazed we miss out on the opportunities to learn and to grow the seeds of hope and love and justice that we may discover in another person there is a story in the Jewish tradition about a great rabbi who was very wise and renowned in his community he was a holy man and always seeking after new degrees of holiness that he had not yet achieved himself one night he dreamt of the world to come the age when the universe shall be whole again and all shall be justice and peace in some traditions it is held that when that day has arrived a great meal will be served to satisfy those who toiled in the world before it was perfected in his dream the rabbi beheld this meal he saw the wonderful colors and smelled the fragrant spices of the food he felt the soft comfort of the grand chair in which he was seated at the table of the righteous just before his dream ended the rabbi looked around and into the face of a man who was seated next to him a man he did not know but as he awoke he heard in his mind the name of the man and the town where he lived the rabbi was filled with joy to receive such a wonderful and prophetic dream and he was very curious to meet this man whom he was destined to sit beside at the banquet for the healing of the world knowing himself to be a deeply wise profoundly holy and very important man the rabbi greatly wished to know what sort of exalted figure he would be honored to sit beside at the blessed meal to come so the rabbi set out for the town where this man lived on the way there he had to cross an old decrepit bridge over a loud river he arrived near sundown on a Friday a time when any observant Jew would need to be at home preparing to welcome the Sabbath he found the man's simple tiny house empty besides this it was filthy and clearly it had not been cleaned for many months the rabbi waited and waited until well after sundown before the stranger from his dream the owner of the house arrived he was the same man to be sure but his face was dirty and his clothes were tattered the poor man accepted the rabbi into his home but with none of the honor and ceremony to which the important holy man had grown accustomed he was offered food but he quailed to eat it for although his host was clearly Jewish it seemed he kept none of the commandments and the food from his kitchen was visibly not kosher the rabbi's heart sank for now having met the stranger he was destined to share the bread of the restored Eden with he felt that there must be some terrible flaw in his own heart how else could he explain the shame of being placed on the same level as this lowly borderline apostate in the morning the rabbi set out back to his own village in despair again he crossed the same rushing river its water even higher and faster than the day before and no sooner did he touch the far bank than the water surged even higher and swept away the old rickety bridge the rabbi began to continue on almost glad to be cut off from his future dinner partner when he realized that he was not carrying his coat he must have left it behind in the home of the stranger but there was no hope of reclaiming it now that the bridge carried away by the river the rabbi turned back to look once more in the direction of his lost coat when he saw something across the river the shape of a person striding towards him it drew closer and closer to the river and the rabbi swung his arms in warning that the bridge was out but the figure just kept coming until the rabbi recognized it as the man he had been so disappointed to meet he was carrying with him the rabbi's coat the man came to the edge of the water and he did not break stride he only took off his own meager jacket and threw it before him onto the water as the man from his dream began to walk almost run really across the water holding out that lost coat towards him the rabbi realized that he was witnessing a miracle he was humbled to have met this man clearly so holy that he could walk across a raging river supported only by his jacket and so kind he would travel far to return a lost coat to a stranger who had judged him so harshly no wall can last forever no wall built of steel or stone and no wall built of feeling or thought the walls which endure are the ones we maintain which we devote ourselves to building and rebuilding again and again some of these hold up our houses or hold up the necessary appropriate boundaries we set with others others block us off from meaningful connection and close the way to the possibility of relationship just like Andy Goldworthy's walking wall the barriers that shape our lives can be reshaped by our choices and by our hard work whether the line of a wall is truly necessary or it no longer serves a healthful purpose you will eventually find a crack the first choice then is whether to fill it in or to make it wider each week we gather in this space bringing with us the cares of recent days in our own lives and in the lives of those we love we bring all these here in the spirit of support and acceptance and care this week a member asks us to light a candle of gratitude that her kidney function test this week shows improvement so her pain meds can be restored we send our hopes for healing and strength and that your spirits stay high in the days to come and we light a candle for one who wrote may I remember to stay grateful for my blessings and give what I can to those who are struggling with historical or present burdens and Kelly and I light a candle of deep sorrow and loss for our colleague the Reverend Jean Pupke beloved minister and leader in our movement who passed away suddenly on Wednesday we send our love to her wife Regina all their family and friends to the first Unitarian Universalist Church of Richmond, Virginia where Jean has been serving since 2006 and to all those within our faith and beyond who were touched by Jean's remarkable life may the fruits of her ministry continue to inspire us all and we light one last candle for all the joys and all the sorrows that live in the silent sanctuaries of our hearts may we hold them all in gratitude in love and in hope an addiction for Super Bowl Sunday come from my colleague may whatever gatherings or activities we engage in this Sunday afternoon help restore us our connections to one another our sense of hope, beauty and fun in this world our deep knowing that we have to take care of ourselves and each other with love and joy if we are to soulfully survive the world's mayhem Go in peace and amen